Oscar nominee Quentin Tarantino on the making of 'Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood'
Many of Quentin Tarantino's films, such as "Pulp Fiction," "Kill Bill" and "Django Unchained," have become cult classics, but the legendary filmmaker has never won the Academy Award for best director or best picture. However, with his 2019 hit "Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood" garnering 10 Oscar nominations, this could be the year. He stopped by the ABC News studios recently to talk about the film.
"I've been there where I thought I had one of the best movies and it's not in that roundup. So it's actually nice to be in the roundup," Tarantino said in an appearance on "Popcorn with Peter Travers."
The film, which stars Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio, follows an actor and his longtime stunt double struggling to find their place in a modern Hollywood. Travers asked Tarantino when he came up with the idea for the storyline.
"This was kind of a long process," Tarantino said. "There was a couple of years when I was just trying to figure out who the characters were. And I wasn't in any hurry to sit down and write a movie script. Even like my very first years of writing on it, I wrote it as a novel, or at least a couple of chapters as a novel in an exploratory way."
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In an interesting turn, Pitt and DiCaprio's characters encounter actress Sharon Tate, played by Margot Robbie. Tarantino talked about why he felt compelled to include Sharon Tate's story in the film.
"I liked the idea of exploring the character of Sharon Tate who, through the sensationalism of the circumstances and the sensationalism of history, has almost been reduced to an extra in her own story to some degree," Tarantino, 56, told Travers. "Of course I wanted to deal with Charles Manson and the family because I'm kind of dealing with Hollywood mythology at that time, Los Angeles County mythology and they are part of that fabric."
He added, "I think the perception of Sharon has changed since this movie has played out through the year. Now people think of her as more than just the murder victim. They think about her as a person. They contemplate the life that she lived. She is a character. She's a person. She's more than a murder statistic."
"One of the things I'm really proud about in this movie was when it came to re-creating a living, breathing Los Angeles was we were actually using the real Los Angeles. When it came to re-creating this world, we didn't do it via green screen. We didn't do it via CGI (computer-generated imagery). We built. We built. We art directed. And frankly in a world where it's easy enough to do it digitally, we didn't have to convince the studio to let us do it. They realized that was part of the aesthetic."
"Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" is in theaters everywhere.
Be sure to watch the full interview with Peter Travers and Quentin Tarantino in the video above.
