Sitting around the dinner table with John Travolta as he checks your homework is, naturally, an experience limited to his three children with his late wife Kelly Preston. That is, unless you’re Dominique Swain. The actress got her start working alongside John, as well as Nicolas Cage, in Face/Off (1977) and as the titular character in Lolita.
We’re catching up on Dominique’s continuing work in show business, her long-term boyfriend and that first role that brought her into the company of Grease’‘s Danny Zuko. Though, expect fewer hand jives, kitschy school dances, and illegal races — face-swapping FBI hunts work up enough of a sweat.
Dominique Swain starred in Face/Off alongside John Travolta and Nicholas Cage
Who is Dominique Swain?
Dominique Swain debuted in the US with a supporting role in Face/Off (1997), alongside John Travolta, before starring as the titular role in Adrian Lyne’s controversial adaptation of Lolita, which released in the US in 1978. Based on the 1955 novel by Vladimir Nabokov, the story traces a literature professor’s obsession with a 12-year-old girl. Dominique’s also starred in movies like Alpha Dog (2006), alongside Bruce Willis, and is credited with over 100 film appearances, per IMDB.
Raised in Malibu, Dominique is the middle daughter of three, born to mother Cindy and electrical engineer father David in 1980. Her sisters have also gone into the arts, with Alexis working as a makeup artist and sister Chelse an actress like Dominique.
John Travolta plays Dominique Swain’s father in the action thriller Face/Off
Starring with John Travolta in Face/Off
For her work in Face/Off, the actress starred as John Travolta’s teenage daughter. John plays an FBI agent intent on foiling a terrorist plot. In order to infiltrate the organisation, he undergoes a facial transplant surgery, but the criminal mastermind wakes up early and is vengeful.
The Oscar-nominated feature also starred Ghost Rider and National Treasure favourite Nicolas Cage and The Bourne Supremacy actress Joan Allen who, together with Dominique, make up the film’s leading family.
Dominique recently starred in the 2025 thriller Seclusion
What’s she up to now?
Dominique hasn’t stepped away from the screen, though she keeps relatively quiet on her private life. She’s recently had roles in 2025 thriller Seclusion, which follows the psychiatrist and author Dr Madeline Faye on a retreat to her father’s beach house and her growing suspicion that an ex-patient has followed her there. According to IMDB, she has wrapped filming on a new project Immortal Combat (2026), which pits history’s greatest warriors against one another.
Details on her personal life are more vague, but she shares regular updates on her involvement with local dog shelters and adventures abroad with boyfriend Jamie Harr. She joined Cameo in 2023, providing custom videos to fans.
John Travolta heads up Face/Off as an FBI agent trying to foil a terrorist plot
John’s Face/Off fame
As for Dominique’s movie dad, John Travolta is best known for his roles in Grease (1978), Pulp Fiction (1994) and Saturday Night Fever (1977), all of which had him putting on his dancing shoes. Face/Off, meanwhile,played into John’s proven talent as an action hero, which he had shown off three years earlier in the Quentin Tarantino hit Pulp Fiction as Vincent Vega.
The 72-year-old actor first appeared on TV screens in 1972 on Emergency! and on Owen Marshall, Counselor at Law. He got his break into the world of fame with another famous Vinnie character on Welcome Back, Kotter. He married Kelly Preston in 1991 and the couple remained together until her death in 2020. They have three children together.
Quentin Tarantino is no stranger to violence in films, with the director employing some of the most iconic, old-school techniques in his films. He is also a connoisseur of old-school martial arts films, something that was visible in his approach to his two-part Uma Thurman starrer, Kill Bill. In a recent interview, the veteran director has singled out one martial arts director whom he considers can portray violence perfectly.
Quentin Tarantino praises Lee Tso-Nam’s brutal ‘death blows’ in movies
Quentin Tarantino is an avid fan of martial arts movies. He has endorsed the genre time and again before. The influence of the genre is also visible in the works of Tarantino, especially in Kill Bill, which heavily leans on the style.
Even when his films are not related to martial arts, most of them at least employ a healthy dose of violence, even in the most uncommon of ways, like in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
In his recent appearance on the Pure Cinema Podcast, Tarantino shared his opinion on Martial Arts films and singled out one director above the others. He claimed that Lee Tso-Nam, a veteran director who made many old-school martial arts films in the 1970s and 1980s, was an expert in depicting fight scenes.
What appealed to Tarantino the most in Tso-Nam’s films was the “fastness” in the fight sequences. Back then, most directors employed the same technique of speeding up the camera to make the fight scenes look more endearing. But Tso-Nam mastered this technique.
Tarantino also claimed that he was the only director to use this common technique in an “artistic” way, which made Tso-Nam’s films visually appealing.
The Pulp Fiction director added that the action scenes in Tso-Nam’s movies are “painful.”
Lee Tso-Nam remains one of the most prolific directors in the history of the Hong Kong film industry. Many of his films have become cult classics and continue to allure fans around the world.
Quentin Tarantino had a hot take about The Hunger Games that got the Internet talking. The celebrated filmmaker joined the Bret Easton Ellis Podcast to chat about all kinds of movies. But, his comments about Hunger Games ripping-off Battle Royale have everyone taking notice. Tarantino argues that Battle Royale writer Kenta Fukasaku (or maybe Koushun Takami, who wrote the novel the movie is based on?) should have sued Suzanne Collins because of the similarities between the two ideas.
Here’s what the Kill Bill director said, “I do not understand how the Japanese writer didn’t sue Suzanne Collins for every f****** thing she owns.”
“They just ripped off the f*****’ book. Stupid book critics are not going to go watch a Japanese movie called Battle Royale so the stupid book critics never called her on it,” Tarantino added. “They talked about how it was the most original f*****’ thing they’d ever read. As soon as the film critics saw the film, they said, ‘What the f***? This is just Battle Royale except PG!’”
Where to begin with a statement like this? Tarantino clearly cares a lot about the medium of film. But, this take is dismissive at the best, and maybe even wrong at the worst at the worst end of it? Yes, the stories of The Hunger Games and Battle Royale do harbor some similarities to each other. But, there have been multiple ideas where two very similar ideas come out near each other without any cheating or copying occurring.
Did Hunger Games copy Battle Royale?
(Toei)
As we just said, the Hunger Games and Battle Royale situation seems like one where the more popular version of a similar story gets this accusation lobbed at it. Suzanne Collins has done well for herself. But, honestly so have Fukasaku and Takami. (Go on Lettrboxd right now and check how many of your friends have ranked/rated Battle Royale. It’s near-universal acclaim in film circles.)
