Quentin Tarantino has admitted that Brad Pitt was on his mind when he stepped away from directing his sequel to “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.”
“[Pitt] was the one I felt I was really letting down when I didn’t do it,” Tarantino told Empire. “I felt bad about that.”
Pitt landed a best supporting actor Oscar for his portrayal of Hollywood stunt man Cliff Booth in the 2019 feature and was reportedly keen to keep the character’s story going. However, despite write the script that would become Netflix’s “The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth,” hitting IMAX cinemas on Nov. 25, Tarantino revealed that it wouldn’t be his 10th and final film as director.
With Pitt being “disappointed that he wasn’t going to play Cliff Booth again,” David Fincher — who had previously directed the actor in “Seven,” “Fight Club” and “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” — stepped in.
“You could have knocked me over with a feather,” Tarantino says, recalling his thoughts when he heard Fincher might be interested in taking on the project. “I was like, ‘Really? You think he’d be interested? Fucking yeah: show it to him!’”
But Tarantino claims that he was worried about scaring Fincher away with his enthusiasm.
“The first couple of times we spoke, I was the male trying to talk this gorgeous woman into fucking me. I was trying to maneuver it so I wouldn’t say anything that fuck shit up,” he said. “One of the things that made this all work was my excitement over David doing my material. I’ve gotten a lot of respect as a screenwriter, but I still feel that people think that I’m a director who just writes shit for himself. The fact that a director of David’s caliber would spend a year-and-a-half of his life doing my material was wonderful. It said a lot about what was on the page.”
Whereas “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” is set in 1969, “The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth” skips forward to 1977, with Booth now acting as a studio fixer in Hollywood.
“He’s so into it,” said Fincher of Pitt in the same Empire interview. “The weirdest, most interesting part of this, for me, is that I’ve never been in a situation where the person playing the character knows more about that character than you’ll ever know. Sometimes you have to push back on that. I knew the new stuff, and Brad knew who the guy was, so Brad could withstand the hurricane of, ‘What about this? What about that?’ He was like, ‘No, no, no. I got this.’”
