CITY OF STARS
Quentin tarantino is back, and taking on the 1960s, the as he puts the finishing touches to once upon a time in hollywood , a wild la
entertainment industry and charles manson. empire joins him odyssey inspired by his childhood
The residence resides on a hushed, leafy street in Central Los Angeles. South is the New Beverly movie theatre, which tonight is playing a bloody double bill of Near Dark and Jennifer’s Body. North is the Hollywood Walk Of Fame, where two days earlier Lucy Liu planted her fingers in cement. Both are exciting places to be. Neither, however, compares to what’s going on inside this house. It’s fair to say, in fact, that of all the many, many cool locations in the sprawling mass of LA, this very ordinarylooking domicile is, in early May 2019, the absolute coolest.
There are clues. Like the small group of people beavering away at complicated-looking equipment, mellow music playing softly in the background. Or the whiteboard crammed with technical codes (“LFOP”, “KEM CHECK”, “DV40”) relating to nine reels. Or the antique movie posters on the wall, including a lurid one-sheet for a 1960s movie called Dark
Of The Sun, boasting Rod Taylor wielding a chainsaw and running towards a shirtless opponent, plus multiple explosions and the understated tagline: “A STRIKE FORCE OF CRACK MERCENARIES FIGHT THE HOTTEST BATTLES IN ALL THE BLAZING FURY OF TODAY’S STRIFE-TORN CONGO!”
The biggest clue, though, is the man who suddenly slides in through the rented house’s back door, a big grin on his face, and shakes Empire by the hand. “Hey, a victim!” Quentin Tarantino exclaims, loudly, breaking into a hearty cackle. “We haven’t had anyone here to show what we’re up to that wasn’t involved up to their ass in the movie. We’ve been looking forward to today.”
Yes, this is Fortress Tarantino. QT HQ. The place where the iconic writer-director — who happens to own the New Beverly, and who directed Lucy Liu in Kill Bill — is baking his ninth and penultimate film. He leads Empire up a set of stairs, to the nerve-centre of this post-production hub: a small room where he and editor Fred Raskin (who has taken over duties as Tarantino’s lead post-production compadre, following the tragic death of Sally Menke in 2010) have been hunkered down for months. Along with more movie posters (these ones more intriguing-looking; more on that later) and a smattering of toys (an Evil Ash from Army Of Darkness, a Terminator, a Snake Plissken, a bunch of Hateful Eight funkos), there is a stand on which is placed a screenplay so enormous it looks like a Bible, or a Complete Works Of Shakespeare. Fittingly, the front page bears the legend, “MAGNUM OPUS”. This is the original manuscript of Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, the epic that in this room has been whittled down from four-and-a-half hours to a little shy of three.
“It’s changed quite a bit,” nods Tarantino. “All my movies do. Because I write these” — he gestures to the stand, then to a huge monitor — “and then I have to release that. A lot has gone, but that’s been the case with all the scripts I’ve
done this last ten years.”
Still, a lot remains. A huge, juicy slab of storytelling, shot on 35mm film, chronicling a few days that went down 50 years ago, back in 1969. The 45 minutes of footage that Tarantino proceeds to unveil, him sitting behind us frequently hooting with laughter at what’s going on up on the screen, is thrilling, ambitious and, yes, funny. There are things you would expect: fantastic music, shots of young women’s feet, big stars delivering crackerjack dialogue.
And then there are three lead characters who aren’t what you expect at all.
Get ready to meet Rick, Cliff and Sharon.
Don’t Condescend me, man. I’ll fucking kill you, man,” says Leonardo dicaprio, eyeballing Brad Pitt and gripping a vape pen. Sitting beside him on a sofa in the Four Seasons Beverly Hills, Pitt arches his eyebrows in surprise.sadly for any paparazzi who may be hiding nearby, this isn’t the beginnings of an A-list rumble for the ages. dicaprio is actually showing off a hitherto unknown knowledge of the details of True Romance,
specifically the zonked-out performance of Pitt as stoner Floyd. While the two stars have had “run-ins” (dicaprio’s word) over the years, they have largely admired each other’s work from afar. “We’ve grown up in the same ecosystem,” says Pitt. “We came up in the same time period. I guess there’s just a natural magnetism.” They just never quite crossed paths professionally, though there were close calls, like the fact they both gueststarred on the same late-’80s family sitcom, Growing Pains.
