CALIFORNIA DREAMIN’
IT’S a chilly night in late October, and the drive-in cinema in Paramount, California, is deserted. Security guards patrol the entrance, but there are no cars in sight and the movie showing – a Frank Sinatra thriller from 1968 – is hardly a Marvel blockbuster. Just over the wall, out of sight, Quentin Tarantino is at work on a quiet scene from Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood, his ninth film.
He’s been shooting for four months now but has only just started to relax into the process. Logistically, the film has been a stressful undertaking, closing down stretches of Hollywood Boulevard and taking swathes of Westwood back into a bygone era. Today’s date in the movie’s world, he explains, is February 9, 1969.
“We might be the last production of this size to be able to go into a busy city like Los Angeles and reverse the clock the way we did,” he says during a break. “The city is just changing so rapidly – we might not have been able to do it the way we did it even a year later.”
Titled as a homage to Sergio Leone, Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood is a sprawling tale of countercultural California and the final days of Hollywood’s golden age. Tarantino’s film follows the fortunes of Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), a fading TV actor, and his stuntman/ assistant Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) as they try to navigate the rapidly changing cultural landscape. But, this being Tarantino, the fictitious pair also find themselves with more than just the capricious tastes of TV audiences to contend with. Dalton, we learn, lives in a luxury home up in Benedict Canyon, on Cielo Drive, where his new neighbours are Roman Polanski and his wife Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie), who will be famously murdered by followers of cult leader Charles Manson in August the same year. In Tarantino’s hands, Dalton, Booth and Tate become intertwined.
This evening’s shoot, meanwhile, is set in a less salubrious part of town. Behind the drive-in, a grubby, dusty space has been commandeered to film a scene
