Quentin Taran­ti­no will direct the Boun­ty Law episodes he wrote for OUATIH

It was a com­mon sen­ti­ment from view­ers walk­ing out of Once Upon a Time in Hol­ly­wood that they’d like noth­ing more than to just spend more time in Quentin Taran­ti­no​’s immer­sive, seduc­tive vision of ​’60s Los Ange­les. Sip a whiskey sour, get a steak at Mus­so and Frank’s, maybe catch a pic­ture at the Cin­era­ma – that’s an escapism just as pow­er­ful as knights-and-drag­ons fantasy.

While time-trav­el remains com­mer­cial­ly unavail­able to the aver­age con­sumer, fans will get anoth­er chance to step into this fic­tion with an upcom­ing direc­to­r­i­al project from Taran­ti­no him­self. In a recent inter­view with Dead­line, the film­mak­er made pass­ing men­tion of plans to real­ize a world with­in his world by actu­al­ly cre­at­ing some episodes of the fic­ti­tious Boun­ty Law.

That’s the west­ern ser­i­al TV show car­ried by lead Rick Dal­ton as gun­slinger Jake Cahill, both men por­trayed by Leonar­do DiCaprio. In his char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly obses­sive fash­ion, Taran­ti­no actu­al­ly wrote half-hour scripts for five episodes of this show, and now intends on bring­ing them to life over what he esti­mates will be the next year and a half.

Taran­ti­no says that he’d been watch­ing sim­i­lar shows in this vein, name-drop­ping Dead or Alive, Want­ed, The Rifle­man, and Tales of Wells Far­go, his inter­est par­tic­u­lar­ly piqued by the con­cept of con­dens­ing a self-con­tained dra­mat­ic sto­ry into 22 min­utes. In the respect that much of Quentin Tarantino’s fil­mog­ra­phy seems like pre­tense for him to indulge in film­mak­ing modes long since past the zeit­geist, this ranks as an unsur­pris­ing development.

But in the respect that it would mean Taran­ti­no shrink­ing his vision to fit the most com­pact ves­sel of his career, it’s quite a sur­prise. It’s been a long time since QT’s done TV – take a free moment today to look up his episode of ER – and it’ll be curi­ous to see him fit his style to a small­er screen and briefer run time.

Whether DiCaprio will reprise his role as Rick Dal­ton as Jake Cahill, but at the very least, we can rest assured that Taran­ti­no won’t describe these episodes as ​“real­ly more like a two-and-a-half-hour film.”