MOVIEMAKER.COM SUMMER 2019 77he laughs. “We’d have something, and then,
literally right across the street, ‘No, no, they’re
tearing that down! They’re gonna build a huge
hotel right next door to a little café!’”
“Assume we can do everything” became a
mantra that spread among the production team,
he says: “If we can’t, let them tell us no. ‘Can we
take the traffic lights down and put our own up?’
‘Can we do this?’ ‘Can we do that?’ ” More often
than not, when they started a dialogue with local
officials, they’d let them run wild.
The crew was justifiably proud as it
resurrected each old locale, but not every
spot survived final cut. “One thing we cut
out killed me,” Tarantino groans. “Using an
episode of The F.B.I. with Burt Reynolds in it
as a reference, we watched a scene where he
drives down Riverside Drive in Burbank. It’s a
perfect shot down the street—not all the way
down to the Bob’s Big Boy, but pretty fuckin’
far. And when he parks, that shot shows
Riverside Drive exactly how I remembered it.
And, it was right up the street from my house.
I drove up there, parked right where we put
the camera, and thought, ‘If you changed this,
changed that, put that old sign back up, and
turned that place into a liquor store again...
this could be exactly like Riverside Drive in
1969!’ And then we totally did it! But I cut it
out, because it wasn’t a big dramatic scene.
It was just Brad Pitt walking to his car.”
Even as he mourns the loss of a killed
darling, Tarantino’s deleted scene yarn is too
charmed to be tragic. He turned an entire
city into his cinematic sandbox, with Brad
Pitt playing dress-up within earshot of his
backyard. “If you talked to all my crewmem-
bers who worked with me for the last 10 years,
I think they’d tell you I’ve always been very
happy on set. And I made Los Angeles into the
Los Angeles of my childhood, so of course I
was gonna be happy,” he says.
Except now, for the first time in his life, he’s
married, and that made this shoot feel new.
“There was an inner-happiness, an inner-
peace from being in love and finding the girl
I want to live with for the rest of my life,”
Tarantino says. “I’d get up in the morning be-
fore she got up, have my coffee and breakfast,
and then go off to make the movie. We shot
the movie in town, so I wasn’t living in a hotel
or a condo I’d rented. So, for the first time, I’d
come back at the end of the day around six,
seven, eight ’o clock, and there was this happy
home waiting for me. We had dinner together,
I would tell her what happened during my
day, she’d tell me what happened during
hers. Maybe we’d just chill or sit on the couch
and watch TV together, and kind of quietlyunwind... a peaceful existence.”
Tarantino initiated his wife, Israeli actor
and pop singer Daniella Pick, into his film
family “completely,” he says: “She saw differ-
ent cuts. I showed her audition tapes. She’d
come by and visit as we made the movie.
Everybody on set knew who she was, and she
had a good time hanging out. It was wonder-
ful to share such a joyous thing that I’ve been
doing for the past 30 years with a loved one.”
For a moment, he sounds in disbelief of what
he’s saying: “It’s something I’ve never really
done before. This was the first time I ever re-
ally shared a movie with another person.”TIME FOR CONTEMPLATION
Trends don’t occupy much real estate
in Tarantino’s head, but as ever, he keeps
a healthy appetite for the next exciting
offering from a young moviemaker.
“If I ran a podcast, watching a bunch
of movies and doing current reviews of
them, I’d be into that,” he says. He thought
David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows was really
clever, and wasn’t disappointed by the direc-
tor’s follow-up, Under the Silver Lake:
“It didn’t 100 percent work, but it had a
haunting quality and a cuckoo sense of ambi-
tion. It was the first movie of the past year
that stayed with me for a long time.”
He wrote a script for a Star Trek movie
and there’s talk that he’ll make it. “Like
a good lawyer, I could make a case not to do
it and a case that would make you excited
about me directing it,” Tarantino says, weigh-
ing whether or not this project would be
a satisfying swan song. “The reason not to
do it: After Jackie Brown, I made a decision
to only do original material, so why would
I change that? On the other hand, there’s,
‘His last movie’s a Star Trek movie? What
the fuck?!’ The ‘What the fuck?!’ quality is...
kinda great! Since I’ve been numbering my
movies, there’s also something kinda coolabout me getting over myself: ‘No, this last
movie doesn’t have to be straight from the
soul. This is the career I could’ve had.’
If I do that, then I’m actually putting
Star Trek in front of me.”
Wouldn’t a franchise gig make him feel
too much like a gun-for-hire? “Not quite.
I don’t own the Star Trek franchise... but
actually, J.J. Abrams kind of does! And he’s
inviting me to do whatever I want.”
Hot takes abound on whether Tarantino’s
talk of retirement is one big bluff. But I find
it telling that when he prefaces his next
thought with, “Now that I’m getting to the
end of my career...,” it’s utterly unsolicited.
He doesn’t seem like he’s waiting to be asked
about “the end” just so he can hit me with
some sound-bite-ready statement. He’s sitting
well with the feeling that he’s left most
of what he has on the field.
“Looking back, I could’ve done things
differently,” he considers. “There are critics
who can legitimately say that the number one
thing they don’t like about me as a director
is that I’m always directing my own writing.”
He didn’t want to be the guy who only rested
on his dialogue, he says, but what he feared
even more was that he’d end up like other
moviemakers he watched break out in the
’90s—the ones who found success making
films with personality, but drifted further
away from whatever special thing those first
few films had to offer.
“I went a certain way that I’m happy with,”
he says. “I made a decision that I wasn’t going
to do that—that my voice was what I had.
And I’ve only been contemplating it because
now’s the time for contemplation.” MMOnce Upon a Time... in Hollywood opened
in theaters July 26, 2019, courtesy of
Sony Pictures Releasing.TARANTINO CONTINUED FROM » PAGE 63
RAISING THE STEAKS: TARANTINO (L) AND PITT (R) BRING ’60S FLAVOR
TO MUSSO & FRANK GRILL, THE ICONIC L.A. STEAKHOUSE THAT SERVED
AS ONE OF ONCE UPON A TIME... IN HOLLYWOOD’S AUTHENTIC SETSPHOTOGRAPH BY ANDREW COOPER / COURTESY OF SONY PICTURES ENTERTAINMENT