Quentin Tarantino says Once Upon A Time In Hollywood is "the closest thing I’ve done to Pulp Fiction”
Aux Features Film
Lucky audiences in France have spent the day making us jealous with their takes on Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, which just saw its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. Our own dispatch is coming soon, but, in the meantime, we’ll direct you to a fascinating new Esquire interview about the film with the director and two of its stars, Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio. There, you’ll find an abundance of new plot details—if that’s of interest to you—as well as some breezy musings on Hollywood, the streaming age, and how the film’s themes reflect their own journeys.
“This film is the closest thing I’ve done to Pulp Fiction,” Tarantino tells the magazine’s Michael Hainey, who says that, while he can’t reveal what that means in terms of “tone and feel,” translates to a vast ensemble and slew of storylines that intersect and intertwine in surprising ways. Tarantino also calls it “my memory piece,” adding, “Alfonso [Cuarón] had Roma and Mexico City, 1970. I had L. A. and 1969. This is me. This is the year that formed me. I was six years old then. This is my world. And this is my love letter to L.A.”
DiCaprio, whose Rick Dalton is described as a “poor man’s [Steve] McQueen,” sums it up thusly:
I don’t think there’s been a Hollywood film like this—and by that I mean a film set in Hollywood and about Hollywood—which gets its nails dirty, getting into the everyday life of an actor and his stunt double. 1969 is a seminal time in cinema history as well as in the world. Rick and Cliff, they’re part of the old guard in Hollywood, but they’re also trying to navigate this new world of the hippie revolution and free love. I loved the idea of taking on this struggling actor who is trying to find his footing in this new world. And his pal who he’s been with through all these wars in Hollywood. Quentin so brilliantly captures what’s going on in the changing of America but also through these characters’ eyes how Hollywood was changing. It was captivating when I first read it. The characters had the imprint of Quentin’s immense knowledge of cinema history. You are in awe of the detail, and you know it’s fucking authentic. [Laughs.]
Tarantino also touches on Charles Manson, who plays a major role in the film—the story takes place across three days, the last of which being August 8, the day of the Tate murders—calling the man a “deadly virus” that infects the world of the film.
There’s plenty of other choice tidbits, from the revelation that Tarantino spent five years developing the story as a novel to Pitt cracking a joke about his “boner pants.” Read it in full here.
28 Comments
Looks pretty damn fantastic, and early hype is universally positive. I’m in! I’ve always loved Tarentino films though, this one looks like another winner.
Margot Robbie doesn’t look very pregnant in the trailer…
Hitler didn’t look very alive by the end of Inglorious Basterds either. I’m starting to think shenanigans are at play!
Honestly I can’t imagine how this movie will be good without making me depressed for the awful crimes that the brainwashed manson morons did. But if someone can make it good and fun is Tarantino.
“the story takes place across three days”I’ve heard it covers a 6 month period, so maybe that’s it? Not sure why this says 3 days.
Yeah, I assumed the stuff from the trailer was from months prior to the murders until I read this article.
From what I’ve read it does take place over three days, just not three consecutive days. The third is a few months later than the first two.
From the linked article:“The stories of Rick, Cliff, and Tate unfold over three days or, as Tarantino says, in three acts: February 8, February 9, and, finally, August 8”
Is Timothy Olyphant playing the Gimp in this one? Is that why they just started to show him in the marketing campaign?
Ironically he’s playing actor James Stacy who lost his leg in a motorcycle accident years after the Manson murders and then was convicted of child molestation in the 80s.
I know this makes me an asshole but a significant part of me hopes this is awful.
Honestly Tarantino has gotten incredibly lazy as a filmmaker. During the 90’s he seemed like he was going to be one of the top directors of his generation going from success to success (Reservoir Dogs to Pulp Fiction to Jackie Brown was an incredible run) but then his work dropped off a cliff. He hasn’t written a developed character in 20 years opting instead to just make all of his characters out for revenge and relies way too heavily on stylized violence to fill seats. His decision to write a movie featuring Roman Polanski throws up a number of glaring red flags given the impassioned defenses he’s made of Polanski in the past (direct quote “that girl went over there to party, she knew what she was doing” when speaking of a 13 year old rape victim). Here’s hoping it’s a return to form but I can’t say I’m holding my breath.
Your first paragraph articulates my feelings on his movies from Kill Bill on. I get riffing on a genre that you love but revenge porn gets stale and other directors have used stylized violence in much more interesting ways (Takashi Miike comes to mind but some might disagree). He just doesn’t seem to have anything to say about the violence in his films beyond “hey, look at this!”
“Hey, look at this!” coupled with “Hey, listen to this old hit song!”
That’s an extremely disingenuous take. Both Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained use violence in very specific and intelligent ways to comment on history and society as a whole.
