The first draft ran 230 pages, and the finished film comes in at about two hours and 20 minutes.
David Fincher trimmed about 60 pages from Quentin Tarantino's original script for The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth, a sequel to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood with Brad Pitt in the lead. Fincher directed the film from Tarantino's script, and he laid out the cuts in a joint interview with Tarantino for Empire.
Fincher described the starting point. "The first draft I read was 230 pages. It was essentially two movies," he told Empire. The finished film runs approximately two hours and 20 minutes, a bit under the two hours and 41 minutes of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
Fincher described the process as a balancing act. "Somewhere in there was the Venn diagram of what Brad wanted to do, what I want to do, what Quentin wanted to do. Not 'want to do,' but the areas we would focus on." Brad Pitt, who had collaborated with Fincher on Se7en, Fight Club and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, helped bring the director onto the project.
Tarantino had considered a follow-up to his 2019 hit himself, but he decided he did not want a sequel to be his 10th and potentially final movie. Tarantino gave Fincher the director's job, having decided not to helm the project himself.
For Fincher, the pull was the characters more than the plot:
"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."
Tarantino compared the two films. "I don't think of it as a hangout movie at all," he told Empire. The 2019 film was one, he said, but audiences knew it was heading to Cielo Drive, the site of the Manson murders, which gave it "this force", so "I didn't need a lot of plot."
"This script was very different." He said it read like crime fiction: "To me, it had the flavor of an Elmore Leonard paperback: a crime-story paperback feel." Tarantino had already adapted one of Leonard's novels, Rum Punch, into his 1997 crime film Jackie Brown.
The film is set in 1977, eight years after the events of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and Cliff Booth takes on work as a Hollywood fixer. According to the official synopsis, Cliff is contacted by Karen Crosby (Elizabeth Debicki), a talent agent representing TV megastar Charlie Peters (Scott Caan). Charlie's wife Toni (Carla Gugino) and pro football champion turned screen star Roderick Harrison (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) are also part of his world. Pitt reprises the role that won him the Academy Award for best supporting actor in 2020.
Despite being a Netflix production, the film is scheduled for an exclusive two-week global IMAX run beginning Nov. 25, before its Netflix premiere on Dec. 23.
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