For her part, Collins has been asked about this issue as far back as 2011. The New York Times interviewed the Hunger Games author about all of this success. During their conversation, the question of Battle Royale and its inspiration for the source material came up. Collins laid out a timeline that seems absolutely conceivable.
“I had never heard of that book or that author until my book was turned in,” Collins explained. “At that point, it was mentioned to me, and I asked my editor if I should read it. He said, ‘No, I don’t want that world in your head. Just continue with what you’re doing.’”
Why does this happen so much?
(Lionsgate)
So, with that all established, the question of how this happens so often rears its head. To be brief, people have ideas at the same time. If you look at the groundwater in the early 2010’s, youth cultures around the world were feeling alienated by not having a voice in political and community discussions. Identities being easily weaponized against one another would lead you to look at the idea of battling your classmates as novel.
BJ Colangelo and Harmony Colangelo’s This Ends at Prom podcast heard about these quotes and quickly pointed out that Battle Royale’s writer took inspiration from Stephen King’s The Long Walk. And, there’s a long chain of Young Adult media taking strands from things that inspired their creators.
That’s probably what’s going down here. Every generation gets the Battle Royale they deserve, it would seem. But, seeing so many people pick up on this discourse is interesting to witness at a time where The Hunger Games is on a wild resurgence. None of the creators in this story are exactly struggling in the public eye. Maybe it’s just a case of us all being more similar than we think?
A two-decade-old dream is finally coming true for director Quentin Tarantino. The “Kill Bill” chapter known as “Yuki’s Revenge” is coming to life in Fortnite.
The animated short will also head to the big screen as part of an exclusive limited theatrical run of “Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair.”
Tarantino’s “The Lost Chapter: Yuki’s Revenge” stars Uma Thurman, who returns as The Bride, and runs eight minutes. Tarantino and Thurman worked with Epic Games’ Unreal Engine, and used motion capture technology to transfer her performance into the gaming platform.
Speaking at his Vista Theater in Los Angeles at a special launch event, Tarantino explained how Fortnite and Epic Games came to be the perfect fit for “The Lost Chapter: Yuki’s Revenge.”
He said, “They got together with me to talk about some situation where my characters and Fortnite do something kind of groovy. So I show up at the meeting thinking that we’re just going to talk about that they want to license the characters, and they want to get my ideas about what will be a fun thing to do.”
As it turns out, the powers that be at Epic Games had other ideas in mind. Rather than license his characters, they wanted to see if he had something in the eight to 12 minute range “that could be good for our purposes and make sure your iconic characters are wrapped up inside this.”
As it turned out, Tarantino did have something.
He had an entire chapter that existed in the original first draft of “Kill Bill.” “It never even made second drafts,” Tarantino revealed.
He explained that in the chapter, Gogo (Chiaki Kuriyama) had a twin sister and had the sniffles that night at the House of Blue Leaves and leaves early.
Due to pacing concerns, it never made the film. “It was too crazy, too violent, and just too much action,” Tarantino said.
He sent the script along. Tarantino said. “I actually thought maybe the ship had sailed as far as, like doing new material. I was wrong.” He added, “When I wrote the first draft of the script, there was a lost chapter that, frankly, I just didn’t think we could pull off. And Yuki has been a figment of my imagination for over 20 years.”
Getty Images for Epic Games
Thurman surprised audiences when she joined Tarantino to explain how motion capture technology helped her bring The Bride to Fortnite.
Unreal Engine’s technology renders characters in real time. In capturing performances, it can test poses and expressions and see what reads the best. And when it came to getting the voiceover, the team had facial data from the actors to help animate.
“It’s so novel to wear the camera on your head, but I completely forgot about it; just started to live in the moments of the scenes we were doing,” said Thurman.
As for this new way of bringing “Kill Bill” to audiences and telling the story of Yuki’s revenge, Thurman said she found it cool. “This is a new audience for the movie.” She went on to say, “It’s really moving. It’s really great, and I think it’s something meant to be.”
Getty Images for Epic Games
Lionsgate opens Tarantino’s‘ “The Whole Bloody Affair,” the four-hour cut (281 minutes with a 15 minute intermission) that combines “Kill Bill Vol. 1” and “Kill Bill Vol. 2″ into a single feature, in theaters on Dec. 5.
Thurman stars as The Bride, left for dead after her former boss and lover Bill ambushes her wedding rehearsal, shooting her in the head and stealing her unborn child. To exact her vengeance, she must first hunt down the four remaining members of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad before confronting Bill himself.
“The Whole Bloody Affair” stars Lucy Liu, Vivica A. Fox, Michael Madsen, Daryl Hannah, Gordon Liu, Michael Parks, and David Carradine as Bill. Produced by Lawrence Bender, it’s written and directed by Tarantino, and is based on the character of “The Bride” created by Q&U (Quentin and Uma).
With the crossover, Tarantino said, “I want both the ‘Kill Bill’ fan and the Fortnite fan to be totally effing happy about this collaboration.”
Quentin Tarantino hasn’t released a feature since 2019’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and fans of the filmmaker are still waiting to hear what his next film (his 10th, and purportedly his last) will be. (We’ve long since stopped speculating about his Star Trek movie.) However, there sure has been a lot of Kill Bill talk lately, hasn’t there?
Fresh interest in the Uma Thurman-starring revenge flick—an epic kung fu and yakuza riff that pays homage to Bruce Lee, Sonny Chiba, and beyond, with an anime interlude, sword fights, training montages, rock n’ roll sequences, and gore galore—started with the release of Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair in theaters. The special presentation edits together the two-part movie (originally released separately in 2003 and 2004) and will soon be hitting theatersnationwide—meaning you don’t have to travel to a Tarantino-owned cinema to get your eyeballs around it.
But if you crave more Kill Bill and long to witness more slicing blades featuring the Bride and her foes, Fortnite is here to serve. The game, long a curious source of exclusive and/or oddball pop culture content, will be rolling out The Lost Chapter: Yuki’s Revenge this weekend.
“Visionary director Quentin Tarantino had a dream of a Kill Bill chapter that never made it to the silver screen, a chapter known as ‘Yuki’s Revenge,’” explains the official Fortnite blog. “Over 20 years later, Tarantino and Epic have come together to bring the story to life in Fortnite. Built with Unreal Engine and character models from Fortnite, Tarantino’s The Lost Chapter: Yuki’s Revenge stars Uma Thurman.”
