Quentin Tarantino has never been the type to keep a lid on things, and his latest reveal is pure catnip for anyone who spent 2019 basking in the California sunshine of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. The director has opened up about how the film begins and what it means for the future of Cliff Booth, the laconic stuntman Brad Pitt turned into a movie star all over again. For a movie that already runs a leisurely 162 minutes, the news that there's more story rattling around in Tarantino's head should have fans reaching for the Blu-ray and a box of cigarettes.

The film, released back in July 2019, dropped audiences into Los Angeles in 1969. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Rick Dalton, a television Western hero whose star is dimming fast, while Pitt's Cliff Booth is his best friend, driver, and all-around fixer. Next door lives Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie), newly married to Roman Polanski and on the cusp of something enormous. Part comedy, part drama, part thriller, it's a hangout movie with a razor blade tucked under the cushion. Now, per Tarantino, there's a whole other opening sequence that could have set the table - and a Booth story that hasn't been told on screen yet.

A Very Different Way In

The headline here is that the movie's original entry point wasn't the one that made the final cut. Tarantino has been clear that the film as released is the film he wanted, but the alternate opening offers a glimpse at how he first imagined easing viewers into Rick and Cliff's world. Think of it less as deleted material and more as the road not taken - a chance to see the director feeling out the tone before he settled on the version that earned Pitt an Oscar and had critics arguing about flamethrowers in Culver City.

It also underscores something fans have long suspected: Tarantino treats this particular universe like a sandbox he isn't done playing in. Between the film's novelization, which fleshed out Cliff's backstory in ways the movie only hinted at, and the director's repeated talk of a stage or television afterlife for these characters, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood has quietly become the most expandable thing he's ever made. On the page, Cliff got a whole interior life involving war, stunt work, and a certain infamous boat. On screen, he got to be the coolest guy in any room, even when the room was a dusty ranch full of trouble.

The Cliff Booth Show

Which brings us to the part everyone wants: what comes next for Cliff. Tarantino has floated the idea of continuing the character's story, and given that Pitt's performance is the film's laid-back engine, it's easy to see why. Booth is a man who has seen everything, done most of it, and still can't quite be bothered to explain himself. He's also the film's moral center in the strangest possible way - a guy with a rumored past who happens to be the only person who sniffs out the danger at Spahn Ranch.

Any continuation would have a rich cast to draw on. Emile Hirsch's Jay Sebring, Margaret Qualley's 'Pussycat', Timothy Olyphant's Jim Stacy, Julia Butters' scene-stealing Trudi Fraser, and Austin Butler's 'Tex' all orbited the main duo, and the film's 7.417/10 TMDb rating suggests audiences would happily buy another ticket to that world. Whether Tarantino actually pulls the trigger is another matter - he's famously talked about retirement and a ten-film cap - but he's also famously fond of rewriting his own rules when a good story is on the table. The man once turned a single chapter of a script into an entire movie. Never count him out.

For now, what we have is a reminder of how much texture lives underneath this movie's shiny surface. The alternate opening and the Cliff Booth material aren't just trivia for completionists; they're evidence of a filmmaker still poking at one of his most personal projects. If more ever comes of it, audiences will be waiting - convertibles idling, radios on, ready to drive back into 1969.

Source: Gold Derby