“I was, like, the cute little blond kid that was in the closet, just there to flirt with girls and do some stuff,” explains dicaprio. “I think Hilary Swank was there too. did you know that?”
“no. I didn’t know that,” replies Pitt. “I played two guys. I don’t remember the second, but one was a rock star who was the idol of the younger son and of course shattered his dreams.” “You were a jerk?” dicaprio asks.
“oh, I was an asshole.”
It’s taken Tarantino (who, incidentally, has not seen those episodes of Growing Pains; even his pop-culture omniscience has limits) to put them together. He of course wrote Floyd’s dialogue for True Romance (he and Pitt met for the first time at the premiere; “Both of us had had three too many, but we just had a laugh,” the actor recalls), then cast Pitt as naziscalping hillbilly Aldo Raine in Inglourious Basterds. dicaprio, meanwhile, played highly strung cotton king Calvin Candie in Django Unchained. now, with Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, they’re finally a double-act.
The two characters, actor Rick dalton (dicaprio) and his stunt double Cliff Booth (Pitt), arrived in Tarantino’s brain at roughly the same time. “I was interested in the concept of a guy who had a hit show from a decade ago, who failed to pull off the transition from TV to movies,” the director says of Rick. “He’s very much in the same boat as George maharis and edd Byrnes, Ty Hardin, a lot of guys like that. Who spent their whole careers running pocket combs through their pompadours. Being a likeable, masculine leading man was what it was all about. And then all of a sudden they blink and now the leading men are shaggy-haired, androgynous types. Usually the hippy sons of famous people, such as Peter Fonda or michael douglas.”
Tarantino is fascinated by the transformations that occurred at the end of the 1960s. As America in general was rocked by change, traditional Hollywood faltered and new Hollywood — young filmmakers making dark, visceral films
influenced by Europe — began to take over. Rick represents the forces on the way out. On the posters for Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, Rick looks cool and collected, a slick player in a brown leather jacket. In fact, he’s a self-pitying mess, reduced to guest-starring on cowboy TV series Lancer (a real show, which Tarantino bought the rights to, beginning his shoot with a two-weeks-long, painstaking recreation). Depressed, desperate and scared he’ll end up doing Spaghetti Westerns in Italy, at one point Rick has the mother of all meltdowns in his Lancer trailer, a sequence both brutal and laugh-out-loud funny. “He’s having a real tough time making the transition psychologically,” Dicaprio says. “The era of the cowboy actor is gone, and he and Cliff are really on the outskirts of the industry: ‘I once had the crown and now I’m visiting sets and getting beaten up by the new hot-shot swinging dick.’”
Tarantino’s movies have frequently alluded to cinema and TV, from Mia Wallace’s failed pilot in Pulp Fiction to the picturehouse-inferno climax of Inglourious Basterds. But his new one has allowed the ultimate celluloid junkie to reshape Hollywood history. On the wall of his cutting room are fake posters, including one for a Western called Nebraska Jim, directed by Sergio Corbucci and starring Rick Dalton (the real Corbucci film is called Navajo Joe and stars Burt Reynolds). And we’re shown a brief snippet from Dalton’s World War II epic The Fourteen Fists Of Mccluskey, which boasts flamethrower-roasted Nazis and a hilarious kiss-off line.
“That was the biggest movie he did during his movie time,” Tarantino reveals. “But he’s only the third lead. Rod Taylor is Mcclusky, Virna Lisi is the Italian partisan girl fighting with them, and Rick is like the second lieutenant guy.” So deep has he dived into Dalton’s fictional career, which intertwines with real actors and directors, that he’s contemplating writing an IMDB page for the character for fans to enjoy.