And yes, there’s a trailer, which gives us a glimpse of Yuki Yubari herself—the sister of Gogo Yubari, the cute yet terrifying schoolgirl played by Battle Royale standout Chiaki Kuriyama in Kill Bill. It definitely appears that Yuki is just as adorably sadistic as her sister.
Even with all those weapons… our money’s still on the Bride.
If you want to watch Yuki’s Revenge in Fortnite, it premieres November 30 at 2 p.m.; as the blog explains, “You’ll be able to find it in the top row of Discover. Doors for the viewing experience open 30 minutes before the show starts.”
But if gaming’s not your thing, “starting December 5, participating theaters in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom will show Yuki’s Revenge as part of an exclusive limited theatrical run of Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair.”
If Tarantino announces Kill Bill: Volume 3 as his swan song, we can say we saw the signs. Either way, the Kill Bill revival is here to wreck your wedding, bury you alive, rev up your Pussy Wagon, and send you on a cross-country mission to get your daughter back while you plan to (see title). Will you be checking out Yuki’s Revenge in Fortnite or making it part of your big-screen re-watch of The Whole Bloody Affair?
Kevin Spacey is revealing new details about his living situation, telling The Telegraph that he “literally” has “no home.”
The Oscar winner opened up about his living situation in the interview that was published Wednesday, where he also discussed the downward trajectory in his career after he received sexual misconduct allegations in 2017.
“I’m living in hotels, I’m living in Airbnbs, I’m going where the work is. I literally have no home, that’s what I’m attempting to explain,” he said, adding that he lost his previous home “because the costs over these last seven years have been astronomical. I’ve had very little coming in and everything going out.”
A sexual harassment claim was brought against Spacey by a House of Cards crewmember. Following the allegations, he was fired from the Netflix series and production on the show’s planned sixth season was suspended, among other allegations. He was later ordered to pay a $31 million arbitration award to a House of Cards producer MRC.
Spacey has denied the allegations and was found not guilty in sexual assault trials in the U.S. and the U.K.
The actor also told the outlet he believes his comeback in the industry is on the horizon.
“We are in touch with some extremely powerful people who want to put me back to work,” Spacey said. “And that will happen in its right time. But I will also say what I think the industry seems to be waiting for is to be given permission — by someone who is in some position of enormous respect and authority.”
“So, my feeling is if Martin Scorsese or Quentin Tarantino call Evan [Lowenstein, Spacey’s manager] tomorrow, it will be over. I will be incredibly honoured and delighted when that level of talent picks up the phone,” he added. “And I believe it’s going to happen.”
If you need something to look forward to this holiday season, Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Billduology is being re-released in theaters as a combination film, The Whole Bloody Affair.
Beginning December 5, the “single, unrated epic” can be seen in either 35 or 70mm film and feature a never-before-seen anime sequence from Production I.G of Ghost in the Shell fame. Being two movies fused into one, Affair will run over four hours long, but don’t worry: Lionsgate is throwing in a 15-minute intermission. It’s also going to live up to its name and be pretty bloody, which you can see in the trailer below.
Released in 2003 and 2004, the Kill Bill films star Uma Thurman as ex-assassin Beatrix Kiddo, who’s hunting down her fellow Deadly Viper assassins after they try to kill her and her unborn her child on her wedding night. Inspired by 1970s kung fu flicks, the cast includes Vivica A. Fox, Lucy Liu, and the late David Carradine, and both movies were well-reviewed, with Thurman earning Golden Globes nominations for each movie. They also made a lot of money—$180.9 million for the first and $150.3 million for the second, with the former having the highest-grossing opening weekend of Tarantino’s career when it came out.
Tarantino previously screened The Whole Bloody Affair a handful of times, but this marks its first-ever nationwide release. He’s also mentioned wanting to do a third movie, saying in 2021 he’d like to bring in Thurman’s real-life daughter Maya Hawke as the grown version of Beatrix’s daughter B.B. as they flee from assassins. But since he’s apparently retiring after his tenth film, that may not be in the cards, ditto a home release for Affair.
Tickets for Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair should go up soon.
For the past decade, the only place to see Quentin Tarantino‘s ultimate version of Kill Bill was in one of Tarantino’s own movie theaters. That is now changing. In huge, surprising news for film nerds everywhere, Lionsgate just announced it will release Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair in theaters nationwide on December 5.
“I wrote and directed it as one movie—and I’m so glad to give the fans the chance to see it as one movie,” Tarantino said in a press release. “The best way to see Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair is at a movie theater in glorious 70mm or 35mm. Blood and guts on a big screen in all its glory!”
This version of the film will be different from the one that recently played at the Vista Theater in Los Angeles, CA, too. It will include “a never-before-seen, 7.5-minute animated sequence,” which we assume is in addition to the one already in the film focusing on O-Ren Ishii, played by Lucy Liu.
Originally released as two films, Kill Bill: Volume 1 and Kill Bill: Volume 2, The Whole Bloody Affair combines all of that with a few nips and tucks to make it more cohesive. It runs over 250 minutes with an intermission and is a stunning work of cinema. In our mind, it’s Tarantino’s best film.
That it’s getting this wide release is something of a shock, though. In a recent interview, Tarantino spoke about why he was leaning towards only playing the film at his own movie theaters and never releasing it on Blu-ray. But, it seems, this is a compromise that allows people to see it in the best way imaginable but then also doesn’t force him to release it on physical media. You still have to see it in a theater.
There’s no word on when fans might be able to buy tickets or just how wide this release will be. All the press release says is that “select presentations of the release will be in 70mm and 35mm, and it is anticipated that the film will play in all major markets.” So keep an eye on your local theaters for this, potentially, once-in-a-lifetime experience.
“Rick, how are you doing with getting Hollywood Boulevard for me?” Quentin asked his location manager, Rick Schuler. “I’m doing well,” Schuler replied.
Quentin looked at his first assistant director, Bill Clark, and looked at Schuler. “Doing well” was not going to cut it. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was a Los Angeles story, a Hollywood story, and it needed to be filmed in Los Angeles. It needed Hollywood as a backdrop. He wanted to convert Los Angeles back to 1969 — “You know, literally street by street, block by block.”
Jay Glennie’s The Making of Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood
2025 Insight Editions/Provided courtesy of Insight Editions & The Story Factory
Schuler had been in discussion with the California Film Commission for weeks. Under Quentin’s gaze, he admitted, “Well, I think I’m 80 percent there.”
