MOVIEMAKER.COM SUMMER 2019 61LEFT AND TOP RIGHT: PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANDREW COOPER / COURTESY OF SONY PICTURES ENTERTAINMENT; BOTTOM RIGHT: COURTESY OF THE WEINSTEIN COMPANY / PHOTOFESTpopulation is already familiar with Sharon’s
real-life demise, he reasons, so “the fact that
we know she has a destiny that’s inescap-
able is our story. For most of the movie—that
Saturday and Sunday in February—we watch
Rick on his day at work, Cliff doing errands,
and Sharon driving around... also doing
errands, which is what people do in Los An-
geles,” he jokes. “But the tragedy in the story
creates a dramatic, forward momentum.”
Of course, this narrative thrust is just as
much about destination as it is about destiny.
In one of Tarantino’s favorite scenes in the
film, the winds of the day take Cliff to Spahn
Ranch—the idyllic Southern California acre-
age that once served as a filming site for West-
erns and B-movies before the Manson Family
moved in. The place feels familiar, Tarantino
says—it’s a set Cliff once worked on—“but now
it’s dilapidated and become something else...
this hippie lair. Still, there’s the trappings
of the Western underneath, poking through
the geography unmistakably. Whereas Rick
is paid to act out Western fantasies over the
course of his day, Cliff plays out this macho,
puffy-chested fantasy for real, in a standoff
with these weird, malevolent hippies.”
As a setting, Spahn Ranch drips with
symbolism—a screenwriter’s wet dream. But
its inhabitants, while important, never chew
too much scenery. “We’re not really telling
Manson’s story,” Tarantino asserts. “I use him
very little. The best metaphor for how I use
the Family is this: I’m painting a lovely pic-
ture, with lovely colors, of a Los Angeles that
I remember. It’s pop-arty, because we’re in
a pop-arty time. It’s a pretty painting—a
happy painting. But, over the course of the
movie, there are cuts of the Family moving
around town, doing their business like the
other characters. And whenever they showup, they’re a mildew—a rot—on the side of the
canvas. That mildew slowly spreads across the
whole painting, infecting it like a disease.”
If you’ve ever read Tarot, you’ll know that
pulling a Death card from the deck doesn’t
signify literal death, but change. The point
is that something old must die in order
to usher in the new. By writing Rick, Cliff,
Sharon, and the Manson Family into the same
alternate timeline, Tarantino shrewdly signi-
fies death two-fold. His story structure, like a
runaway train, sends that which is figuratively
dying—Hollywood’s Golden Age, the sixties
writ large—and that which will literally die—
Sharon—on an irreversible collision course.BACKSTORIES
Wrapping thoughts inside of thoughts,
holding his screenwriting method out
in front of him to examine its moving parts,
Tarantino laughs as he wonders aloud
whether his description of his craft amounts
to “gobbledygook.” Parallel narratives, mov-
ies-within-movies, comprehensive character
biographies before a story even begins to
take shape... so much of his process sounds
fanciful to a screenwriter in the abstract.
But what does it look like in action?
“A writer-director who wanted to exploremy way of writing characters and scripts
would be going a different way than almost
anybody else who would teach you how to
do it,” he says. “It’s not that I’m so special. It’s
just that you have to invest in the concept of
being a writer—not just writing something for
yourself to direct. That means you’ve got to
commit to the literature of what you’re doing,
rather than worry about that finished movie
at the end of the road. I don’t mean you have
to write this highfalutin, 500-page novel. But
in a weird way, you’re writing your script more
for you and your actors to read. Then, with
you leading the way, your actors will transfer
this document into a movie.”
With something like
Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood, the
literary legwork Tarantino put in was straight-
forward: building Rick’s Hollywood and
modeling his filmography after several actors
who forged similar careers. The Hateful Eight,
he tells me, presented “a situation where I got
tricky with backstory in a way I hadn’t before.”
When it came time to direct scenes
that introduce ex-Confederate militiaman
Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins), who treks to
Red Rock, Wyoming and announces himself
as the new sheriff in town, Tarantino saw an
opportunity to use sleight of hand, withhold-
ing his character’s backstory as clandestine
knowledge. “Part of the thing in the movie
is you don’t know... ‘Is he the sheriff, or is he
not the sheriff ?,’” he continues. “I told Walton,
‘I know what I think, but I don’t want you
to know what I think. And I don’t want to
know what you think! I don’t want to direct
you while thinking you think one way or the
other. And, whatever you think, I don’t want
you to tell anybody else—not the other actors,
not anyone. I don’t want anything that they’re
doing affected by what you think about your
character.’” If he and his actors went into the“I LIKE TO THINK OF MYSELF AS A COMBAT SURGEON WHO ENDED UP RUNNING A COLLEGE MEDICAL FACILITY. YOU LEARN ON THE BATTLEFIELD.”
TWIST OF TATE: DP ROBERT RICHARDSON (C) AND CREW FILM STAR
MARGOT ROBBIE (L) AS SHARON TATE, WHOSE TRAGIC FATE STEERS
THE COURSE OF ONCE UPON A TIME... IN HOLLYWOODL TO R: TARANTINO PREPS FOR A SCENE OF THE HATEFUL EIGHT
WITH RICHARDSON AND STARS KURT RUSSELL,
JENNIFER JASON LEIGH, AND TIM ROTH. THE FILM’S
SNOWBOUND SHOOT MATURED HIS APPROACH TO
CINEMATOGRAPHY AND CHARACTER BACKSTORY, HE SAYS