While Rick isn’t based on anyone in particular, Cliff was inspired by tales Tarantino has been told over the years about a real-life stuntman with a fearsome reputation. “Like a lot of dangerous guys, he was usually real nice and everything, but there was just a powerline sizzle that came off the guy,” the director says. “I never met him — he passed away some time in the ’70s — but I was really fascinated by him, for three reasons. One, he killed his wife and got away with it. I’m not saying he murdered her, though! Two, he was indestructible. He just couldn’t be hurt. And three, because he was a guy who scared even stunt people. If you made him mad, he could kill you. And he had the temperament to do that.”
All three of those things are in play with Cliff, a mellow but lethal ex-commando, in the movie. Having hitched his cart to the wrong movie-star horse, he’s even more on the skids than his buddy. “Cliff eats if Rick eats,” says Pitt. “And if Rick’s going hungry, Cliff’s definitely going hungry.” Once Upon A Time In Hollywood will follow their adventures both together, as they cruise LA in Rick’s yellow Cadillac, and solo. For Cliff, the latter will involve a visit to a certain ranch up north in Chatsworth. And an encounter with a peculiar man named Charlie. BACK IN 1998, IN AN INTERVIEW with Empire for his third feature film, Jackie Brown, Quentin Tarantino listed some things that scare him. “I fear a guy in an alley with a baseball bat, I fear the Manson Family bursting into my house, I fear a rabid dog walking down the street,” he said, “but I don’t fear anything artistic.”
Twenty-one years on, he’s yet to release a film about a rabid dog (though we’d watch a Tarantino reboot of Cujo), but his new one does feature the murderous Manson Family — and
Charles Manson, the cult leader who sent the young men and women out on horrifying kill-missions in Hollywood over the summer of 1969. “The first true-crime serial killer I heard about on the news was actually not Manson, but a guy in Los Angeles that was killing people with a hammer,” remembers Tarantino. “That just seemed horrible and grabbed my imagination. And the next thing that popped up was Manson. Everybody was talking about him, but for a six-year-old it wasn’t clear what had happened. I asked my stepfather, ‘Who’s this Manson guy?’ ‘Oh, Quentin, you don’t want to hear about it.’ He didn’t tell me.”
That’s hardly surprising; even for a youngster with a strong stomach (tiny Quentin watched the blood-soaked M*A*S*H five times in 1970), it would have surely induced nightmares. What had happened was a horrific home invasion on the affluent Cielo Drive: four disciples of Manson entered a house seemingly at random, then brutally murdered pregnant actress Sharon Tate, celebrity hairdresser Jay Sebring and three others. Director Roman Polanski, Tate’s husband, only survived because he was in Europe at the time prepping a movie. The next night, the Manson Family struck again, stabbing to death a married couple, the Labiancas, in Los Feliz.
The awfulness of the crimes sent shockwaves through Hollywood — parties were cancelled, Frank Sinatra was reported to have gone into hiding and Steve Mcqueen started keeping a weapon under the front seat of his sports car. And while the perpetrators were caught, 50 years on the murders are still pored over in pop culture. This year alone, there is a Hilary Duff film called The Haunting Of Sharon Tate, another called Charlie Says in which Matt Smith plays Manson, and yet another, Tate, starring Kate Bosworth. But it’s Once Upon
A Time In Hollywood — which sees Rick Dalton also living on Cielo Drive, just one door over from Tate — that has drawn the most flak, particularly over the fact its original release date was the anniversary of the Labianca murders.
Tarantino brushes off the controversy briskly. “Columbia doesn’t know when the fucking murders happened!” he says. “They thought it was a good time on the schedule and were like, ‘Oh, it’s his ninth movie… August 9… That should be great.’ They literally didn’t know.” Early in production he met with Debra Tate, Sharon’s younger sister, who had voiced dismay about the project, to show her the script and talk her through his treatment of the events. “She liked the script — she saw where I was coming from,” he says. “She pointed out a few inaccuracies that I had. A couple of them were just what’s always been reported. Sometimes I liked what I had better, so I just left it. But no, once she saw where we were coming from, she was down with it.”
The Manson Family are in the film, portrayed by the likes of Lena Dunham, Dakota Fanning and Austin Butler. So is Manson himself, embodied by Damon Herriman, who is also playing the buck-clad maniac in this year’s instalment of David Fincher’s Mindhunter. But for now the filmmakers are keeping schtum on how exactly they fit into Tarantino’s tale. Will he recreate the tragic real-life events, or futz with history as he did with the Hitler-killing climax of Inglourious Basterds? One clue may be that the intertitle at the start of the film reads February 1969, not August, when the killings occurred.
