Quentin Tarantino has revealed why he has handed off the directorial reins of his Once Upon a Time in Hollywood follow-up, The Adventures of Cliff Booth, to David Fincher, instead of helming the project himself, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Released in 2019, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood follows struggling TV Western actor Rick Dalton and his best friend and stunt double Cliff Booth as they navigate the changing times of late 1960s Hollywood, leading up to the night of the infamous Manson Murders. The film has become one of the director’s more expansive and personal projects, as he has since written a novelization of the story, and also teased full biography of the Rick Dalton character.
Now, with a sequel in production at Netflix, with Brad Pitt returning as Booth, Tarantino is surprisingly not in the director’s chair. The filmmaker explained his reasoning for doing so in a recent interview, not wanting to repeat himself, especially for his 10th and potentially final film:
I love this script, but I’m still walking down the same ground I’ve already walked. It just kind of unenthused me…This last movie, I’ve got to not know what I’m doing again. I’ve got to be in uncharted territory.
Tarantino, who will still write and produce the project, then went on to discuss why he thinks David Fincher is the right person to lead the sequel:
I think me and David Fincher are the two best directors…So the idea that David Fincher actually wants to adapt my work, to me, shows a level of seriousness towards my work that I think needs to be taken into account.
The Pulp Fiction director also clarified why another project, The Movie Critic, was cancelled:
The thing about The Movie Critic is I really, really like it. But there was a challenge that I gave to myself when I did it…Can I take the most boring profession in the world and make it an interesting movie?… It was pre-production that made me realize that I was so excited about the writing, but I wasn’t really that excited about dramatizing what I wrote.
He went on to emphasize that while The Movie Critic was a spiritual sequel to In Hollywood, no characters from that film would have appeared.
A release date for The Adventures of Cliff Booth has yet to be announced.
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