Like almost everyone else, it seems, directors are quickly joining the NFT game, with filmmakers like David Lynch and Wong Kar Wai turning their own movies into digital collectibles. Now, Quentin Tarantino is playing “ketchup”—and he’s revisiting his most famous film to do it.
This week, Tarantino took the stage at NFT.NYC, a week-long crypto-art conference in Times Square, to announce that he’s turning seven scenes from Pulp Fiction into “secret” non-fungible tokens. Each will feature digitized excerpts from the original handwritten script for the film, as well as snippets of audio commentary from the director himself.
The digital objects will reveal “secrets about the film and its creator,” according to Secret Network, the blockchain platform on which the NFTs will be minted. They’ll be auctioned off on the OpenSea NFT marketplace.
Dates for the sale of each NFT have not yet been announced, but at NFT.NYC, Tarantino said the first piece would be sold “in about a month.”
The director explained that he was introduced to NFTs a year and a half ago by fellow filmmaker Eli Roth. At the time, he couldn’t wrap his head around the concept. But, “the more I started to think about it,” he said, “the more I started to think, ‘This is a neat idea. This is really kind of cool.’”
“There’s no amount of money in the world that would [make me give up] my original script,” Tarantino went on, comparing the text to an original poem by Keats or a Matisse painting. “It’s not worth it to me to sell it, and it’s not worth it to me to put it in a museum and have it sit in a glass case. But doing it this way… I think it’s an exciting thing,” he said.
Tarantino was one of several notable names to take a stage at the second annual—and still ongoing—NFT.NYC event, joining a list of speakers that includes Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, Reddit CEO Alexis Ohanian, and entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk. The conference, which features four day of IRL talks, workshops, and parties, has quickly emerged as one of the most important events on the calendar of crypto-art aficionados.
Set to run through Thursday, November 4, at a handful of New York venues, the insider event has expanded into the public sphere as well. A notable NFT collector who goes by the name Cozomo de’ Medici—a reference to the Renaissance-era banker and art patron—has taken over the billboards of Times Square all week to show off examples from his prized collection of digital art, worth millions in cryptocurrency. Among the works on view are pieces by XCOPY, Seerlight, and Tom Sachs.
“The billboards,” the collector told Artnet News, “offer a chance to give the world a look at the approaching digital Renaissance—which is actually already here, most people just do not know it yet. Soon, NFTs and proof of ownership on the blockchain will be a part of everyday life. For now, we enjoy it through remarkable art.”
The real-life identity of Cozomo de’ Medici has been the subject of feverish debate online. After an elaborate internet scavenger hunt, the collector seemingly outed himself as rapper Snoop Dogg, but others believe that to be a ruse. (Snoop, for his part, has gone along with the game.)
When asked if he was indeed Snoop Dogg, or if we would otherwise confirm his identity, Cozomo simply said: “I cannot confirm or deny any rumors.”