Tag: Once Upon A Time In Hollywood

'The Movie Critic' Scrapped By Quentin Tarantino, '70s-Set Pic Had Brad Pitt Reprising Cliff Booth Role
Posted on in Film News, News

‘The Movie Critic’ Scrapped By Quentin Tarantino, ’70s-Set Pic Had Brad Pitt Reprising Cliff Booth Role

In a shocking twist of fate, writer/director Quentin Tarantino has decided not to move forward with “The Movie Critic” later this year (Sony Pictures was attached to distribute) as a report from Deadline announces the project has been scrapped entirely and the filmmaker will pivot to something else as his tenth, and final, film. “The Movie Critic” had longtime collaborator Brad Pitt attached to play a role, which the outlet claims would have been a reprisal of Pitt’s charismatic stuntman character Cliff Booth from “Once Upon A Time In Hollywood.”

Other plot details were a little murky but would have followed a movie critic in Los Angeles during the 1970s that was writing for a “porno rag” and likely would have invited itself to feature the seedy underbelly of the city. There were also hints from Tarantino it would have homaged things like the violent revenge flick “Rolling Thunder,” and the protagonist was said to be similar to Travis Bickle from “Taxi Driver.” The former could have been an entry point for Cliff Booth to get involved, as that film featured two military buddies getting revenge together.

You never know; perhaps Tarantino will turn the script/project into a book instead.

This wouldn’t be the first time Tarantino has gotten cold feet ahead of production on one of his movies. You might remember that he once got so fed up with a leak of an unfinished version of “The Hateful Eight” script during the casting process that he pumped the breaks, and it was only until he did a live stage reading of the script that Tarantino ultimately decided to give the project a second shot.

Meanwhile, there have been plenty of unmade ideas in the past, who knows how far he ever got with these, that simply were spoken about in interviews that never materialized like “The Vega Brothers” movie, a fabled “Kill Bill 3” where Kiddo and Bibbi had to fight off revenge seekers, and there was even a time when Tarantino wanted to do an adaptation of the Len Deighton spy novels “Berlin Game,” “Mexico Set,” and “London Match.“

What comes next for Tarantino is a bit of mystery as a second project wasn’t on deck, and there was an expectation that “The Movie Critic” would be the filmmaker’s final theatrical feature.

SOURCE: DEADLINE

Posted on in Film News, News

Wes Anderson Enlists Margot Robbie For A Supporting Role In His Next Movie

Wes Anderson is assembling quite the cast for his next feature film.

The untitled movie already has Wes Anderson regulars Bill Murray (Rushmore, The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, Fantastic Mr. Fox, The French Dispatch, Isle of Dogs, The Royal Tenenbaums, Moonrise Kingdom), Tilda Swinton (Moonrise Kingdom, The Grand Budapest Hotel, The French Dispatch), and Adrien Brody (The Darjeeling Limited, The Grand Budapest Hotel, The French Dispatch) among the cast.

The Hollywood Reporter has revealed that Oscar-nominee Margot Robbie is set to take a supporting role as well. Robbie was recently seen in James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad with more awards caliber credits such as The Wolf of Wall Street, Bombshell, Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, and sports drama I,Tonya.

He’ll also work with two-time Oscar-winner Tom Hanks, who is reportedly taking a cameo role in the pic.

Plot details have been kept under wraps and might be a while before we know what it’s exactly about or who the cast will be playing. I’m sure fans will be interested to know if Wes is attempting something more in the way of genre filmmaking (western or sci-fi) or still continue in the realm of quirky character-driven comedy.

A release timeline hasn’t been given but it’s assumed that the movie will land at Searchlight Pictures with a potential festival run in 2022 if the film is completed in time.

His latest movie, The French Dispatch, will be released by Searchlight Pictures on October 22.

The French Dispatch brings to life a collection of stories from the final issue of an American magazine published in a fictional 20th-century French city. It stars Benicio del Toro, Adrien Brody, Tilda Swinton, Léa Seydoux, Frances McDormand, Timothée Chalamet, Lyna Khoudri, Jeffrey Wright, Mathieu Amalric, Stephen Park, Bill Murray, and Owen Wilson.

