Following several unconfirmed reports, Quentin Tarantino announced this week at The Weinstein Company’s Oscar afterparty that his next directorial effort will be a Western that reunites him with the breakout star of Inglourious Basterds, Academy Award winning Austrian actor Christoph Waltz. Tarantino told reporters from Deadline New York that the script was completed and will be delivered to the Weinsteins within the next two months, and that the movie could start shooting before the year is out.

Although this genre is ostensibly something new for the director, both Kill Bill: Volume 2 and Inglourious Basterds were clearly influenced by the Westerns of Sergio Leone and John Ford, amongst others. Tarantino is a director who loves to pay homage to (or as some would put it, blatantly steal from) other filmmakers; Italian actor Franco Nero, who claims to be attached to the film, told reporters that the movie would be called The Angel, The Bad and The Wise as a tribute to Leone’s The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, although this title has (thankfully) been debunked.

Of course Tarantino is also notorious for talking up future projects that never come to fruition (movies supposedly in the works include a Kill Bill sequel, Resevoir Dogs/Pulp Fiction spinoff, a 30′s gangster movie and a KKK revenge film). But if the script really is completed, then perhaps we actually will get to see the directors attempt at a full blown Spaghetti Western; the combined version of Kill Bill, entitled Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair is also getting a US theatrical release at the end of the month after being talked about for years: perhaps Tarantino is turning over a new leaf, where he actually follows through on half the things he says?

The other question is, naturally: how excited are you for this film? As I said earlier, Tarantino has already made several films with Western elements; are you glad he’s finally dropping all pretenses, or would you rather he tackled one of his many other projects? Personally, while I might be more intrigued by, say, the 30′s gangster film he spoke about, pretty much any forward moving Tarantino news is enough to get me very, very excited.