It’s no longer so unusual to see a film written by Quentin Tarantino but directed by someone else: yet no one is particularly worried about The New Adventures of Chris Booth with Brad Pitt, because behind the camera for Netflix sits David Fincher. The two were interviewed by Empire, and there the director confessed—he can afford to—that one element of the script had left him very unsettled… and he ended up tearing it apart. The film, a spin-off of Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, will hit cinemas from November 26, before landing on the platform a little before Christmas.
David Fincher trimmed Cliff Booth’s Script, Tarantino’s Blessing
A True Romance (1993) by Tony Scott or From Dusk Till Dawn (1995) by Robert Rodriguez: before The New Disadventures of Cliff Booth, these were the only two cases in which a Quentin Tarantino script hadn’t been directed by him. And, in the case of this particular sequel to Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, it seems Tarantino didn’t hold back, because David Fincher admits: “The first draft I read was about 230 pages, basically there were two films! Somewhere there was a Venn diagram [a meeting point between sets, ed. note] of what Brad wanted to do, what I wanted to do and what Tarantino wanted to do. Not exactly ‘we wanted’, let’s say the aspects each of us wanted to focus on.”
But what is The New Disadventures of Cliff Booth for Tarantino? “This is not at all a laid-back film [Quentin uses the term hangout movie, i.e., a film without a pace dictated by a gripping plot, ed. note]. C’era una volta… a Hollywood was a relaxed film, you knew we’d go to the Cielo Drive, it already had this force, I didn’t need a lot of plot. This screenplay is quite different.”
Ironically, that, despite the meeting point found among the three big names—Pitt-Tarantino-Fincher—the New Disadventures of Cliff Booth still lasts not exactly a short watch, two hours and twenty minutes: without the cuts it would have been their The Irishman?
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