Quentin Tarantino surprised a Los Angeles audience on Friday night by screening the first 17 minutes of The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth, the follow-up to his 2019 hit Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
The director was taking part in a question-and-answer session at AFI Fest, held at the TCL Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, after a screening of the original film. When he was asked about the sequel as the event drew to a close, he told the crowd: “Well, I could talk a little bit about The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth, or I could show you the first 17 minutes.”
It was the first public look at the Netflix film, which Tarantino wrote and David Fincher directed. Brad Pitt returns to his Oscar-winning role as the stuntman Cliff Booth. The story moves on from 1969 to 1977, and Booth now works as a bartender and cinema projectionist while quietly fixing problems for Hollywood’s elite. Variety described the opening sequence as a gritty, dark picture of 1970s Los Angeles.
Tarantino said he had always seen Booth as “a paperback hero”, adding: “I loved the Cliff Booth character, I loved the way that Brad played him.”
Fincher, who attended the event, told Empire this week that he had cut 60 pages from Tarantino’s 230-page draft, which he called “essentially two movies”. The finished film runs about two and a half hours.
Elizabeth Debicki, Scott Caan, Carla Gugino and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II also star. The film opens in IMAX cinemas on 25 November and starts streaming on Netflix on 23 December.
Tarantino also spoke about his first stage play, The Popinjay Cavalier, starring Sacha Baron Cohen. It opens in London’s West End in March.
Source: Variety