“Rick, if there’s anything I can do to help you out, I’ll be willing to do that,” Quentin replied.
Production designer Barbara Ling was also anxious to know what it was she was going to be working with. Schuler had been asking the Hollywood powers that be, responsible for the economic success of their city, to shut down eight blocks.
“They had been, like, ‘Eight blocks? No way!’ and had said no a hundred times,” Ling recalls. “I also remember, eight blocks was freaking out the producers budget-wise.”
Schuler had an idea how he could utilize the filmmaker’s extraordinary enthusiasm and will to best use. He had an idea he wanted to run by Bill Clark: Schuler had a meeting with the Hollywood neighborhood council. Would Quentin be willing to address them — just talk about the project? Talk about the movie, what Hollywood meant to him? It could help get things over the line.
The day of the meeting, Schuler sprung it on Quentin and Clark that he wanted to make the filmmaker the surprise star act of his pitch and have him come in at the end. Nobody on the council would know he was there beforehand.
“For whatever reason, Rick thought it would be best if he kept Quentin a surprise to the council members,” Clark says.
But what was Schuler to do with Quentin in the meantime? Of course, you hide a two-time Oscar-winning writer-director in a windowless broom closet with his trusted first A.D. It is going to be only for a few minutes, right?
Quentin took one seat, Clark the other. “I tried to keep QT entertained as best I could so he wouldn’t become irritated by sitting in this little room for so long,” Clark recalls. In the main hall, Schuler was trying to work out when he would be seen.
When his turn on the agenda finally arrived, after he’d had a chance to warm up the panel and explain the needs of the production, Schuler said there was somebody else who wished to say a few words. “When Quentin walked in, their jaws just went straight to the floor,” Schuler recalled. “He had been hiding in the closet for nearly an hour, and I had no idea if he was going to be pissed at me! But he looked at me and I nodded, and he started talking. Without notes, he explained to them that he was brought up in Hollywood. He now owned a theater in the neighborhood. He is doing a movie about Hollywood and celebrating Hollywood and needed their backing and support.”
The 15-strong panel’s mouths were still agape as Quentin took his leave, followed by Clark and Schuler. Summoned back later in the day, Schuler received the news he had been hoping for: unanimous approval to shut down Hollywood Boulevard. Quentin’s petition had won the day.
Barbara Ling and her production design team could now go about transforming Hollywood back to how it was in 1969. During their early exploratory chats, a line from Quentin resonated with her: “Imagine an 8-year-old boy lying in the back of his parents’ car. Well, the movie is his point of view.” It was this line, sparse in creative detail but evocative, that spurred her on to bring Quentin’s vision to the screen. The race was on.
To re-create the Hollywood Boulevard of his youth, Quentin wanted realism as far as the eye could see. Movie star Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his stunt double, Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), had to drive a length and take the viewer back to ’69. Eight blocks would see them fine. However, for eight blocks, a discussion was needed.
At all times, Quentin wanted for his partners — those who have financed the movie — to make back their investment. It is a matter of pride that he brings his movies in on time and on budget. And so, when producer David Heyman broached the idea of cutting back from eight blocks to a financially manageable three, he was expecting pushback from an auteur director who would stop at nothing to have his vision brought to the screen unimpeded.
“But, do you know what?” Heyman says. “He was dreamy, just dreamy. There were challenging moments — some bits were not easy — but he was like a teddy bear. I wish all directors were like Quentin.”
Taking over city blocks, whether three or eight of them, comes at a cost, and liaising with the various business owners did not come cheap. “There was a feeling that if you mentioned Quentin’s name, then everybody would open up, give you access,” Schuler says. “But these locations see Quentin’s name and Sony as the studio, and then you have Leo and Brad driving down Hollywood Boulevard, and their thinking is there is money in the pot. It always comes down to money. That caused friction with the budget.”
“It was a location-heavy show, I know, but the money leaving the production offices was huge,” production manager Georgia Kacandes adds. “The fees had to be negotiated down.”
Like Quentin, Barbara Ling was a child of the city. She got it. Ling was older than Quentin. She had used fake IDs to enter many of the clubs and bars Quentin had written about. She had hitchhiked along the winding streets of L.A. She was an Angeleno. Her excitement matched that of Quentin, who could not wait to get going. He wanted to smell the Hollywood of 1969. From the get-go, Ling knew that Quentin wanted to replicate 1969 for real — none of this fake digital nonsense, it had to be all in camera. If Rick, Cliff and Sharon were there, you’d best believe that they were really there. “I don’t ever want to be standing in front of a greenscreen or a bluescreen ever, Barbara!”
“Good!”
This chimed with Ling, who had come from a world of theater. You had to be able to touch it. Yes, she got it.
“But the sad thing with Los Angeles is that they just can’t stop ripping things down!” she laments. “L.A.’s just a very nonpreservation town, unfortunately. But the exciting thing with Quentin is, he wanted the locations practical. Look, he had no problem with using visual effects to erase something that was not in keeping with the era. CGI helps you create downward: You can make a street go longer, but when it comes to close-up, I just think it fails.”
“Ultimately, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was so well-received, and a lot of that was due to everything being practical,” Ling says. “Careers were dumbed down a bit by CGI — particularly, CGI in foreground. You can just tell you can’t touch that building. You can walk by it, but you can’t touch it.”
Leonardo DiCaprio was transported back in time. “I have driven up and down Sunset Boulevard my whole life,” he says. “To go to school, my mom would drive me, and I saw the changing of Los Angeles. During the late ’70s, I would deliver comic books with my dad on Sunset. We’d go to head shops — bong shops — and this kind of thing. People were wearing tie-dye.
Rick and his driver, Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), at Musso’s bar.
2025 Insight Editions/Provided courtesy of Insight Editions & The Story Factory
“Well, what Quentin did was so spectacular,” the actor adds, marveling. “He redressed those blocks. I mean, that was a monumental moment and a great historic cinematic memory for me. No CGI — every fucking storefront was transformed. It was like I was a kid again.”
DiCaprio, knowing that his dad would get a kick out of seeing Hollywood transformed, invited him and his wife down for the day. “My dad has long white-gray hair and is still a hippie, right?” he says. “So I told him and his Sikh wife to come down: ‘Just wear your normal clothes — you’ll fit right in.’ “
Pulling onto Sunset, Rick’s mood is not lifted at the sight of the town he calls home being overrun by swarms of “fucking hippies!” Pitt, driving, brought the car to a stop at the junction.
