Quentin Tarantino has said he felt he was letting Brad Pitt down when he stepped away from directing a sequel to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. “He was the one I felt I was really letting down,” Tarantino told Empire. “I felt bad about that.”
Pitt won the Academy Award for best supporting actor for playing stuntman Cliff Booth in the 2019 film and was reportedly keen to return to the character. Tarantino wrote the screenplay for The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth, but it will not be his tenth and final film as a director. David Fincher took over the project after Pitt was disappointed at the prospect of not playing Booth again.
Tarantino said he was surprised Fincher might be interested and encouraged him to read the script. He also described being careful not to put the director off with his enthusiasm. Tarantino said he valued that a director of Fincher’s standing would spend a year and a half working with his material, adding that it showed what Fincher thought of the screenplay.
The new film moves the story from 1969, the setting of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, to 1977. Booth is now working as a studio fixer in Hollywood. Fincher told Empire that Pitt knows the character so well that he sometimes had to push back when the actor challenged his ideas about Booth.
Sources: Variety.