Quentin Tarantino promises his upcoming novelization of “Once Upon a Time … In Hollywood” is much different than just the movie he put on the screen…
When Quentin Tarantino brought his latest film “Once Upon a Time … In Hollywood” to theaters in 2019, he teased just how much was left on the cutting room floor not to mention the vast backstories and future works for many of the characters in the movies.
While he was promoting the film, Tarantino talked at length about the way he envisioned lead character Rick Dalton’s (Leonardo DiCaprio) career both before and after the events in his movie. The same could be said for Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), who was actually a much bigger mystery, especially given the hint that he may have actually killed his own wife years before the movie takes place.
On June 29, Tarantino will release the novelization for “Once Upon a Time … In Hollywood,” which serves as the first book for the multi-time Oscar winning writer and director and he promises what readers will find is a much deeper and richer version of his original story — not just some book adaptation of his movie.
“I’m really happy with it, I’m really proud of it,” Tarantino said when speaking on the Pure Cinema podcast. “I think if you’re a fan of the movie, I think you will get a kick out of reading the book, and exploring the characters further and deeper, and learning secrets that you didn’t know, and were not in the movie. It’s not just me taking the screenplay and then breaking it down in a novelistic form. I retold the story as a novel.
“So it’s not like, ‘Oh, okay, well he obviously had a few scenes left over, so he just took the screenplay and novelized it and threw in a few extra scenes.’ It was a complete rethinking of the entire story and not just a rethinking as far as throwing some scenes that were left out of the editing room. But I did so much research.”
Tarantino has been working on the book version of his movie for several years and now he’s ready to let audiences see a different vision for “Once Upon a Time … In Hollywood.”
“I was writing it for five years, so there was so much stuff that I wrote and I explored that I never even typed up, because there was no way it was going to make the movie, but it was edification, it made me understand the characters, it made me learn things about them… I’m trying to tell a novelistic version of these characters,” Tarantino explained.
“If the book existed first, then the movie would be me making a movie out of that material. You know how you take an unwieldy novel and try to turn it into a movie? Well, to me, the movie is that. This is the unwieldy version of the movie.”
While much of the movie centered around Rick Dalton’s struggling career as the image of the Hollywood leading man began to dramatically change in the late 1960s, his best friend and longtime stuntman Cliff Booth didn’t receive nearly as much attention.
Of course, Cliff was a major part of the entire story — he did manage to stomp his way through part of the Manson family in the epic conclusion — but his origins prior to the events in the film were largely shrouded in mystery.
Tarantino promises to pull back that curtain a bit more in the book and reveal more of Cliff’s background.
“In the movie, Cliff is a real enigma, you’re kind of like, what’s this guy’s deal?” Tarantino said. “And one of the things in the book is, there’s these isolated chapters that tell you, like, this whole chapter will be about Cliff’s past.
“It goes back in time to tell you about Cliff at this point in time. And then you go further on with the normal run of the story and there’s another chapter that goes back in time and tells you about Cliff’s past. And every isolated chapter that’s just about Cliff’s past is like a weird little pulp novel unto itself starring Cliff.”
Tarantino’s novel for “Once Upon a Time … In Hollywood” is already available for pre-order with a release date set for June 29.
