Quentin Tarantino long has taken his encyclopedic cinematic influences, including genres and actors from the past, and blended them through his filter to create wildly inventive films that have influenced many up-and-coming filmmakers. Now, he has done a similar thing that I bet will not be copied by other filmmakers. After steeping himself for a half-decade in the lore of ’60s films, stuntmen, Western TV series and the Manson family to create Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Tarantino harkened back to his love for movie novelizations and wrote one for his own movie, after the fact. The book becomes in a way its own singular Tarantino creation: Using his film as a springboard, Tarantino heads into many unexpected directions while satisfyingly expanding and fleshing out the mythology of the world and the characters populated by Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie and others. If you are a fan of the movie, you’ll find it hard to put down a novel that first was published in paperback. Here, Tarantino discusses why he put the same painstaking detail in the book as he did the movie, and where he goes from here.
Read more. Great read, lots of mentions of Brad’s character Cliff Booth.