Director David Fincher has revealed that Quentin Tarantino‘s original script for this year’s “The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth” was so long it was “essentially two movies.”
Fincher and Tarantino sat down with Empire for their first-ever joint interview about their forthcoming “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” sequel, which Fincher directed from a Tarantino-penned screenplay. The new film, a loose follow-up to Tarantino’s Oscar-winning 2019 dramedy, catches back up with Brad Pitt’s Cliff Booth as he works as a Hollywood fixer in 1977. Pitt is back, reprising the role that netted him an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in 2020.
“The first draft I read was 230 pages. It was essentially two movies,” Fincher told Empire of Tarantino’s original “Cliff Booth” script. Fincher purportedly cut 60 pages from that draft, explaining, “Somewhere in there was the Venn diagram of what Brad wanted to do, what I want to do, what Quentin wanted to do. Not ‘want to do’, but the areas we would focus on.”
“Cliff Booth” represents a rare union between two distinct, acclaimed filmmakers. Tarantino and Fincher have never worked together before, but they both have made movies with Pitt. Now, they have come together to make a film that, despite featuring a number of “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” characters, will be very different from its parent movie.
For starters, Tarantino says viewers should not expect “Cliff Booth” to have the same laidback feel as “Once Upon a Time.”
“I don’t think of it as a hangout movie at all,” Tarantino told Empire of “Cliff Booth,” adding, “‘Once Upon A Time In Hollywood’ was a hangout movie, but you know you’re going to Cielo Drive (site of the Manson murders). It has this force, thus I didn’t need a lot of plot. This script was very different.”
“To me, it had the flavor of an Elmore Leonard paperback: a crime-story paperback feel,” Tarantino teased. The filmmaker famously adapted one of Leonard’s novels, “Rum Punch,” into his beloved 1997 crime film, “Jackie Brown.” Fincher, for his part, said he found the paperback crime novel quality of Tarantino’s script particularly appealing.
“I liked the idea that it’s a story around a bonfire,” Fincher explained. “It wasn’t about the plot as much as it was about how the participants collided with one another in the back alleys of Hollywood in 1977.”
Despite being a Netflix production, “Cliff Booth” is set to premiere exclusively in Imax theaters on Nov. 25. It will then debut Dec. 23 on Netflix, following its initial, limited two-week Imax engagement.