“That’s my dad right there — my dad and my stepmom,” DiCaprio told him. Pitt laughed, and they waited to get the nod to pull out onto Hollywood Boulevard. DiCaprio looked at a smiling Pitt and said, “No, no, that is my dad.”
“Ha-ha! Yeah, right,” his disbelieving co-star replied.
“Brad, I’m not joking! It’s my dad. He’s right there. I invited him down because he fits right into 1969.”
“Wait — you’re fucking serious?”
“Yes, that is my father right there. Hey, Dad!”
“Hey, Leo!”
A giggling DiCaprio turned to his disbelieving driver.
“Ha! See, I told you!”
Booth speeds down Hollywood Boulevard.
2025 Insight Editions/Provided courtesy of Insight Editions & The Story Factory
Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) is running errands across Hollywood, including picking up a first-edition copy of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles for Roman Polanski from the Larry Edmunds Bookshop. This is Quentin paying homage to a real-life event, having learned that Sharon gifted a copy of the book to Roman shortly before her death.
“Oh my goodness, Quentin had every shop redesigned, and that really was a bookshop I walked into, and then I got to touch the Maltese Falcon statuette,” Robbie says, marveling. Seen in a bookshop reminiscent of the one Humphrey Bogart’s character visits in another John Huston classic, The Big Sleep, the statuette was designed by Fred Sexton for The Maltese Falcon. Its owner? Leonardo DiCaprio, who bought it at auction in 2010.
Margot Robbie walking on the streets of Hollywood was proving quite the draw, but no matter who the star is in a Quentin Tarantino movie, the director is the biggest draw. Crowds were forming. When permission to film in Hollywood was granted, a prerequisite with such a high-profile production on the city’s streets was safety. Clark and Schuler set about hiring a collection of production assistants — essentially, people with charisma who knew how to engage with others and make sure they were paying attention. Bicycle barricades were put in place, and when Clark called, “Switch sides,” a hundred people effortlessly shifted from one side of the road to the other. It helped that the PAs had a secret weapon in Quentin Tarantino.
Cinematographer Bob Richardson (seated) tracks Margot Robbie, as Sharon Tate.
2025 Insight Editions/Provided courtesy of Insight Editions & The Story Factory
“It worked like a charm,” Clark says, laughing. “Quentin is amazing because he turned to the crowd and spoke with them just back and forth a little bit,” Schuler says, marveling. “It came naturally to Quentin. He loves making movies, and to him it was evident that the crowds that had turned up to watch him work loved movies, too. After speaking with them and signing a few autographs, he simply said, “I’ve got to go back to work — I’d really appreciate if you were quiet.” Silence prevailed.
Hey, Mark, would you ever be interested in my filming here sometime?”
“Hey, Quentin, of course— whatever you need. Just let me know.” Quentin was at the counter bar at Musso & Frank Grill, one of his favorite watering holes since he was a young kid. This particular evening, he was enjoying a martini with Christoph Waltz.
A few years later, Mark Echeverria, Musso & Frank’s COO, received an email from location manager Rick Schuler explaining that he was working on a project with Quentin that involved taking Hollywood back to 1969, and that Quentin wished to shoot a portion of the movie in Musso & Frank. Schuler explained further that, of course, there would be no need for any alterations to the restaurant. It would remain the same.
“That’s the beauty of Musso & Frank,” Echeverria says. “Our restaurant has not changed, and hardly anything had to be done to revert our restaurant to 1969.” Ling concedes from a production design perspective there wasn’t a lot to do. “Oh, they’re pretty iconic interiors,” says Barbara. “I mean, we had to change the cash registers and things like that. Tina Charad came in and reproduced all the menus from 1969.”
“Ultimately, I made my recommendation, and that was we should support Quentin,” Echeverria recalls. “I explained how the movie was on brand and of the respect Quentin and Rick had showed us by coming so far in advance. It was, for me, a no-brainer.
“Most of our bartenders and employees have a personal relationship with Quentin, as he has been such a regular, and it was more of shooting something with a friend — but, yes, ultimately, we all knew the magnitude of what was going on.”
DiCaprio and Tarantino prepare a scene in Rick Dalton’s home.
2025 Insight Editions/Provided courtesy of Insight Editions & The Story Factory
Three years after Frank Toulet opened the doors to his restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard in 1919, Joseph Musso joined the operation, and the now-famous grill, with its red leather booths, mahogany bar and first public phone booth, quickly became the go-to place for celebrity Angelenos — a real home away from home for the likes of Charlie Chaplin, Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra and Elizabeth Taylor, who mixed cheek-by-jowl with such literary giants as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker and John Steinbeck. The same year Toulet and Musso joined forces, Buster Keaton used the restaurant as a location for his film Cops. It would quickly become a favorite location for filmmakers, and Quentin knew he wanted his name associated with its illustrious past.
After Rick’s meeting at Musso & Frank with his agent (Al Pacino), Cliff drives the actor back home to his house on Cielo Drive. Rick sets about fixing himself a drink or eight, and his neighbors, Roman and Sharon, leave for a night of fun with the fun people of Hollywood.
Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) meets with his agent (Al Pacino) in a scene shot at Musso & Frank Grill.
2025 Insight Editions/Provided courtesy of Insight Editions & The Story Factory
Cliff is in his Volkswagen Karmann Ghia, heading home. His smooth, almost sensual, and yet authoritative gear changes see the stuntman treat the bend in the road as though it is a tight turn on a racecourse to be navigated. Accelerating out of Cielo Drive, the small car propels down the road, leaving behind the acrid stench of burnt rubber in the night air.
A decorated war veteran, Cliff understands risks, and what would be for some a ponderous journey home from work takes him no time at all — all befitting a stuntman who knows how to handle a car at speed. Quentin, as ever, wanted to see his actor’s face in the shot.
“There was no way Brad was going to let somebody else behind the wheel,” cinematographer Bob Richardson insists. “That was never a question from Brad. I’m betting he was doing 50 — he was just flying down there. We had a camera mounted behind him, and the camera car was struggling to keep up with him. Look, Brad was fully in control, but he was fast.”
“OK, no problem for Brad to be driving,” Quentin’s longtime stunt coordinator Zoë Bell agrees, “but Brad is one of the leads, and so one of the things that I fought for was that we had at least a square. That is four stunt drivers who flank Brad. They’re moving in and out so if he fucks up or one of the precision drivers does — precision drivers are basically extras who are qualified drivers, but I cannot speak of their skill — if one of those precision drivers fucks up or Brad’s brakes fail, a couple of stunt drivers can come together in a pincer and nudge a car to a stop. They’re always alert. They have those instincts.
