It sounded like an April Fool’s joke when The Playlist reported last week that David Fincher will direct an offshoot to Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, written by Tarantino and starring Brad Pitt in a reprisal of his role as the charming and deadly stuntman Cliff Booth.
Tarantino, after all, is a famously exacting and unique director who rightly insists on close creative control over his projects. Why would he hand off a character he clearly loves, having featured him in 2019’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and a more detailed 2021 novelization?
The realness of the project became more apparent as more details emerged: Days after the Playlist report, The Ringer‘s Sean Fennessey reported on the Big Picture podcast that he had checked with his Tarantino contacts and learned that the film should “probably should not be thought of as a sequel. It should be thought of as a follow-up that is connected to, but not the same as” the original film.
Fennessey compared it to the relationship between two Raymond Chandler adaptations: 1946’s The Big Sleep and 1975’s Farewell, My Lovely, both of which feature Phillip Marlowe — though he is played by Humphrey Bogart in the first and Robert Mitchum in the second. Fennessey also said the new film will take place in 1977, eight years after Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
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It seems that a film set eight years after its predecessor, featuring the same actor in the same Oscar-winning role, with the same screenwriter, is more like a sequel than a 1975 film featuring a different creative team and released a generation after the previous Phillip Marlowe movie. But we can debate that when the movie comes out. The more pressing question is why Tarantino would hand off his character to anyone else.
The answer may be legacy.
How The Movie Critic Connects With Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
Tarantino has famously stated, many times, that his next film, his tenth, will also be his last. He abandoned plans to direct what had been expected to be his last film, a project called The Movie Critic, in April 2024. The Hollywood Reporter said at the time that Pitt had been in talks to star in The Movie Critic, reprising the role of Cliff Booth.
The Playlist reports that the Movie Critic script seems to have turned into the project that Fincher will now direct.
Handing the script off to Fincher gives Tarantino newfound creative freedom, and a chance to have it both ways: He gets to leave his character in the hands of a very trusted director and contemporary he has long admired, while going off to do something else for his tenth and final movie.
And if the Fincher movie is a failure — which seems very unlikely, given the pedigree of everyone involved — Tarantino can sit back and enjoy years of fans and critics lamenting the Tarantino version that might have been.
The Playlist also says that Netflix, which purchased the project, “may have paid over $20 million for Tarantino’s screenplay.”
That’s a win-win-win.
Quentin Tarantino on David Fincher
Tarantino admires Fincher — whose films include the Pitt-led Fight Club and the masterful Zodiac, among others — but does not exactly see him as competition, as he told Charlie Rose in 2009 interview to promote his then-brand-new Inglorious Basterds.
A telling, oft-cited quote lays out both his high esteem for Fincher and the pressure Tarantino feels as a writer-director.
“One of the most talented filmmakers of my generation is David Fincher, but he’s not in the same category as me because I’m a writer-director, and that makes it different,” Tarantino told Rose.
“That makes it a different thing. It’s hard work to go that blank piece of paper and start from square one, start from scratch every single solitary time. You are at the bottom of Mount Everest, every single solitary time, and everything you’ve done before not only does not help you, it can even like hang over your head. … You make less movies that way, and it is a lot easier to go look at the scripts that are out there and available and maybe work with the writer or do a little rewrite or that kind of thing and you get more movies made.”
Every Tarantino film — except for 1997’s Jackie Brown, based on Elmore Leonard’s novel Rum Punch — came from an original story. And he wrote them all alone, with the exception of 1994’s Pulp Fiction, which he co-wrote with Roger Avary, his former video store co-worker. (Today Tarantino and Avary co-host the Video Archives Podcast, recounting their days as South Bay video clerks, and recommending films.)
Though famously opinionated and committed to his own vision, Tarantino seems to seek out collaborations with artists he trusts and respects, including Avary and Robert Rodriguez, with whom he made 1996’s From Dusk till Dawn (Rodriguez directed while Tarantino starred and wrote the script based on a concept by Robert Kurtzman) and 2007’s Grindhouse (featuring two films, Planet Terror and Death Proof, the first written and directed by Rodriguez and the second written and directed by Tarantino.)
Tarantino has long floated the idea of making an R-rated Star Trek film — which would have put him at the helm of someone else’s IP for the first time — though that idea seems to be in the past.
Tarantino also wrote the screenplays for 1993’s True Romance, directed by Tony Scott, and 1994’s Natural Born Killers, directed by Oliver Stone, though he sold both early in his career before he had the clout to insist on directing them himself. He has frequently praised the late Tony Scott, though he famously dislikes Stone’s Natural Born Killers.
No matter: Instead of directing either of those films, he made Pulp Fiction, widely considered far superior to either True Romance or Natural Born Killers.
Fincher’s version of Cliff Booth could be a True Romance, which generates awe for Tarantino’s writing and the aforementioned speculation about whether the film would have been even better in his hands. Or, worse-case scenario, it could be a Natural Born Killers, in which fans credit Tarantino for the good elements and blame someone else for the flaws.
Either way, Tarantino is now free to end his film career with a fresh project, potentially superior to the one that might have been, while secure in the knowledge that one of the best filmmakers of his generation is looking out for Cliff Booth.
Main image: Quentin Tarantino and Brad Pitt behind the scenes of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Courtesy of Sony.