Fincher says Quentin Tarantino's first draft for The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth ran 230 pages and felt like two separate movies before he trimmed it down.
Quentin Tarantino writes long. Everyone who has read one of his scripts knows that. But even by his standards, the first draft of The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth apparently ran long enough to make David Fincher do some serious editing.
"The first draft I read was 230 pages. It was two movies," Fincher told Empire in a joint interview alongside Tarantino. He ended up cutting around 60 pages, roughly a quarter of the script, to land on a runtime of two hours and 20 minutes. That's still a chunky film, just shorter than Once Upon a Time in Hollywood's two hours and 41 minutes.
Fincher framed the trim as a negotiation between three people with different instincts for the material. "Somewhere in there was the Venn diagram of what Brad wanted to do, what I want to do, what Quentin wanted to do," he said. "Not 'want to do,' but the areas we would focus on."
Brad Pitt reprises Cliff Booth, the stuntman-turned-fixer who won him a supporting actor Oscar in 2019. This time it's 1977, eight years after the Manson-family detour of the original, and Cliff is bartending, running a projector and occasionally solving problems for people in Hollywood who'd rather not go to the police. Elizabeth Debicki, Scott Caan, Carla Gugino, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Peter Weller round out the cast, per the official synopsis circulated by both Deadline and The Hollywood Reporter.
A hangout movie or a crime story?
Here's where Fincher and Tarantino don't quite agree, at least in how they describe the thing. Fincher says the appeal was never really plot. "I liked the idea that it's a story around a bonfire," he 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."
Tarantino sees it differently. "I don't think of it as a hangout movie at all," he said. "Once Upon A Time In Hollywood was a hangout movie, but you know you're going to Cielo Drive. It has this force, I didn't need a lot of plot. This script was very different. To me, it had the flavor of an Elmore Leonard paperback." He's adapted Leonard before, on Jackie Brown, so the comparison isn't throwaway.
Worth remembering here that Tarantino handed the director's chair to Fincher after deciding he didn't want a Cliff Booth sequel to be his tenth and possibly final film. Pitt, who's made three films with Fincher going back to Se7en, is said to have pushed for him to come aboard.
The film gets an exclusive two-week IMAX run worldwide starting November 25 before it lands on Netflix on December 23. Whether Tarantino, who famously walked out of Oliver Stone's reworking of Natural Born Killers but loved what Tony Scott did with True Romance, ends up a fan of Fincher's cut is still an open question. We'll find out soon enough.
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