SOURCE: THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER

Posted on in News

Quentin Tarantino Might Finish A ‘Reservoir Dogs’ Novel After Writing Two Chapters

Quentin Tarantino is doing a bunch of interviews to help promote the publishing of a novelization of his Oscar-winning film Once Upon A Time Hollywood, expanding upon those characters and events from the film. However, Tarantino might not stop there as he revealed to The Big Picture podcast (via Slash Film) that he started out writing two chapters of a Reservoir Dogs novel before pivoting to Once Upon A Time In Hollywood instead.

“I thought to myself, ‘Well shit, I ought to do one of these for one of my movies. So my first thought was Reservoir Dogs, because there’s a mystery/crime section in the bookstore…I mean, it’s right there. And I even wrote, like, two chapters of a Reservoir Dogs novelization. But then I thought, ‘Wait a minute. What the fuck am I doing? The last movie I did was Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. I have tons of material that never saw the light of day – material that I never even typed up because it’s not going to be in the movie, it was just edification for me. And people seem to like it.’ So it just seemed like this could do really well,” Tarantino said about the creative process of how he wrote his novelization of Once Upon A Time In Hollywood.

The filmmaker mused about doing more writing and even finishing his Reservoir Dogs novel, “Hopefully, I’ll do this quite a bit. I can see myself – I don’t know if I’m going to do every movie I’ve ever done, but I can definitely see the idea of a Reservoir Dogs novel. That could be really cool. And then [I’m working on] an original. It’s kinda pulpy. I’ve got a western idea, and I’ve written about two chapters of an original western novel.”

Maybe, we’ll find out what happened to Steve Buscemi’s Mr. Pink, as he believes the character became the Buddy Holly waiter in Pulp Fiction.

RESERVOIR DOGS – Six criminals with pseudonyms, and each strangers to one another, are hired to carry out a robbery. The heist is ambushed by police and the gang are forced to shoot their way out. At their warehouse rendezvous, the survivors, realizing that they were set up, try to find the traitor in their midst.

SOURCE: THE BIG PICTURE PODCAST

Posted on in Film News

‘Kill Bill 3’: Quentin Tarantino Would Cast Uma Thurman’s Daughter Maya Hawke As The Adult Version Of B.B.

There are heap of projects that Quentin Tarantino talks-up during interviews that will likely never see the light of day, one good example is his Vega Brothers film that was his white whale project that he would talk about that ultimately couldn’t be made because Michael Madsen and John Travolta aged-out of those roles decades ago.

Another one he consistently talks about is the fabled Kill Bill 3, set 20 years after the events of Kill Bill Vol.1 and Kill Bill Vol.2 that sees Beatrix Kiddo aka The Bride and her daughter B.B. getting their own dose of revenge twisted upon them.

Quentin Tarantino has brought up Kill Bill 3 again while speaking with Joe Rogan to promote his new novelization of Once Upon A Time In Hollywood (via The Playlist), mentioning that he would hire Uma Thurman’s real daughter to play the grown-up version of B.B. in the third movie. Actress Maya Hawke (Fear Street, Little Women, Once Upon At Time In Hollywood) having recently worked with Tarantino isn’t hard to imagine that would have been a good fit.

“I think it’s just revisiting the characters twenty years later and just imagining the Bride and her daughter, Bebe, having 20 years of peace, and then that peace is shattered,” he explained. “And not the Bride and Bebe are on the run and just the idea of being able to cast Uma [Thurman] and cast her daughter Maya [Hawke] in the thing would be fucking exciting,” Tarantino said.

Interestingly enough, the original B.B. actress from Kill Bill Vol. 2 does appear briefly in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, as Perla Haney-Jardine plays the girl that sells Cliff Booth the acid soaked joint.

Tarantino also mused about other potential characters that could appear, “Elle Driver is still out there, Sophie Fatale got her arm cut off, but she’s still out there. They all got Bill’s money. Actually, Gogo had a twin sister Shiaki and so her twin sister could show up.”

As far was we know, neither Kill Bill 3 or his hypothetical remake of Reservoir Dogs will actually be his tenth and final film. However, I wouldn’t be shocked if Tarantino decided to give these ideas a mini-series treatment similar to what he plans to do with his six-part Bounty Law series.

SOURCE: JRE

Posted on in Film News

Quentin Tarantino Explains That Cliff Booth & Bruce Lee Match Was Inspired By Lee’s Documented Tension On ‘The Green Hornet’ Set With American Stuntmen

Quentin Tarantino is making the press rounds to promote his novelization of his Oscar-winning film Once Upon A Time In Hollywood and the topic of the controversial scene with Bruce Lee was brought-up while speaking on the Joe Rogan podcast (via THR). Many people including Lee’s own daughter Shannon Lee took the fictional scene as disrespectful to the late actor, as it pretty much only showed him as being a boastful loud-mouth.