“I’m telling you with my eyes,” protests Margot Robbie, the actor playing Sharon Tate in the move, when the subject is gingerly broached. “It’s hard to talk about!” She read the top-secret screenplay in Tarantino’s kitchen, as the director watched Dexter in the other room. “He gave me a VB beer, which is a very Australian beer that I’ve never seen outside of Australia in my life,” she laughs. “People credit him often for his film knowedge. They’re totally failing to recognise his amazing beer knowledge also.” And as she sipped her brew, flipping the pages
of ‘MAGNUM OPUS’, she realised the significance of the role she was being offered.
“Sharon embodies the best parts of the ’60s,” Robbie says. “She had this kind of hippy nature to her — she would not wear shoes, and she would pick up hitchhikers and that kind of stuff — yet she was a huge up-and-coming star in Hollywood, in the inner circle that Rick Dalton craves. This is a celebration of her life. And you get a lot of hang time with her in this film.”
Ultimately, Debra Tate so supported the project that she loaned Robbie a pair of earrings and ring that once belonged to Sharon, for the actor to wear during the shoot. “It was a strange thing,” says Robbie. “I guess it sounds like I’m being a bit spiritual or whatever, but it really did help me ground the character in something real. I wanted to honour her memory, and bring the best parts of Sharon forward. And I found it really quite moving to have a piece of her with me.” T MAY NOT seem so at a glance, but this tale of stuntmen, frustrated actors and doomed stars might be Tarantino’s most personal film yet. “I think all of my movies are achingly personal, alright?” he muses. “I’m usually dealing with something in my life and I disguise it with genre, so people don’t realise. However, this isn’t a genre movie, so the personalness is more on the surface. And where the real personal point of view comes into it is the fact that I was a resident of Los Angeles County in 1969. I remember what was on TV. I remember the products. I remember the billbords. I remember everything. Any research I did was just to jog my memory.”
Tarantino has created a time machine, one that takes him back to the sights, sounds and smells that entranced his sixyear-old self. The songs and even the jingles that play on the radio station Rick and Cliff listen to — KHJ Radio — are the precise ones he recalls hearing at the time. “We use the DJ patter and the stupid contests and shit, and it’s in mono, the way it would be out of a car radio,” he says, before launching into a four-minute monologue that ends with him exuberantly reciting the final lines of Rock ’N’ Roll High School, as delivered by ’80s rock-jock ‘The Real’ Don Steele.
His fervour for pop culture has dampened not one jot. Over the three hours Empire spends with him, he is a whirlwind of energy, frequently jumping to his feet to switch seats or act out a story. He talks of Andy Mclaglen and Hal Needham and Toho monster movies and the time he yelled at Brad Pitt because Pitt couldn’t remember if he’d done a scene with Johnny Depp in 21 Jump Street (“YOU DON’T REMEMBER IF YOU HAD A SCENE WITH JOHNNY DEPP ON 21 JUMP STREET?! I THINK YOU’D REMEMBER IF YOU DID A SCENE WITH JOHNNY FUCKING DEPP!”). It’s very difficult indeed to imagine him imminently dropping out of Hollywood and never picking up a camera again. Yet, he confirms, that’s still the plan. Once Upon A Time In Hollywood will be his penultimate film.
“If I thought I was going to make movies for another 20 years, that’s when, like a lot of directors, I’d end up getting lazy,” he says. “And that’s not the case. I put everything I had in this movie. You know, John Singleton didn’t know the last movie he was going to make was going to be the last movie. So I’m treating this one as if it is the last one.”
A rabid dog might yet cross Tarantino’s path. But all being well, there’s still one more to come. He just doesn’t know what it is yet. “No, not at all,” he admits. “That’s actually to me part of the glory of ten. It’s deep inside me.” Whatever that yet-to-be-excavated opus might be, you better bet your ass it’s going to be magnum. ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD IS IN CINEMAS FROM 14 AUGUST