Quentin Tarantino isn't married to the two-hour, 39-minute Cannes version of ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD, as he made very clear during his time at the prestigious film festival in France. According to the renowned filmmaker, there's a good chance that he'll be going back in to recut the movie before it is released in theaters. However, whereas some might speculate that the director would be cutting the picture down to a tighter format, Tarantino actually plans on adding more footage back in.
“I may make it longer,” said the director at the Hotel Carlton the day after his latest film screened at the festival. Fred Raskin, the editor on the film and the Tarantino's longtime collaborator, has claimed his original assembly was around four hours and twenty minutes. Of course, any hardcore film fan knows that most pictures start out lengthy before they're narrowed down to a more cohesive structure for general audiences to enjoy. “His job is to put in every single thing I shot, give me everything,” explained Tarantino. “That’s not unusual, for an epic-y kind of movie.”
Although the duo managed to whittle down the movie to just over two and a half hours, Tarantino now feels that the film should be padded with additional scenes before the movie plays in theaters around the world. "“I’m going to explore possibly putting something back in. If anything, I wanted to go to Cannes too short. if I’m going to err, I’m going to err on too tight.”
It's not an unusual move for the filmmaker, to be honest. Around a decade ago, Tarantino re-edited INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS after it played at Cannes, as well. Plus, there's plenty of worthy material that landed on the cutting room floor simply due to time constraints. Everyone in ONCE UPON A TIME lost scenes, even A-lister Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays an aging Hollywood star named Rick Dalton, and head honcho Al Pacino, who plays an agent promoting spaghetti westerns at Musso & Frank.
DiCaprio’s Dalton, once a huge TV western star, is anxious and worried about staying in the game and getting back into movies. “Dick wishes he was as successful as Burt Reynolds,” said Tarantino. “Rick is not any one person, because we made a conscious effort not to do that. Rick is a little bit of Edd Byrne, Ty Hardin — the man who would be McQueen — a little William Shatner.”
With a slew of memorable names popping up in the cast for the film, including Margot Robbie, Brad Pitt, Dakota Fanning, Luke Perry, Kurt Russell, Lena Dunham, Emile Hirsch, Michael Madsen, James Remar, Bruce Dern, Clu Galager, Lew Temple, and more, it's easy to understand how it might be difficult fitting in an appropriate amount of screen time for each character. Now that Tarantino has seen his $90 million movie play with the audience at Cannes, he has a better idea of the final product that he wishes to present.
As far as Sony chairman Tom Rothman is concerned, Tarantino can do whatever he wants. “It’s his movie. We’re privileged to be along for the ride,” he said. “It’s a Quentin Tarantino film. It’s entirely in his very capable hands.”