60 SUMMER 2019 MOVIEMAKER.COMget at the work itself, which so often weaves his
referential style with lasting life experience.LIFE STORIES
“Part of my thing is telling my own
personal story and burying it inside genre,”
Tarantino says. He stops short of calling
Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood his “most
personal movie.” After all, “Kill Bill, and a lot
of my other movies, were just as personal,”
he says, stressing that the quote recently
attributed to him is “a slight misnomer.
That whole thing was something my producer
David Heyman said and people are kind
of running with it.”
He breathes deeply—relieved that he’s “put
that caveat on top”—before conceding that his
relationship to the material does make this
project altogether different. “Since this is a
memory piece, it’s based on my perceptions
from when I was six and seven. I’m not just
making it all up off the top of my head. I had
to put myself in that point of view: remember-
ing how people acted, what their living rooms
looked like, what their offices and looked
like... what you saw when you looked out the
window of a car.”
What Tarantino says most struck him about
L.A., especially at such an impressionable
age, was how “the industry is always being
reflected back on you—from the buses, to the
theater marquees, to the billboards that hang
over the streets. As a little kid, certain adver-
tisements appealed to me: an interesting pitch
for a ketchup bottle, or a bus bench plugging
reruns of old shows that were playing on lo-
cal television. I remember noticing that they
were all over town. It’s not that I saw it as
Michelangelo Antonioni’s billboard montage
in Zabriskie Point, which is there to show the
crass commercialism of America. But it’s an
industry town, so in my movie, we pile
Los Angeles high with stuff like that.”
Though it can be grouped with films
that pull back the curtains on the studio
system—think Singin’ in the Rain
and The Bad and the Beautiful—
Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood “isn’t really
a genre movie,” Tarantino says. “You’re just
following the characters’ lives.” In order to
make that work, his characters first had to
pass the test of time: He spent about six years
with actor Rick Dalton (DiCaprio), stuntman
Cliff Booth (Pitt), and a world of supporting
characters—fleshing them out on the page and
hanging out with them in his head before de-
ciding they were interesting enough to makethe Hollywood in which they existed come
alive. This marinating stage, he says, began
by imagining Rick’s career credits: breakout
guest appearances on Tombstone Territory
and Lux Video Theatre in ’57; a multi-season
lead role on Bounty Law in ’58; star turns
in the made-for-TV movies Tanner and
The 14 Fists of McCluskey (a cult hit) in ’65
and ’66; and a four-picture deal with Univer-
sal that ultimately lacks the oomph needed to
land a leap from TV to film.
Each new fact of Rick’s fictional filmography
was born of a creative drill Tarantino describes
as “a series of ‘What happened then?’ After his
first few credits, what happened then? And
then? And then?” It’s the kind of choose-your-
own-adventure game you could imagine his
childhood self inventing: a playful way for
a seven-year-old to control the destinies of stars
he’d see on his living room TV screen, or on
those billboards down Sunset Boulevard.
He asked himself, “Now that I know these
characters, what kind of story do I want
to tell? Do I want to come up with an
Elmore Leonard-y type plot that ties all of them
together? Do I want something even more plot-
driven than that, so that they’re working one
way or another toward telling this big story?
Or, do I like the characters enough that I don’t
really have to deal with a story?”
“Moving that rock up the hill little by little,
investing in making Rick’s backstory seem
real to me, was a lot of fun,” he says—so much
so that he could justify tracking the jaded
western thesp, along with everyone else in hisorbit, for three “days in the life”
worth of screen-time. “At one point I thought,
‘Except for my third act, can I just reduce this
all to one day? I tried plotting it out that way
and said, ‘No, no, no, that’s just too gimmicky.
And it’s too much like American Graffiti,
which this is already too much like. Don’t do
that. Let it breathe!’ ” February 8, February 9,
and August 8 of ’69—the three dates he as-
signed to each of the film’s three acts—would
be all the breathing room he’d need.DEATH STORIES
About that third date: It’s when the sixties
met their maker. On that night, Charles Man-
son, a drifter turned desert-dwelling cult leader,
conspired with four members of his “Family” to
hunt Sharon Tate and a string of other victims
of their now-infamous killing spree. The Man-
son Family dressed and acted the part of hippie
youths, but replaced psychedelia and free love
with psychopathy and death, symbolically shat-
tering Americans’ illusions of the countercul-
ture and effectively ending an era.
In Tarantino’s retelling of these seismic
events, Sharon (Margot Robbie) and her hus-
band, a budding young director named
Roman Polanski (Rafal Zawierucha), are
Rick’s new neighbors on Beverly Hills’
Cielo Drive, and the ebbs and flows of Cliff ’s
daily routine pulls him fatalistically toward
Manson’s (Damon Herriman) lurking lackeys.
“That’s the dangerous aspect of the movie,”
Tarantino says, unpacking in structural terms
how this ripped-from-the-headlines horror
figures into the climax. Most of the general“I LIKE TO THINK OF MYSELF AS A COMBAT SURGEON WHO ENDED UP RUNNING A COLLEGE MEDICAL FACILITY. YOU LEARN ON THE BATTLEFIELD.”
DOUBLE LIFE: ACTOR RICK DALTON’S (DICAPRIO, R) STUNT DOUBLE
CLIFF BOOTH (PITT, L) LEADS A MODEST LIFE ADJACENT TO GLITZ
AND GLAMOUR IN ONCE UPON A TIME... IN HOLLYWOOD