“It is hard to place, to justify, the cost on this,” Bell says. “Brad is a lead actor, one of the stars of the movie. You’re obviously thinking of Brad’s safety, but also, if anything happens to him, it will have consequences for Quentin, the production, and blow back on me. No, I wanted everything covered.”
The stunt coordinator may have been looking out for Brad, but his speedy driving in the Karmann Ghia nearly caused a casualty. “I nearly drove over Zoë — thankfully she has calisthenic reflexes,” laughs Pitt.
If Cliff was going to get on the freeway, then Quentin would need a freeway for him to get onto. Schuler had to pull in some favors from his friends at the California Highway Patrol. He had worked closely with them organizing access for the movie CHiPs, and he scooted up to Sacramento for another round of negotiations.
“I told them that we wanted to shut down the Hollywood freeway and the 101 freeway and showed them the two exits,” Schuler recalls. “I explained to them that we needed to have rolling breaks — rolling breaks are the cops holding the traffic — between the hours we needed, slowing things down in both directions, so it was limited.”
Quentin would be asked if the trucks and cars whizzing by Brad Pitt were CGI.
“No, no, fuck no,” he would insist. “Those motherfuckers were all real.”
Pitt, as Cliff Booth, lies back in his character’s Volkswagen Karmann Ghia.
2025 Insight Editions/Provided courtesy of Insight Editions & The Story Factory
Brad was just buzzing that he had a once-in-a-lifetime experience “to cruise down Hollywood Boulevard with no traffic or speed limit! And in a cool car. Well, it is a Q.T. film, so it is never gonna be a shit box!”
It is very clear what I said, what I asked for. What is to interpret? So how come we are not doing it?” First A.D. Bill Clark had heard similar refrains from Quentin over the years, but here, he was truly saddened. His director had a shot in mind, and he needed a suitable location to make it a reality — and it was proving elusive.
“Look, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is the only movie I have written where I started with the end,” Quentin explains. “I thought, ‘What if Mr. Indestructible was over at his actor’s house and that actor lived next door to Sharon Tate, and Tex and the girls went to that house instead?’ And then the line came to me: ‘Those hippies sure picked the wrong motherfucking house that night.’ I thought it was a neat idea,” he adds. “But to pull it off, we had to be able to do two things: We had to have the scenes in the front and the gates to the neighboring house to the side. You had to have a sense of the two houses together, and I had to do the shot in the backyard on Rick and his pool, and then the camera goes down into where you see Sharon and Roman drive away, and then I needed that last shot.
“That shot was in my head from the get-go, but we just weren’t finding what I needed, and I am not being shown what I am having in my head,” Quentin recalls. “We had to find two houses whereby we could pull it off. I was trying to make something work from what I was being shown.”
“Quentin got very close to begrudgingly making a compromise,” says Clark, “and I wasn’t happy about that because ultimately, the movie was going to suffer. It is Quentin’s job to be dissatisfied and to push us. He was getting flustered with the places we were seeing — nothing was right.”
Location scouting is a long and arduous trek. You have to put in the hard yards to find the pearls. But the houses the team was viewing were not getting any better — they were getting worse. Clark decided to take matters into his own hands and get back on the road. He gave cinematographer Bob Richardson a call.
“Let’s make it happen, White Devil!”
This attitude typified why Quentin likes Bill by his side. “That’s Bill,” Quentin says. “He says to Bob, ‘We’re not finding what Quentin wants. Well, we know exactly what Quentin wants, so let’s start driving around the Hollywood Hills until we find the fucking houses we need.’ “
Clark resorted to poring over Google Maps and satellite views. He knew that it was going to call for a cold scout, requiring them to just knock on doors. So after another busy wrap on yet another scouting day, he and Richardson, maps on laps, set off.
During two days of intense driving, they pulled into a cul-de-sac off Laurel Canyon. There was a frisson of excitement. They saw a gate. They saw a house with a drive. Turning to Richardson, Clark said, “That’s a cool house.” And then the front door opened to reveal a woman bringing out a trash can. They hopped out of their car, and Clark quickly made the introductions.
“Hey!” Bill called out. “Hi! This is Bob, and I’m Bill.”
Explaining who they were and what they were up to, they asked whether she owned the house. “Yes,” she replied. “My renters are moving out, and I’m just clearing things up.” The levels of excitement just went through the roof.
“You’re kidding!”
If she was renting out the house, then they could rent it on behalf of Quentin Tarantino, right? Turning, they spied the gates to the neighboring property. “What’s up with those gates?” “Oh, that guy used to be an actor. They’re really nice people. They’re away on vacation right now.”
Fuck!
Looking though the woman’s door, they spotted a swimming pool. Clark and Richardson looked at each other and asked the silent question: “That’s Rick pool, right?” The pair could not contain themselves, and they obtained an invitation to have a look around the house.
Facades along three blocks of Hollywood Boulevard were replaced to take L.A. back to the ’60s. The Larry Edmunds Bookshop, the Pussycat Theater and Peaches were all re-created.
2025 Insight Editions/Provided courtesy of Insight Editions & The Story Factory (2)
Quentin could see his final shot taking shape. Clark and Richardson wanted to get inside the neighbor’s property. Ling wanted to get inside, and you’d best believe that Quentin wanted to see what was behind those gates and up that drive.
“Look, it is as I often say,” Clark proclaims. “God is a Tarantino fan.”
As they were all thinking about the possibilities of the location, up drove a BMW into the cul-de-sac. Schuler’s years of location scouting told him that this dude was a player in their forthcoming story.
Pulling up alongside the minivan Schuler and Quentin sat in, the owner of the BMW rolled down his window, and Schuler did the same. Now, both participants in the drama could see into each other’s vehicles. BMW Dude, spotting Quentin, of course recognized one of the town’s favorite sons.
Schuler began his spiel: “I’m here with Quentin Tarantino, and I’m interested in your house. Can we talk about the new Quentin Tarantino movie?”
“Sure!”
The automatic gates opened. It was Hollywood — of course they did.
How author Jay Glennie earned Tarantino’s approval — and the exclusive right to tell the behind-the-scenes stories of all the director’s films.
