David Fincher Cut 60 Pages From Tarantino's Cliff Booth Script

By Elena Vasquez

David Fincher cut roughly 60 pages from Quentin Tarantino's first draft of "The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth." The original screenplay ran 230 pages. The finished film runs approximately two hours and 20 minutes.

Fincher described the scale of the cut in a joint interview with Tarantino in Empire. "The first draft I read was 230 pages. It was essentially two movies," Fincher said.

The film stars Brad Pitt, who reprises his Oscar-winning role as Hollywood stuntman Cliff Booth from "Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood." That 2019 film received 10 Oscar nominations, including best picture and best director. Pitt won the Academy Award for best supporting actor for the role in 2020.

What drove the cuts?

Fincher said his interest in the project centered less on plot than on characters colliding in 1970s Hollywood. "I liked the idea that it's a story around a bonfire," Fincher told Empire. "It wasn't about the plot as much as it was about how the participants collided with one another in the back alleys of Hollywood in 1977."

He framed the edit as a negotiation among three creative interests. "Somewhere in there was the Venn diagram of what Brad wanted to do, what I want to do, what Quentin wanted to do," Fincher said. "Not 'want to do,' but the areas we would focus on."

Pitt, who worked with Fincher on "Se7en," "Fight Club" and "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," helped bring the director onto the project.

Why did Tarantino hand off the film?

Tarantino passed directing duties to Fincher after deciding against making the project himself. He had considered the film as a follow-up to his 2019 hit but ultimately decided he did not want a sequel to serve as his 10th — and potentially final — movie.

Set in 1977, eight years after the events of "Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood," the new film follows Booth working as a Hollywood fixer. The original centered on Booth's relationship with fading television actor Rick Dalton, played by Leonardo DiCaprio. The sequel draws more heavily on crime fiction, notably the work of novelist Elmore Leonard. Leonard's novel "Rum Punch" served as the basis for Tarantino's 1997 film "Jackie Brown."

Tarantino rejected the label applied to his 2019 film. "I don't think of it as a hangout movie at all," Tarantino told Empire. "'Once Upon A Time In Hollywood' was a hangout movie, but you know you're going to Cielo Drive. It has this force, thus I didn't need a lot of plot. This script was very different…To me, it had the flavor of an Elmore Leonard paperback: a crime-story paperback feel."

Cielo Drive was the site of the Manson murders, which figure in the original film's climax.

When can audiences see it?

"The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth" gets an exclusive two-week global IMAX run beginning Nov. 25. It then premieres on Netflix Dec. 23.

The takeaway: Fincher's cut trims Tarantino's script by roughly a quarter — 60 pages from 230 — to shape a single film from two movies' worth of material.