Tarantino Says He Felt He Was 'Letting Down' Brad Pitt by Not Directing Cliff Booth Sequel

Quentin Tarantino has admitted that Brad Pitt was the person he felt worst about stepping away from when he declined to direct his sequel to "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood."

"[Pitt] was the one I felt I was really letting down when I didn't do it," Tarantino told Empire. "I felt bad about that."

Pitt won the best supporting actor Oscar for playing Hollywood stunt man Cliff Booth in the 2019 film, and he was reportedly keen to keep the character going. Tarantino wrote the script that became Netflix's "The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth," which hits IMAX cinemas on Nov. 25 — but the director confirmed it will not be his 10th and final film behind the camera.

With Pitt "disappointed that he wasn't going to play Cliff Booth again," David Fincher stepped in. Fincher had already directed Pitt three times, in "Seven," "Fight Club" and "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button."

How did Fincher end up directing Tarantino's script?

Tarantino says he could barely believe it when he heard Fincher might want the project. "You could have knocked me over with a feather," he told Empire, recalling his reaction. "I was like, 'Really? You think he'd be interested? Fucking yeah: show it to him!'"

He was also, he admits, careful not to scare Fincher off. "The first couple of times we spoke, I was the male trying to talk this gorgeous woman into fucking me. I was trying to maneuver it so I wouldn't say anything that fuck shit up," Tarantino said.

The arrangement mattered to him beyond the friendship. "One of the things that made this all work was my excitement over David doing my material," he said. "I've gotten a lot of respect as a screenwriter, but I still feel that people think that I'm a director who just writes shit for myself. The fact that a director of David's caliber would spend a year-and-a-half of his life doing my material was wonderful. It said a lot about what was on the page."

What changes for Cliff Booth in 1977?

The original film was set in 1969. The sequel jumps forward to 1977, with Booth now working as a studio fixer in Hollywood — the man a studio calls when problems need making disappear.

Fincher, in the same Empire interview, described an unusual dynamic on set: an actor who knows the character better than the director ever could. "He's so into it," Fincher said of Pitt. "The weirdest, most interesting part of this, for me, is that I've never been in a situation where the person playing the character knows more about that character than you'll ever know. Sometimes you have to push back on that."

The division of labor, as Fincher tells it, was clean. "I knew the new stuff, and Brad knew who the guy was, so Brad could withstand the hurricane of, 'What about this? What about that?' He was like, 'No, no, no. I got this.'"

What does this change for Tarantino's legacy? His tenth and final film as director remains unmade, and the Cliff Booth script now belongs to Fincher's filmography. The Nov. 25 IMAX release will show whether the handoff was, as Tarantino put it, a testament to what was on the page.