Quentin Tarantino has had a cameo appearance in all his movies, and Once Upon A Time In Hollywood was no exception, and he ended up appearing two times in very different ways. Quentin Tarantino’s career as a filmmaker began in 1992 with the crime movie Reservoir Dogs, which gave the audience a taste of his narrative and visual style, and his big break arrived two years later with Pulp Fiction. Since then, Tarantino has explored different genres, all with his unique sense of humor and doses of violence, and his latest project, Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, took the audience to an alternate universe where certain events in the late 1960s turned out very differently.
Once Upon A Time In Hollywood follows actor Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his best friend and stuntman Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) as they struggle to remain active and relevant during the final years of Hollywood’s golden age. Their stories are intertwined with that of Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie), and the movie also included the presence of Charles Manson (Damon Herriman) and his “family”, but it gave Tate a very different ending. Once Upon A Time In Hollywood was praised by critics and viewers (though it also got its dose of backlash), and even though it broke a couple of traditions in Tarantino’s movies, it didn’t forget about a cameo from its famous director.
Tarantino’s work hasn’t been restricted to sitting behind the camera, and he has found ways to take an active part in his movies in different roles, to the point where it sometimes has been tricky to find him – for example, in Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino appears as a Nazi soldier getting scalped and later as an American GI in the movie-within-the-movie Nation’s Pride, facing away from the camera. His cameo appearances in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood are similar as he doesn’t appear directly in front of the camera, but his peculiar voice gives him away – you just have to pay attention.
In a meta-type of cameo, Tarantino “appears” right at the end of Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, in the Red Apple Cigarettes commercial shown during the credits. Tarantino plays the role of director, and his only line is “and cut!”. This particular cameo is a fun one for Tarantino fans as Red Apple is a fictional brand that appears in many of his works, so having him as director of a commercial of a brand he created for his movie universe was especially fun. The other cameo can be found in the official Once Upon A Time In Hollywood poster, and you have to pay very close attention. The poster shows Rick, Cliff, and Sharon, with other minor characters right below them, such as Al Pacino’s Marvin Schwarz and Kurt Russell’s Randy Miller, and between a dancing Sharon and the big image of her, a director behind a camera can be seen, and it’s none other than Quentin Tarantino.
Tarantino still has some projects waiting to be made, and no matter which one he chooses as the next, he will surely find a way to appear in it, whether it’s through actual characters (as in Reservoir Dogs, where he played Mr. Brown), as an extra, or an off-screen presence, though Once Upon A Time In Hollywood also proved he can show up in posters – it’s really just a matter of paying attention to all the details.