Quentin Tarantino’s ROLLERBALLS

A harddrive of ROLLERBALLS imagery was taken into police custody after a drug bust on a Miami apartment in 2012

3 min readMay 30, 2023

After the box office flop of Jackie Brown, Hollywood’s favourite bad boy auteur director almost followed the trend towards blockbuster scifi reboots.

Rumours regarding Quentin Tarantino’s ROLLERBALLS were hot currency in the LA movie industry for the two years the film was in development.

Javier Bardem let slip in a 2008 interview to Rolling Stone that he had completed preliminary character photography on an undisclosed Tarantino project.

Tarantino completists have since determined that the then 29 year old Bardem was slated to play Chico Fuentes, a Mexican B-Movie actor employed to replace James Caan after the Oscar winning actor departed the production (to play Tony ‘Scarface’ Montana), suggesting the baroque complexity of Tarantino’s alternate history reboot of Rollerball.

Juliette Lewis’ supporting role as Michelle Makestar, a thirty-something Hollywood starlet facing the tailend of a mediocre career, who stops at nothing to be cast as Harlan Budski, Houston Rockets chief coach, went to the point of recording Makestar’s major monologue, scripted by Tarantino as a satire of his soon-to-be-former agent at CAA, Mark Makepiece.

Dates also fit with a documented police incident between Bardem and co-star Lewis when the pair were arrested for “rollerskating while intoxicated” in the parking lot of a downtown LA Wendy’s.

ROLLERBALLS meta-commentary on the Hollywood movie making process would later inform Tarantino’s work on Once Upon A Time In Hollywood. The alternate history scifi reboot was finally scrapped by Tarantino when Uma Thurman confirmed her participation on Kill Bill.

A harddrive of ROLLERBALLS imagery was taken into police custody after a drug bust on a Miami apartment in 2012, and the images were soon bought and leaked by the Hollywood Reporter.