Quentin Tarantino closed an AFI Fest Q&A by screening the opening 17 minutes of his Cliff Booth follow-up, giving a packed Hollywood theater an early look at Brad Pitt’s return.
A crowd filled the TCL Chinese Theatre on Friday night expecting Quentin Tarantino’s 2019 hit “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” and a post-screening conversation with the writer-director. They got both. Then Tarantino offered a choice that settled the night.
At the end of the Q&A, he put it to the room: keep talking about “The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth,” or watch the first 17 minutes. He chose the footage. The TheWrap report described a room that had already come for the original film and stayed for the surprise.
The new film is written by Tarantino and directed by David Fincher. Brad Pitt returns as Cliff Booth, the stuntman and right-hand man to Leonardo DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton. Netflix will release it, with an exclusive IMAX premiere set for Nov. 25 and a streaming debut on Dec. 23. Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Scott Caan, and Elizabeth Debicki also appear.
Tarantino did not pitch the sequel as a plot machine. He pitched the feeling he likes living inside.
“I like that you’re just hanging out with them,” he said in the Q&A. “You’re hanging out with (Rick Dalton) on the set of ‘Lancer,’ and you kind of get caught up in that ‘Lancer’ story for a few seconds. You get caught up with (Cliff Booth) at Spahn Ranch. You get caught up with (Margot Robbie’s Sharon Tate) tripping around Westwood. It’s not about a story, the fact that it’s just about this folklore that’s a mix of real things that happened back then and real people and a real industry, and then also this kind of fantastical version that I created.”
“I like that you’re just hanging out with them. You’re hanging out with (Rick Dalton) on the set of ‘Lancer,’ and you kind of get caught up in that ‘Lancer’ story for a few seconds. You get caught up with (Cliff Booth) at Spahn Ranch. You get caught up with (Margot Robbie’s Sharon Tate) tripping around Westwood. It’s not about a story, the fact that it’s just about this folklore that’s a mix of real things that happened back then and real people and a real industry, and then also this kind of fantastical version that I created.”
That is the lane he wants again. The original mixed real 1969 Hollywood names and places with Tarantino’s invented version of the era. He has already extended that world through a novelization and now this screenplay. The AFI Fest screening was also the first time he had seen “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” in IMAX.
In the new footage, Pitt’s Booth appears in a different place in his life. The opening stretch was described as alternately talky and explosive. That tracks with how Tarantino builds scenes: long hangs, then sudden force.
Tarantino also returned to why he wrote Sharon Tate the way he did. Margot Robbie played her in the 2019 film. He said he wanted to push back against a public memory locked on her death.
“For a very, very long time, Sharon Tate has been sort of defined by her demise. Most people, when they think about her, they think about her death. They think about that bloody night. I did a lot of research on her, and she seemed like a really great person.”
He tied that research to the film’s choice to reimagine the end of that story rather than leave her frozen as a crime-scene name. The point he made was simple: he wanted audiences to meet a person, not only a tragedy.
Another cast note landed harder. Burt Reynolds was set to play George Spahn. He did the script reading. After Reynolds died, Bruce Dern took the role in the finished movie. Tarantino called the table read Reynolds’ final performance.
“We did the script reading with him, so actually the last performance that Burt Reynolds ever gave was as George Spahn.”
He put the same idea another way in remarks carried by TheWrap: the casting that meant the most to him ended up not being in the movie. That is a clean measure of how these projects get built, loyalty to a reading room performance that the camera never caught.
Tarantino’s control ran down to set dressing. Production designer Nancy Haigh won an Oscar for her work on the film. He still reworked Cliff Booth’s trailer.
“They took me down to look at Cliff Booth’s trailer, and I look at the trailer, and it was fine. Nancy did a really good job on it. But the thing about it was, she did a fantastic job for an art director. But she doesn’t know Cliff Booth the way I do. I had to make it more personal, because I know the guy.”
He wanted books and posters that matched the character he carries in his head, including wardrobe logic he tied to Booth doubling for Tom Laughlin on “The Born Losers.” That is the level of detail he still treats as non-negotiable.
The Chinese Theatre crowd also got the original’s crowd-pleasing beats. DiCaprio’s work on the “Lancer” set drew applause, including the young scene partner, Julia Butters, then 10, telling Rick Dalton it was the best acting she had ever seen. The film’s early bench has aged well in plain career terms: Mikey Madison, Austin Butler, Margaret Qualley, and Sydney Sweeney all passed through that world before bigger awards attention.
Friday night’s offer was blunt. Talk more, or watch 17 minutes. Tarantino picked the reel. For a filmmaker who keeps saying the joy is hanging out in the world he built, that was the honest closer, show the goods, then let the IMAX and Netflix dates do the rest.
Hollywood loves a mystery box. A director who would rather run the first reel than keep spinning is still the better bet.
