Quentin Tarantino is counting his way to 10 movies and then he’s done. However, as a talented scribe, we can expect to see him continue writing. In fact, he has proven this already by allowing David Fincher to take the reigns of his latest screenplay, The Adventures of Cliff Booth.
This isn’t the first time Quentin Tarantino has handed over his material to another filmmaker. Across his career, he has sold screenplays and also worked on rewrites. So, here’s our ranking of every movie the legendary QT wrote but didn’t direct.
5. Past Midnight (1991)
A year before the release of his breakout movie Reservoir Dogs, Tarantino had his name attached to the mystery thriller Past Midnight. The story focuses on Ben Jordan (Rutger Hauer), a man who has just spent 15 years behind bars for the murder of his pregnant wife. Upon release, he professes his innocence to his social worker and the two set out to find the real killer. While this movie didn’t fare well with critics or at the box office, many have traced back to give it a shot thanks to Quentin Tarantino’s prestige in Hollywood.
Tarantino is credited as Associate Producer on the movie while Frank Norwood is the sole credited writer. However, Tarantino was actually brought in to polish up the film. He spliced the script with his signature dialogue and pop culture references, elevating it from a slasher film to something a little more slick. However, lead star Rutger Hauer reportedly did not resonate with the script and chose to stick to Norwood’s original material. Had this movie came a few years later, perhaps Hauer would have trusted the snappy dialogue. But the resulting movie is somewhat wooden and poorly-paced. Parts of Tarantino’s re-workings may have made their way in, but ultimately, this does not feel at all like a Tarantino movie.
4. Natural Born Killers (1994)
On the surface, it seems somewhat evident that Natural Born Killers is a Quentin Tarantino brain child. It’s violent yet poetic, has unique dialogue, and is littered with dark humor. It’s a simple story told in a fever dream like narrative, focusing on a deranged couple who travel across America on a twisted killing spree while the media irresponsibly glorify them. Sounds pretty Tarantino-esque, right? Well, Tarantino himself wasn’t happy with the finished product.
Tarantino’s initial involvement was significant after selling the screenplay to producers Jane Hamsher and Don Murphy for $10,000 after he had tried, and failed, to direct it himself for $500,000. The script was then sold to Warner Bros. and Oliver Stone boarded as director. However, this is where the project took a swerve in a different direction.
Creative disagreements led to revisions of the script and Tarantino ended up with a “story by” credit. The film faced mass amounts of criticism for its portrayal of violence and faced censorship and bans in multiple markets. Although Tarantino later went on to make his own violent movies that would also cause controversy, he sides with the critics who didn’t like the movie. In fact, he is credited as “story by” through his own choice. When speaking on The Howard Stern Show, he admitted to never watching the full movie and explained how he walked out of the theater 20 minutes in. Ultimately, Natural Born Killers is another Tarantino flick that doesn’t feel like one due to heavy cuts and a change to linear storytelling.
3. Crimson Tide (1995)
By the time Crimson Tide entered production, Quentin Tarantino had become known around Hollywood for his razor-sharp dialogue after the sizzling success of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. To that, he was hired to polish up the screenplay for this conspiracy/disaster thriller. Tony Scott‘s submarine flick stars Denzel Washington and Gene Hackman as naval officers locked in a tense standoff aboard a nuclear submarine during a crisis involving Russian rebels. Scott deftly explores themes of military authority, moral responsibility, and the terrifying prospect of nuclear warfare as the two men clash over protocol versus conscience, resulting in a tightly-paced movie. However, he wasn’t fully happy with the script at first.
After previously directing one of Tarantino’s scripts with True Romance, Scott thought he was the perfect man for the job to splice things up. Tarantino’s involvement in polishing the script does initially seem like an unusual match, given his reputation for stylized violence and pop culture-saturated crime narratives. However, his contribution makes more sense when considering his talent for crafting sharp, tension-filled dialogue and his ability to elevate character dynamics through verbal sparring. However, Denzel Washington had a major issue with Tarantino injecting “racist dialogue” into the movie. This sparked a feud between the two Hollywood titans that wouldn’t be squashed until 2009 when they both appeared on Friday Night with Jonathan Ross and Tarantino said he would love to work with Washington and called him “one of the best actors in the world”.
2. From Dusk Till Dawn (1996)
Released in 1996, From Dusk Till Dawn paired together two of the hottest filmmakers of the time – Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez. The genre-blending flick starts out as a crime thriller equipped with Tarantino’s signature dialogue and slowly transcends into a full on horror movie filled with action and gore. And it is this melding of genres that initially made studios pass on the film. However, when Tarantino became the hottest commodity in Hollywood and Rodriguez became a global sensation thanks to his self-funded El Mariachi, the two decided to bring the story to life.
When featuring on The Joe Rogen Experience, Rodriguez explained that Tarantino had began picking apart the script for From Dusk Till Dawn and using the material in his other movies. Interestingly, the iconic Ezekiel 25:17 speech from Pulp Fiction was originally written into From Dusk Till Dawn. So, Rodriguez implored that the two make the movie before there was no more material left. This crime-laced gorefest feels like the perfect amalgamation of Tarantino and Rodriguez’s artistic styles. The Tarantino mark is well-and-truly there, but Rodriquez’s smooth direction elevates the film to something more commercial feeling than Tarantino’s work, whilst also maintaining originality. While it may have been too daring of a concept in the 90s, this kind of genre fluidity is common practice today, with 2025’s crime horror movie Sinners standing as a shining example of that.
1. True Romance (1993)
Out of all of the Quentin Tarantino written movies that he didn’t direct, True Romance is the one that stayed pretty much fully respectful to his vision. As a result, it gets the QT stamp of approval. In fact, he likes it so much that he laid a commentary over the whole movie in the special features to the DVD release. Tony Scott’s crime thriller tells the story of Clarence (Christian Slater) and Alabama (Patricia Arquette), two free-spirited, energetic 20-somethings who fall in love in an evening and get married on a whim. However, in true Tarantino fashion, there are plenty of menacing bad guys looking to crush their happiness. When Clarence kills Alabama’s pimp (a chilling performance from Gary Oldman), they make off with a bag that they think has her things in, but what’s inside is actually a mammoth amount of cocaine. So, they flee murky Detroit and head to the glitz and glam of Hollywood to sell it to the rich and famous.
True Romance feels like it could have been directed by Tarantino himself. It’s violent, shocking, and chaotic, but is layered with levity to soften the brutal blows. Long dialogue-heavy scenes are executed with precision and never feel drawn out, the soundtrack is bustling with a plethora of genres, and the hard-hitting moments are hard to watch but impossible to take your eyes off. All trademarks of a classic Tarantino movie. The only thing that was altered in the filming process was the format, as Scott decided to ditch Tarantino’s non-linear approach and put the film in sequential order.
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