Jay Glennie’s The Making of Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood
2025 Insight Editions/Provided courtesy of Insight Editions & The Story Factory
“I was saying to Q last night that these books are written for two people, me and him,” Jay Glennie says over Zoom from his home office in rural England, a cattle shed stacked floor-to-ceiling with movie history books. “My assumption being that if we both got a kick out of it, somebody else will as well.” Q in this instance refers to Quentin Tarantino, with whom Glennie has been toiling away for hundreds of hours on a new coffee table book on the making of 2019’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, from which the adjoining article is excerpted.
The final product, published by Insight Editions in the U.S. and Titan Books in the U.K., arrives everywhere books are sold on Oct. 28. The 500-page volume is brimming with costumes, props and set photos, new interviews with Tarantino and the cast — established A-listers like Leo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie, as well as future ones like Mikey Madison, Austin Butler and Sydney Sweeney — and behind-the-scenes anecdotes from the production team.
It’s all woven together with 170,000 words of accompanying text by Glennie, a humble cinephile who has gained an international reputation as the Cecil B. DeMille of “making of” movie books. It was one of those — 2019’s One Shot: The Making of The Deer Hunter — that drew the admiration of Tarantino. “Jay’s book brought back to me the way my dear departed friend Michael Cimino’s picture has — since the day of its release — held a significant place in my heart and memory and has been my barometer for artistic achievement inside the Hollywood studio system and memory,” the director writes in his intro to the new book.
“So we’ve got emails going, and we’re on a Zoom, a few bottles of wine consumed either end, and next thing you know, I’m booking a flight to Los Angeles,” Glennie recalls of his first conversation with the director. “Suddenly we’re doing 10 books together.”
The Making of Quentin Tarantino’sOnce Upon a Time in Hollywood features a “9” on its spine. Nine more books are planned, one for each of Tarantino’s films — including his still unannounced 10th and (allegedly) final project. The next installment, about the making of Inglourious Basterds, is already nearing completion, while the next three in the series are slated to be Django Unchained, Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. — SETH ABRAMOVITCH
This story appeared in the Sept. 18 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
Quentin Tarantino always seems to have something to say, and his latest comment making headlines is very unexpected.
The acclaimed director appeared on Club Random with Bill Maher when the topic of film trilogies was brought up. While not all film trilogies turn out great, Tarantino says he’s a massive fan of the first three Toy Story films. In fact, he says that Toy Story 3 is “one of the best movies I’ve ever seen.”
Tarantino loves Toy Story 3 so much that he hasn’t even bothered to see the fourth installment of the franchise, which was released in 2019. He supported his reasoning by saying, “You literally ended the story as perfect as you could, so, no, I don’t care if it’s good. I’m done. I am done. It can still be good, but I’m done!”
Oh boy…who’s going to tell Tarantino that Toy Story 5 — which sees our favorite friends trying to compete with screens and electronic items — is in the works and slated for release in 2026?
Regardless of Tarantino’s feelings about Toy Story 4 and 5, he’s smart enough not to mess with the likes of Disney/Pixar. Actors, however, is a different story.
Tarantino made headlines earlier this month thanks to George Clooney. Last year, Tarantino talked with Deadline about how studios don’t seem to invest in actors anymore to help them become “movie stars.” This then led to Tarantino talking about certain actors who he considers to be today’s “movie stars.” Among them are Margot Robbie, Bradley Cooper, Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Cruise, Denzel Washington and Harrison Ford.
Deadline‘s Baz Bamigboye then asked Tarantino whether he considers Clooney to be a movie star. Tarantino responded with, “Well, it’s been a long while since I think George Clooney has drawn anybody to an audience. When was the last time that he had a hit in this millennium?”
These comments were then brought up during a recent interview Clooney did with Brad Pitt for GQ. The topic of Tarantino was brought up in the scope of how both Clooney and Pitt seem to be go-to actors for certain directors. GQ‘s Zach Baron cites Clooney as being a go-to actor for the Coen brothers, while Pitt is a go-to for David Fincher and Tarantino.
This led to Clooney touching on how Tarantino “said some s— about me recently.” When Clooney mentions how Tarantino alleges he hasn’t had a hit movie this millennium, he says, “That’s kind of my whole f—ing career.”
Clooney concludes, “So now I’m like, all right, dude, f— off. I don’t mind giving him s—. He gave me s—.”
Erica Banas is a news blogger who’s been covering the rock/classic rock world since 2014. The coolest event she’s ever covered in person was the 2021 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony. (Sir Paul McCartney inducting Foo Fighters? C’mon now!) She’s also well-versed in etiquette and extraordinarily nice. #TransRightsAreHumanRights
Some might initially be led to believe that Sabrina Carpenter’s video for her third single from Short n’ Sweet, “Taste,” is Quentin Tarantino-oriented with its cautionary opening title card (in a Tarantino-y font), “Parental Advisory and Viewer Warning: The following video contains explicit content and depicts graphic violence which may be offensive to some viewers. Viewer discretion is advised.” But no, it becomes quickly apparent that the Dave Meyers-directed video is a full-on homage to 1992’s Death Becomes Her. And while many attempts at homage in music videos turn out to be mere shot-for-shot re-creations (see: Iggy Azalea and Charli XCX’s “Fancy” or Ariana Grande’s “thank u, next”), Carpenter chooses to riff on the Death Becomes Her concept rather than totally copy each scene.
Thus, the video begins with a close-up on a “girlie bed” contrasted by “masc” accoutrements like guns and knives, with Meyers sure to give an extra-long pause on the Prada lipstick (brand partnerships are so important, n’est-ce pas?). All the while, Carpenter creepily sings, “Rock-a-bye baby, snug in your bed/Right now you are sleeping/And soon you’ll be…dead.” Carpenter then wields one of the knives as a mirror while applying her lipstick, wanting to look her best before infiltrating her ex’s mansion with a machete. Trotting into the bedroom to find her ex and his new girlfriend sleeping (it reeks of the Betty Broderick narrative), Carpenter is unpleasantly surprised to find that the female body she starts to hack away at is filled with feathers instead of guts. Turns out, Ortega was waiting for her to show up and came prepared with a shotgun as her own weapon of choice.
It’s here that the Death Becomes Her reference becomes clear, with Ortega—the Madeline Ashton (Meryl Streep) to Carpenter’s Helen Sharp—shooting a hole right through Carpenter’s stomach and sending her flying right over the balcony. When Ortega looks over it to see the resulting carnage, it becomes obvious that they’ve deviated from the original Death Becomes Her scene in opting to have Carpenter also land on two stakes in the white-picket fence that “padded” her fall. Carpenter might be down, but she’s not out, ready for instant revenge by lobbing a knife right into Ortega’s eye and flipping her the bird afterward.
