Tarantino says he felt he was 'letting down' Brad Pitt by not directing the Cliff Booth sequel

Quentin Tarantino says Brad Pitt was the person he felt he was "really letting down" when he decided not to direct The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth, his own script for the follow-up to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. "I felt bad about that," Tarantino told Empire magazine, in an interview reported by Variety on Wednesday 4 November.

The film at a glance

Pitt won the best supporting actor Oscar for playing stuntman Cliff Booth in the 2019 film, which was set in 1969, and Variety says he was keen to return to the character. Tarantino wrote the new script but decided it would not be his tenth and final film as director. With Pitt disappointed that he might not play Booth again, David Fincher, who directed him in Seven, Fight Club and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, took it on.

'You could have knocked me over with a feather'

Tarantino said he could hardly believe Fincher was interested, and was afraid of scaring him off with too much enthusiasm. He said it meant a lot that "a director of David's caliber would spend a year-and-a-half of his life doing my material", because people still think of him as a director who writes only for himself.

Fincher told Empire that Pitt knew the character better than he ever could: "I knew the new stuff, and Brad knew who the guy was."

Tarantino's own last film

Tarantino has said his tenth and final film script is written, but that a stage play comes first (our earlier report).

Watching in Pakistan

The 25 November date is for IMAX cinemas. Netflix has not yet said when the film starts streaming, which is how most viewers in Pakistan are likely to see it. If you pay for Netflix by card, our currency converter shows what a dollar price costs in rupees.