Basterds sells itself as being a revenge fantasy film where you get to enjoy the catharsis of watching Hitler and a bunch of Nazis get blown away and burned to death by a squad of Jewish resistance fighters… but very pointedly, the climax takes place in a movie theater during a Nazi propaganda film where Hitler and his high command are… enjoying the cathartic violence of watching a German soldier blow away a bunch of Allied soldiers. The film subtly and not-so-subtly draws parallels between you the audience and Hitler and his cronies in that theater, probing the way we’re all susceptible to get sick pleasure out of watching people get horribly murdered if we believe those people “deserve it.” It’s also worth noting that the Basterds themselves don’t distinguish Nazis from run of the mill enlisted Germans, and that literally everything they do throughout the movie would, under the Geneva Conventions, be considered war crimes. There are even a number of instances of German soldiers being humanized right before the Basterds murder and scalp them, further driving home the point that maybe we should think more about this beyond just “Germans = evil and deserve to die.”
Meanwhile, Django Unchained is very clever in how it portrays violence throughout the movie. When Django kills or bloodies someone, it’s shot with Tarantino’s standard Spaghetti Western flair – people fly out of rooms, fountains of blood gush from their wounds, it’s, in essence, “fun.” But whenever the film shows an act of violence against slaves, it’s much more stark, cold, and downright uncomfortable to watch. It’s one of the only times I’ve ever seen a movie use violence in both ways and flip on a dime so naturally. Sure you can argue that Django’s revenge quest is simplistic, but the way that revenge is actually portayed, you really feel his anger, you feel his pain, and you feel his catharsis. The violence in this case is used as a way of putting you into the main character’s headspace, and it works brilliantly. It also allows the film to be a fun pulpy revenge movie while still taking completely seriously the pain and suffering inflicted upon slaves by white Americans in the 19th Century, doesn’t shy away from making the white characters as despicable and hateable as possible. It’s not historically accurate, but it gets at an emotional truth that I find very resonant, and it’s largely done through violence.
The way he clearly feels about it, is those old grindhouse splatter flicks didn’t give a flea’s fuck about what their violence was saying, so why should he have to?But those movies were made for $10, Quentin. They had to pack audiences in there somehow. You have movie stars you can use, you’re playing on a different level. Why not act like it?
Tarantino is one of those directors whose early work was so great that I’ll always give him the benefit of the doubt — and I’m definitely going to go see this one as soon as I can — but I agree his recent track record has been discouraging. Ever since Kill Bill (which I adored), I started coming out of almost all his movies thinking, “well, I guess he got that out of his system,” only for the next one to be an even less refined expression of the same impulses.I liked Basterds just fine: I thought it was undisciplined and sometimes obnoxious, but it seemed like a bold and interesting experiment, and I like it when directors take chances like that. Django I didn’t like much at all — it felt like both an uglier and a dumber retread of Basterds in a lot of ways, and it revealed just how far out of his depth Tarantino can be when dealing with heavier shit like race. (Obviously Basterds is all about Nazis, which is certainly heavy, but it’s not like he had scenes in Auschwitz or anything, whereas Django seemed to blow right over that line of good taste.) And then I’ll be honest, I thought Hateful 8 was nearly unwatchable.
Casting Emile Hirsch in this doesn’t help much either.
Surely the closest thing he’s done to Pulp Fiction is Pulp Fiction.
Well seems hard not to see this film as about the current state of the film industry.
This film is the closest thing I’ve done to Pulp FictionExcept for, you know, Pulp Fiction
He really missed the layup there by not following that up (in the interview, that is) by calling this one Pulp Non-Fiction.edit: or Pulp Fact.
“Alfonso [Cuarón] had Roma and Mexico City, 1970. I had L. A. and 1969. This is me. This is the year that formed me. I was six years old then. This is my world…”I’ve enjoyed many Tarantino movies, and I plan on seeing this one, but goddamn does his self-aggrandizement grate. He’s probably one of the most reliably annoying interviewees I’ve ever heard.
He must have been the most self-aware six-year-old in history.
I was 6 in 1996. My first memories are from then, how i watched European Football Championship with my family. Those little green images on our TV that came from London, Manchester, Sheffield… are the first things that I remember. Because of them I played football for 15 years and after that I became sports journalist. That experience when i was 6 steered my entire life and career. So, I absolutely know what is he talking about.
The whole “I was molded by 1970 LA…at the age of six” thing is absurd bullshit, but he’s made as many good movies as Cuaron.
I like the trailers but I’m still worried about someone with as loving a relationship to violence as Tarantino has taking on such a brutal and gruesome set of murders.
“This film is the closest thing I’ve done to Citizen Kane.”- Orson Welles, every time he made a movie