David Fincher cut 60 pages from Quentin Tarantino’s screenplay for The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth, bringing Brad Pitt’s return as the Hollywood stuntman into a movie running about 2 hours and 20 minutes.
The first draft Fincher read ran 230 pages. “It was essentially two movies,” he said in a joint interview with Tarantino. Shaping it meant finding the overlap between what he, Tarantino and Pitt wanted to explore.
Pitt reprises his Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood role in a story set in Hollywood in 1977. Tarantino chose Fincher to direct, and their descriptions of the screenplay reveal different ways into the same material.
Fincher was drawn to “the idea that it’s a story around a bonfire.” He 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.”
Tarantino described a crime story: “To me, it had the flavor of an Elmore Leonard paperback: a crime-story paperback feel.” He said the original Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood could function as a hangout movie because the approaching Manson murders gave it momentum.
Writing another Cliff Booth story also left Tarantino reluctant to direct it himself. He’s long planned to stop directing movies after his 10th, and returning to familiar characters didn’t fit what he wanted from that final film.
“I love this script, but I’m still walking down the same ground I’ve already walked,” he said on The Church of Tarantino podcast. “This last movie, I’ve got to not know what I’m doing again. I’ve got to be in uncharted territory.”
The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth is scheduled for a 2-week worldwide Imax release beginning November 25, followed by Netflix on December 23.