Buckle up, people: Cliff Booth is back. In Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, Brad Pitt stepped into the role of a rough-and-ready stuntman who – literally – changed the course of history (and earned Pitt an Oscar to boot). Now, the character returns in The Further Mis-Adventures Of Cliff Booth, a sequel-of-sorts that marks a remarkable talent team-up. Not only is Pitt back, with a fresh screenplay from Tarantino himself – but the duo tapped the great David Fincher as director this time around. The new issue of Empire features the first joint interview with Tarantino and Fincher talking about the film – and they promise a different kind of Cliff Booth (mis)adventure.
Where OUATIH revelled in letting the audience spend time with Booth (and Leonardo DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton, and Margot Robbie’s Sharon Tate) in 1969, the 1977-set follow-up has more momentum. “I don’t think of it as a hangout movie at all,” says Tarantino of Cliff Booth. “Once Upon A Time In Hollywood was a hangout movie, but you know you’re going to Cielo Drive (site of the Manson murders). It has this force, thus I didn’t need a lot of plot. This script was very different.” Expect something that harks back to the feeling of, say, Jackie Brown. “To me, it had the flavour of an Elmore Leonard paperback: a crime-story paperback feel,” he teases.
For Fincher, that was much of the appeal. “I liked the idea that it’s a story around a bonfire,” the director says. “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.” He had plenty of material to work with, courtesy of Tarantino’s expansive screenplay. “The first draft I read was 230 pages. It was essentially two movies,” says Fincher, noting that he cut 60 pages – resulting in a movie around 2 hours and 20 minutes long. “Somewhere in there was the Venn diagram of what Brad wanted to do, what I want to do, what Quentin wanted to do. Not “want to do”, but the areas we would focus on.” Who’s ready to get back in the Booth?
Read Empire’s full exclusive Quentin Tarantino and David Fincher interview – talking their long-awaited team-up on The Further Mid-Adventures Of Cliff Booth – in the Dune: Part Three issue, on sale Thursday October 22. Pre-order a copy online here. The Further Mid-Adventures Of Cliff Booth comes to IMAX from November 25, and streams on Netflix from December 23.