the BIG picture

It’s a week to Halloween in the last stretch of his ninth film, Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood, but Quentin Tarantino has anything but blood, guts or horror on his mind. Although his story is rumoured to climax in August 1969, when drug-addled hippies butchered five people at a movie star’s mansion, the inspiration in his head couldn’t be more surprising. “I guess the closest outside influence, even though I’m doing it my own way, might be Claude Lelouch,” he ventures.

There’s one of director Lelouch’s films in particular – 1970’s Le Voyou (aka The Crook), which is, in his own words, “Pulp Fiction before Pulp Fiction.” There’s a dizzying timeline, a twist, and, for a film about the kidnapping of a little boy, it’s oddly moving, funny and really quite sweet. There’s even a recurring film-within-a-film – a dazzling, glamorous balletic musical in which a ’20s-style mobster hoofs it up with his molls. Surprisingly, Tarantino hadn’t seen it until just a few years ago.

Disappointingly, there’s nothing very glamorous about tonight’s location, which overlooks an empty drive-in in the city of Paramount, a scuzzy, muddy little area surrounded by rickety, long-abandoned tin buildings with broken windows. There’s a motor home that looks like it might have been left here a long time ago, but its current occupant is one of the biggest stars on the planet. This is the home of Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), stunt double of Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), a TV star who had the smarts to buy a place up in the hills when he was still a struggling actor. There’s a motorbike outside, a battered blue car, and Cliff’s gentle giant of a dog Brandy, an American pitbull, is sniffing around.

It’s already past midnight, and Pitt is sitting with a can of beer on the top of his trailer. There’s a deckchair on the roof, which overlooks a movie screen showing a scene from Gordon Douglas’ 1968 film , the second in the Tony Rome trilogy. It’s the first encounter between Frank Sinatra’s crumpled detective and Raquel Welch’s