“I can understand his daughter having a problem with it, it’s her fucking father, I get that. But anybody else [can] go suck a dick. If you look at it, it’s obvious Cliff tricked him, that’s how he was able to [beat him,] it’s explained a bit more in the book,” Tarantino said of backlash towards the sequence.

Tarantino then cited Matthew Polly’s book Bruce Lee: A Life as one of the reasons for fictionalized match on the set of Green Hornet, “The stuntmen hated Bruce on The Green Hornet, it’s in Matthew Polly’s book. Bruce had nothing but disrespect for American stuntmen and was always hitting them. He was always tagging them with his feet and his fists and it got to the point where they refused to work with them.”

This isn’t a new revelation, as the filmmaker previously said that folks like Cliff Booth saw actors like Bruce Lee, who do their own stunts, as a threat to their business. A sort of changing of the guard and shift in the industry. It’s possible that Quentin Tarantino could have spent a little more time explaining that background perspective, tension with the stunt team, and potentially could have gave the characterization of Bruce Lee more scenes to establish that his time working on Green Hornet wasn’t actually pleasant for him.

His horrible experience working in Hollywood isn’t news to people that have followed the career of Bruce Lee. The legendary actor/martial artist (born in San Francisco) ultimately left Hollywood to pursue a second film career in Hong Kong as his options in America were limited being a man with Asian/Eurasian background. Bruce had been a child actor in Hong Kong before leaving for the United States. His first breakout role was in the 1950 film The Kid that he starred alongside his father, Lee Hoi-Chuen, a comic book film of all things.

One of the last straws was his horrible experience working in the television industry and after being mistreated on The Green Hornet, he attempted to land his own series with Kung Fu and the role of Kwai Chang Caine was ultimately gifted to a young David Carradine (Kill Bill) because of his famous father, John Carradine. Despite Carradine having zero experience with martial arts when he was hired, an obvious slight to Lee to hire a white actor to play an Asian character and felt he could have more success overseas.

Bruce Lee was indeed a headstrong personality as he famously ignored Chinese traditions by teaching westerners martial arts and writing books about the subject in English. This was seen as an act of hostility towards the martial arts community and caused lots of tension as he starred in Hong Kong films that essentially launched the Kung Fu film genre’s popularity in the United States. However, by most accounts Bruce was an intelligent, inclusive, and loving human being.

It’s also worth noting that Jackie Chan, who worked as a stunt man for Bruce Lee had nothing but kinds words about his experiences. And even recalls Bruce’s reaction when he accidentally struck him during their scenes together on Enter The Dragon.

Tarantino could have been a lot more tactful with his portrayal, for sure.

SOURCE: JRE

Posted on in Film News

Quentin Tarantino Reveals Jennifer Lawrence Almost Appeared In ‘Once Upon A Time In Hollywood’ As Squeaky Fromme

Quentin Tarantino and Jennifer Lawrence have been trying to work together since he was trying to assemble a cast for his western The Hateful Eight, as the actress was once being eyed to play the foul-mouthed outlaw Daisy Domergue. Tarantino confirmed the potential casting to Entertainment Weekly in 2015 and spoke about the missed opportunity being due to her extremely busy schedule.

“I can see her doing a good job with this role, so we went to talk about it and everything. She was just doing me a courtesy to see me, I think. She was doing Joy. She had to do all this publicity on the Hunger Games movies. There was just no fucking way in the world that she was available,” the filmmaker said.

They reportedly tried again to work together on Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, but that didn’t happen either. Tarantino briefly mentioned during an interview on the podcast WTF With Marc Maron (via The Playlist), that Jennifer Lawrence was supposed to play Manson Family mamma bear Squeaky Fromme in the film before Dakota Fanning ultimately took the part.

“Early on, in the pre-production of Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, I flirted around with the idea of—and [by the way], I couldn’t be happier with what Dakota Fanning did, it’s one of the best performances in the movie, she’s amazing as Squeaky Fromme, she becomes [her]. But early on, I investigated the idea of Jennifer Lawrence playing Squeaky, so she came down to the house to read the script cause I wasn’t letting it out,” Tarantino told host Marc Maron about his early idea to cast Jennifer Lawrence as Fromme.

