Quentin Tarantino has confirmed that he won’t be stepping behind the camera for the upcoming sequel to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
Instead, David Fincher will direct The Adventures of Cliff Booth for Netflix. Speaking on The Church of Tarantino podcast, the two-time Oscar winner explained why he chose to pass on the project, even though he loves the script.
“I love this script, but I’m still walking down the same ground I’ve already walked,” Tarantino said.
“It just kind of unenthused me. This last movie, I’ve got to not know what I’m doing again. I’ve got to be in uncharted territory.”
For him, directing the sequel would have meant repeating familiar creative steps instead of pushing into something new for his final film.
During the conversation, Tarantino also addressed The Movie Critic, which had long been rumoured as his 10th and final project. He revealed that the film has been scrapped because the concept felt too close to what he had already done in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
“I wasn’t really excited about dramatizing what I wrote when I was in pre-production, partly because I’m using the skillset that I learned from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood [of] ‘How are we going to turn Los Angeles into the Hollywood of 1969 without using CGI?’” he said.
He explained that recreating 1969 Los Angeles for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was a challenge that pushed his creativity, but The Movie Critic lacked that sense of discovery.
“It was something we had to pull off. We had to achieve it. It wasn’t for sure that we could do it. … The Movie Critic, there was nothing to figure out. I already kind of knew, more or less, how to turn L.A. into an older time. It was too much like the last one.”
For Tarantino, the decision to move away from both projects is about ensuring that his final film takes him into unfamiliar territory, a place where he feels challenged as both a writer and a director.