The Adventures of Cliff Booth: What we know about the Brad Pitt sequel to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
The sequel to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, catching up with Brad Pitt’s Cliff Booth, is shaping up with the first glimpse of just what we’re in for.
In the jubilance of that Bad Bunny-induced ecstasy yesterday, you may have missed the return of Cliff Booth’s nonchalant swagger.
In case you forgot who Cliff Booth was – it was 2019, pre-pandemic times – that’s Brad Pitt’s character in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino’s violent love letter to the magic of Los Angeles and the movie business.
Netflix dropped a trailer for The Adventures of Cliff Booth, the assumed title of the Pitt-starring sequel project, during the Super Bowl. Notably, the online video of the trailer didn’t actually feature the name of it, just rolled into like you would know what it is.
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The clip itself is a series of fast edits that give you a tease of where we find Cliff Booth a few years after all that trouble with the Charles Manson acolytes up in the Hollywood Hills.
Or as it’s framed in the trailer in an exchange between Pitt’s Booth and a character played by Elizabeth Debicki – “So you helped Rick subdue those hippy intruders?”
“Something like that,” he says, coyly, to which she replies, “you say it as if there was more to it”.
He adds, “I don’t possess many talents but I know better than getting in the way of a good story.”
Well, isn’t that a promise and a half?
Everything is still pretty mysterious, including whether The Adventures of Cliff Booth is a film or a TV series.
It was assumed it would be the former, and there had been whispers of a potential limited cinema roll-out, but an image of the clapperboard from set had on it “Teleplay: Quentin Tarantino”, which usually signals it’s a series, according to the Writers Guild of America guidelines.
But that could also just be a case of Tarantino making a distinction for a screen project, even a movie, that was made for streaming and not cinema. Filming also, reportedly, took six months, which was longer than principal photography on Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
Tarantino isn’t actually directing the follow-up even though he wrote it. He handed off the duties to David Fincher, which has led many to wonder just what a Fincher-helmed Tarantino movie looks like.
Fincher’s visual style is more disciplined and precise than Tarantino’s seemingly freewheeling aesthetic. Fincher’s cinematographer on his Netflix projects (Mank, The Killer, Mindhunter) takes over from Once Upon a Time’s Robert Richardson.
Tarantino’s story is set a few years after the film and finds Booth still in Hollywood, not as a stuntman but a fixer, sent in to clean up messes. That’s a clever framework if this ends up being a TV show, especially an episodic one.
Pitt signed up and was reportedly responsible for bringing Fincher, his Seven director, on board. Leonardo DiCaprio, the lead of Once Upon a Time, was at one time in talks to make a cameo as Rick, but ultimately decided not to.
The rest of the cast will include Debicki, Scott Caan, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Carla Gugino, Holt McCallany, Peter Weller, JB Tadena and Timothy Olyphant.
Tarantino told The Hollywood Reporter in August that while he loved the script he wrote, he didn’t want to direct it because it would feel like retreading the same ground. He is still trying to bed in his 10th and final film.
“This last movie, I’ve got to not know what I’m doing again. I’ve got to be in uncharted territory.”
Tarantino may still go out on the hustings to promote The Adventures of Cliff Booth, expected to be released mid-year, but he should expect a barrage of questions over the fallout to comments he made in December in which he excoriated three actors he had never worked with, Owen Wilson, Matthew Lillard and Paul Dano.
His critique of Dano was particularly scathing, and it led to an outpouring of support for the actor, including from former colleagues Ben Stiller, Daniel Day-Lewis, Matt Reeves, Toni Collette and Reese Witherspoon.
George Clooney again referenced Dano during an awards ceremony acceptance speech in January. “By the way, Paul Dano and Owen Wilson and Matthew Lillard, I would be honoured to work with those actors. Honoured.”
In late January at a Sundance anniversary event for Little Miss Sunshine, Dano said he was “incredibly grateful that the world spoke up for me so I didn’t have to”.