Considering that Quentin Tarantino is going to hang up his spurs as a feature film director with his tenth and final film, the pair are going to have to make sure they align their schedules or this might happen a third time.

SOURCE: WTF WITH MARC MARON

Posted on in Film News

Quentin Tarantino Muses About A 3 Hour & 20 Minutes Cut Of ‘Once Upon A Time In Hollywood’ If He Had Been Able To Make It Longer

Quentin Tarantino fans like myself have longed for extended cuts of his films, case in point, Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair, is a version where the two movies are combined. However, this version hasn’t been released or if it has I certainly missed out on it.

This idea of extended cuts is more or less directors being allowed to show the film without studio expectations of runtime, the longer a movie if the theory is that audiences will get bored or will limit the amount of screenings that can be played in a theater.

When it came to Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, Tarantino left out a bunch of footage but decided to write a novelization of the film to expand those characters and the world they inhabit. During a chat with comedian/actor Marc Maron on his podcast WTF With Marc Maron (via The Playlist), Quentin revealed that if he were to assemble a longer cut with the footage he took out it could end up around 3 hours and 20 minutes.

“I think if I were to put it all together, in a way where I would use everything that I wanted and didn’t have to worry about time, it would probably be around 3 hours and 20 minutes or something,” Tarantino said to host Marc Maron.

Hopefully, that version can see the light of day but I wouldn’t count your chickens, just yet.

ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD – Actor Rick Dalton gained fame and fortune by starring in a 1950s television Western, but is now struggling to find meaningful work in a Hollywood that he doesn’t recognize anymore. He spends most of his time drinking and palling around with Cliff Booth, his easygoing best friend and longtime stunt double. Rick also happens to live next door to Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate — the filmmaker and budding actress whose futures will forever be altered by members of the Manson Family.

SOURCE: WTF WITH MARC MARON

Posted on in Film News

Quentin Tarantino Once “Considered” Remaking His Iconic Robbery Thriller ‘Reservoir Dogs’ As His Last Movie; “I Won’t Do It, Internet”

Quentin Tarantino is making the press rounds to promote his new novelization of Once Upon A Time In Hollywood that expands upon the Oscar-winning pic and stopped by the stages of Real Time With Bill Maher last night. The director briefly reiterated his plan to retire after completing his tenth and final feature film, while also teasing something interesting at the same time.

Tarantino revealing that, at one time, he considered remaking Reservoir Dogs as his tenth and final movie.

“I’ve actually considered about doing a remake of Reservoir Dogs as my last movie. I won’t do it, internet, alright, but I considered it,” Tarantino said when asked if Reservoir Dogs would be different if he had made the film with his current level of experience as a filmmaker.

RESERVOIR DOGS – Six criminals with pseudonyms, and each strangers to one another, are hired to carry out a robbery. The heist is ambushed by police and the gang are forced to shoot their way out. At their warehouse rendezvous, the survivors, realizing that they were set up, try to find the traitor in their midst.

It’s interesting because he’s been talking up a Vega Brothers movies for decades, but since Michael Madsen’s Vic Vega and John Travolta’s Vincent Vega were killed in their respective movies it would make things unbelievable as the actors are much much older at this point. A remake could have potentially scratched that itch.

He’s mentioned in the past his desire to return the world of gangsters and thieves, with a Pretty Boy Floyd-type film, but never executed on that idea. His favorite director Sergio Leone tackled the genre with Once Upon A Time In America starring Robert De Niro, the title of Tarantino’s last film was an obvious nod to both Leone’s western Once Upon A Time In The West and the aforementioned gangster flick.

Tarantino has previously said he’s written but a bunch of episodes of his Bounty Law spinoff series, and has suggested he’ll tackle that before attempting his final movie. Although, retirement to Quentin Tarantino is likely going to look a little different than what most would imagine, as he plans to write books and potentially write/produce/direct television projects.

Reservoir Dogs was my first introduction to Quentin Tarantino slightly before Pulp Fiction landed in rental stores and cable. I have a huge attachment to Tarantino’s first directorial debut but can also see how it could be improved or expanded with a reboot, given it’s scope could have been more on the level of a Martin Scorsese gangster epic if it had a larger budget to work with. However, the original is still extremely charming and even more impressive when you learn it was only made for $1.2 million when it feels like it cost significantly more.

