Speaking during a post-screening Q&A for Hollywood (per The Hollywood Reporter), Tarantino discussed why he felt compelled to write the Cliff Booth screenplay for another filmmaker—”as I’m getting older, being a man of letters is more my thing”—and shared why he remains devoted to the fictional Hollywood history he created in his last feature, which has since expanded with a novelization and this project with Fincher. “I tend to not remember good reviews of mine in quotes; I kind of remember the bad reviews in quotes,” he said. “One quote that I do remember somebody writing about Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood, it was like, ‘This seems like the first world Quentin Tarantino has ever created that he would like to live in,’ and there is that aspect.”
Tarantino also said Cliff Booth appealed to him as a character who could helm a series of novels like Don Pendleton’s Mack Bolan or Donald E. Westlake’s Parker. “I loved the Cliff Booth character, I loved the way that Brad played him, and there was this aspect of him as sort of like a paperback hero. I could see like a series of paperbacks with Cliff Booth getting involved with this adventure or that adventure or something like that.” As for Tarantino’s future, you can expect him to remain in the Cliff Booth-writin’ business in some capacity—because, cousin, right now the Cliff Booth business is a-boomin’.
“I’ve got nothing to do but just invest in this mythology,” he said. “I invested in it before I did the movie, and then I invested in it in the years since I’ve done the movie, just so I know the mythology. The audience doesn’t need to know everything, but it’s kind of nice that I know everything, and you can trust me that I know it.”
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