Luc Besson has claimed he gave Quentin Tarantino the idea to retire after 10 movies.

• READ MORE: Once Upon A Time In Hollywood review: Tarantino’s most satisfying work in decades

Tarantino’s next movie, The Movie Critic, is expected to be his last. The director has long spoken about his desire to retire after his tenth movie.

In an interview on The Discourse Podcast (via The Playlist and IndieWire), Besson claimed that Tarantino got the idea to retire after 10 films from him.

While Besson did not stick to his plan – his film DogMan that premiered in 2023 was his 21st – he claims Tarantino used it as a blueprint for his own career.

“What’s funny is that I said that to Tarantino a long time ago…So, he copied me. No, I was honest when I said that. I said that after [I’d made] like six or seven movies. And it was a way for me to concentrate and say, ‘If I have only 10 bullets, I have to be careful with the last three.’”

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He said he come up with the idea because while he would be offered lucrative films plans, he felt many of them would stifle him creatively.

He continued: “Because at this time, Hollywood, there was lots of sirens coming to me saying, ‘Here’s the script,’ and the projects that they proposed to me were not bad, but it was sequels — it was the Hollywood machine. And they propose with a lot of money.

“I don’t want to. I want to stay myself, how to stay pure. So I need to find a way to resist the sirens of these mermaids. And the way I found to do that was to say, ‘I’m going to do 10, so if I have two more films, I can’t do that. I have to do something more like the one I want.’”

Besson is currently filming a new project, Dracula: A Love Tale with Christoph Waltz and Caleb Landry Jones. The director said his own retirement may soon be on the horizon now.

“So, maybe I should do one or two more because I still have a lot [to say],” he said. “Well, now I can tell you, I’m going to do three [films] and then I stop. Oh, so we’re done after three here. So, after Dracula, there’s two more, and I don’t bother you after that.”

According to Variety, Brad Pitt is in talks to star in Tarantino‘s final movie.

The Pulp Fiction director’s 10th film will be set in 1977 Southern California and centre on a real-life, cynical film reviewer who wrote for a pornographic magazine.

With further details currently under wraps, it is unclear who Pitt will be playing in the film.

Pitt and Tarantino have previously worked together on 2009’s Inglourious Basterds and 2019’s Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood, which landed Pitt an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.