He wouldn’t be the first filmmaker to attempt to revisit or reboot their own material, director Michael Mann famously turned his television pilot L.A. Takedown into the fantastic Al Pacino and Robert De Niro flick Heat. The latter is obviously the superior of the two, becoming one of the best crime films ever made and Heat is easily one of the films that Mann is best known for.

It is worth noting that he’s talked about these projects and nothing really becomes of them. Something like Kill Bill 3 has been another thing he’s talked-up for ages and was said to be speaking with Uma Thurman about it not too long ago. I still have major doubts it’ll ever get made outside of a book or series.

Tarantino had been working with screenwriter Mark L. Smith (The Revenant) on a Star Trek film at Paramount Pictures, but seemingly won’t be happening as development has stalled.

SOURCE: REAL TIME WITH BILL MAHER

Posted on in Television News

‘Band of Brothers’ Follow-Up WWII Series ‘Masters of The Air’ Casts Austin Butler & Callum Turner

Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg previously were behind HBO’s WWII series Band of Brothers and The Pacific about American soldiers that fought in European and Pacific campaigns. They’re currently working on a new show, Masters of The Air, that HBO passed on and landed at Apple TV+. An adaption of the novel from Donald L. Miller that focuses on bomber pilots aka bomber boys, which will be written by John Orloff and Graham Yost.

The Hollywood Reporter has revealed that Once Upon A Time In Hollywood’s Austin Bulter and Fantastic Beasts 2 actor Callum Turner. They have landed the roles of Maj. Gale Cleven and Maj. John Egan.

Masters of the Air is the deeply personal story of the American bomber boys in World War II who brought the war to Hitler’s doorstep. With the narrative power of fiction, Donald Miller takes you on a harrowing ride through the fire-filled skies over Berlin, Hanover, and Dresden and describes the terrible cost of bombing for the German people. Fighting at 25,000 feet in thin, freezing air that no warriors had ever encountered before, bomber crews battled new kinds of assaults on body and mind. Air combat was deadly but intermittent: periods of inactivity and anxiety were followed by short bursts of fire and fear. Unlike infantrymen, bomber boys slept on clean sheets, drank beer in local pubs, and danced to the swing music of Glenn Miller’s Air Force band, which toured US air bases in England. But they had a much greater chance of dying than ground soldiers. Masters of the Air is a story of life in wartime England and in the German prison camps, where tens of thousands of airmen spent part of the war. It ends with a vivid description of the grisly hunger marches captured airmen were forced to make near the end of the war through the country their bombs destroyed.

According to a report from Deadline from October, No Time To Die director Cary Joji Fukunaga is attached to tackle episodes. Also, I can confirm that Alien: Covenant and Raised By Wolves production designer Chris Seagers is going to be working on the series.

SOURCE: THE HOLLYWOOD STUDIOS

Posted on in Film News

Damien Chazelle’s R-Rated 1920s Hollywood Drama ‘Babylon’ Bumped To Christmas 2022 By Paramount

Deadline has revealed that Paramount Pictures is bumping the release date of Damien Chazelle‘s latest movie titled Babylon an entire year to December 25, 2022 . The film will be a period drama set in Hollywood’s transition to talkies in the 1920s with Brad Pitt attached to star and Margot Robbie reportedly in talks for a role after Emma Stone exited.

The film is a period, R-rated drama, set in the shifting moment in Hollywood when the industry turned from silent film to talkies. 

This new release date would place Babylon in direct competition with upcoming blockbusters Avatar 2 and Aquaman 2 as both will drop earlier in the month.

The pair of actors starred in Quentin Tarantino‘s Once Upon A Time In Hollywood leading to Pitt’s Oscar win for Best Supporting Actor, however, they never shared the screen together. It’ll also be interesting to see if the project will skew more in the realm of something similar to David Fincher‘s latest project Mank, a dramatic biopic about the Citizen Kane screenwriter that takes place well after that talkies have dominated the film industry.

Brad Pitt is currently shooting the Sony Pictures assassin action flick Bullet Train in Los Angeles for director David Leitch (Deadpool 2, John Wick, Atomic Blonde).

Margot Robbie‘s next theatrical release will be The Suicide Squad on August 6th and is said to have a role in David O. Russell‘s next project.

It’s certainly notable that movies focused on Hollywood and the film industry tend to do extremely well during awards season nominations suggesting that Babylon could be gearing-up to become a contender even before cameras roll.

SOURCE: DEADLINE