“It’s not just me taking the screenplay and then breaking it down in a novelistic form. I retold the story as a novel,” Tarantino said. “So it’s not like, ‘Oh, OK, 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 continued, “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. 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.” One character the “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” novel will flesh out more fully than the movie did is stuntman Cliff Booth, played in the film by Brad Pitt in a performance that won him the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. “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 “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” novel is now available for preorder. The book goes on sale June 29. Sign Up: Stay on top of the latest breaking film and TV news! Sign up for our Email Newsletters here.
