Here are some of the big differences between Once Upon A Time In Hollywood's script and the final movie. It was a long odyssey between Quentin Tarantino being a movie-obsessed video store employee to becoming one of the defining filmmakers of his generation. From an earlier, abortive attempt at making a feature called My Best Friend's Birthday to his actual debut Reservoir Dogs and beyond, Tarantino's talent for quotable dialogue, creating famous - and sometimes shocking - movie moments and assembling amazing music for his soundtracks has seen him become an icon.
Quentin Tarantino plans to retire after making ten films, which means he only has one left following 2019's Once Upon A Time In Hollywood. This movie takes place in 1969, following fading actor Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), his loyal friend and stuntman Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) and Margot Robbie as Sharon Tate, who is Rick's neighbor. The movie keeps with Tarantino's theme of alternate history tales like Inglourious Basterds and is a tribute to a bygone era in the film business. The movie received mostly glowing reviews, with Pitt nabbing a Best Supporting Actor Oscar at the Academy Awards for his work.
Like The Hateful Eight - which originally started as a novel sequel to Django Unchained - Tarantino first developed Once Upon A Time In Hollywood as a book before turning it into a screenplay. He was also incredibly protective of the script, due to the leak of The Hateful Eight screenplay prior to filming, which almost made him abandon the project. To that end, the Once Upon A Time In Hollywood script isn't currently available to read, though through various interviews with Tarantino and the cast, there were many changes to the story before it hit screens.
An unconfirmed rumor suggested Brad Pitt was originally in line to play a detective investigating Charles Manson's cult, which is a subplot that was seemingly dropped before filming. A big change was made to Once Upon A Time In Hollywood's most controversial scene, where Cliff fights Bruce Lee (Mike Moh). The movie sees them engage in a best of three sparring match, but it's broken up before a winner emerges. In the script, Cliff manages to successfully knock Lee down with a "cheap" shot, but Pitt's objection to depicting Lee losing made Tarantino revise.
One of the first scenes in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood sees Rick meet with Al Pacino's casting director Marvin Schwarz for career advice, and it was also one of the first scenes Tarantino wrote for the movie. The scene was written as a one-act play and made it to the shooting script, but was trimmed down from its original, 30-minute version. Tarantino is said to be exacting when it comes to actors speaking his dialogue as written, but in a very rare exception, he created a whole new scene based on DiCaprio's suggestion. The scene where Rick Dalton's actorly insecurities bubble up on the set of Western Lancer and he has a breakdown in his trailer was improvised by DiCaprio, who felt Rick needed to mess up and forget his lines before earning the respect of young co-star Trudi (Julia Butters); Trudi also had two scenes cut, including a phone call scene with Rick.
Tarantino regular Tim Roth shot an unused Once Upon A Time In Hollywood cameo as the butler to Jay Sebring (Emile Hirsch), which was described as a funny sequence. The Once Upon A Time In Hollywood narrator is voiced by Kurt Russell, who was originally supposed to reveal Rick is firing Cliff. In another change to his original script, Tarantino quickly typed up a scene where this happens on camera. Many other sequences were cut, including more scenes with Charles Manson and his followers and more time was spent with Sharon Tate, and in 2020 Tarantino mentioned a four-hour cut restoring the major deletions was being developed. A release date for the latter has yet to be revealed.