At the hospital where Carpenter manages to be outfitted with a pink “sexy” gown featuring white polka dots complemented by her thigh-high tights and heels, Ortega then comes for her revenge. And it’s here that the most obvious Tarantino tribute enters the fray, with Ortega dressed in the same nurse ensemble as Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah), complete with a white eyepatch that has a red cross detail on it. Defibrillating Carpenter into oblivion, Ortega has hardly seen the last of her as she reappears at her ex’s house that night, watching them from outside as they get all romantique by the fire.
Carpenter quickly puts a pin in those plans (voodoo doll pun intended) by pulling out a voodoo replica of Ortega and bending its body in the most cringeworthy ways. Laughing to herself as she bashes Ortega’s doll head against a bush, Carpenter is rudely interrupted by the sudden appearance of another doll Ortega happens to have—one that, quelle surprise, resembles Carpenter (mainly because it’s blonde). Thus, she tosses the doll into the fireplace, in turn, causing Carpenter’s body to burst into flames.
Things continue to escalate when, in the next scene, Carpenter attacks Ortega while she’s in the shower with this mid white guy (played by Rohan Campbell), who’s mostly just a trophy for these two women (much like Ernest Menville [Bruce Willis] in Death Becomes Her) as opposed to someone they actually seem to care about all that much. Conveniently, Ortega happens to be packing a scythe while in the shower, hacking away at Carpenter’s arm before chasing her back down the stairs and tackling/wrestling her.
Convinced she’s finally won this time, Ortega is shown blissfully kissing Mid White Guy as the lyrics, “Well, I heard you’re back together and if that’s true/You’ll just have to taste me when he’s kissin’ you/If you want forever, I bet you do/Just know you’ll taste me too,” play in the background. Thus, it’s only right to hit that point over the head by having Mid White Guy turn into Carpenter while Ortega is in the midst of making out with him—fulfilling many a wet dream (though nothing will ever compare to the iconicness of the Madonna-Britney (and yes, Xtina) “union” at the 2003 VMAs), to be sure.
While viewers might be titillated by the image, Ortega is anything but, whipping out a chainsaw to cut at Carpenter’s body anew, sending her backwards into the pool as she makes a bloody splash. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately), it turns out to be a witchy trick on Carpenter’s part, as she then suddenly appears behind Ortega to watch Mid White Guy’s body sink to the bottom of the pool. It only takes a few seconds for Ortega to look “not that mad” about it.
After all, this dude was so generic that all he can be referred to at the funeral is “Beloved Boyfriend.” And while the woman who must be his mother (hence, all the over-the-top sobbing) is noticeably upset about it, Ortega looks over at Carpenter with an almost grateful look in her eye as the two smile at one another and leave.
For the final scene, Ortega and Carpenter are shown walking down some steps together sipping from either coffee or smoothie drinks (maybe Erewhon’s Short n’ Sweet smoothie?) as they kiki about “Beloved Boyfriend,” with Carpenter noting, “I mean, clingy. Lots of trauma, lots of trauma.” “Very insecure,” Ortega chimes in. Carpenter laughs, “’Very insecure!’ You kill me.” While it might not have the exact ending of Death Becomes Her (with Madeline and Helen opting to remain bitter frenemies rather than close besties), it does conclude with both of them at their ex’s funeral. And what better way to forge a lasting friendship than that?
Over the past decade, Ryan Murphy has positioned himself as the “go-to” for all things campy/pop culture-oriented. More than that, all things “retro” pop culture-oriented. Hence, “vintage”-favoring shows from the “Murphy factory” that include Feud, Pose, Hollywood, Halston, American Crime Story, Dahmer and, lately, just about every season of American Horror Story. It’s the latter series, still arguably his most well-known, that has lately favored returning to the Decade of Excess. Namely, AHS: 1984 and AHS: NYC. And yes, a considerable amount of his work has included the dissection of the Hollywood machine, its mercilessness and its tendency toward sexism, racism, cultism and all the other bad isms. Case in point, AHS: Hotel, which also frequently sets its stage in an Old Hollywood setting and showcases Richard Ramirez as a character (as is also the case in AHS: 1984).
All of this is to say that Murphy has been infiltrating, for some time, the same themes and time period that Ti West’s Maxxxine—the third film in a trilogy that rounds out X and Pearl—explores through the same horror/slasher-tinged lens. Except that Maxxxine achieves what Murphy only wishes he could do. Never quite “landing the plane,” so to speak, on most of his projects. The ideas are there, sure, but not the artful, satisfying execution required to make them as great as they could be. And, speaking of landing planes, as we join Maxine Minx (Mia Goth), formerly Maxine Miller, in “Tinseltown, California” six years after the bloodbath (or Texas Pornsaw Massacre) that ensued while she was just trying to make a skin flick in the middle of nowhere, we see that she’s got herself a little job at a titty bar near the L.A. airport called The Landing Strip. Only Maxine isn’t working the pole so much as going into a back area for “Flight Crew Only,” where all the pornos are filmed.
This is where she goes after auditioning for her first “proper” movie, a horror sequel called The Puritan II. An audition she knows she nailed, and told all the girls waiting outside in the casting line as much, too. That they all might as well go home. Of course, that’s the thing about Hollywood: every aspiring actress is hungry, hot and convinced they’re better than all the other girls she’s competing with. But Maxine is “different,” as they say. Special. That once-in-a-blue-moon kind of actress with “it” factor (or “X” factor, in this scenario). A star. Indeed, the word “star” and what it means in Hollywood is immediately addressed at the beginning of Maxxxine with a title card touting the Bette Davis quote, “In this business, until you’re known as a monster, you’re not a star.”
Maxine is already a monster waiting to sacrifice herself to the Hollywood beast, it’s just that most people don’t know what she’s been willing to do in the past in order to quite literally make it. Not even her best friend and the only guy in town not trying to fuck her (as he says), Leon (Moses Sumney). To be sure, apart from her agent, Teddy Knight, “Esq.” (Giancarlo Esposito), there are few other people in Hollywood that Maxine can count on (and maybe it says something that only two men she trusts aren’t white). Sure, she has “coworkers,” like Amber James (Chloe Farnworth) and Tabby Martin (Halsey, who isn’t exactly “L.A. enough” for this movie), that she occasionally commiserates with, but, by and large, Maxine is out there on her own. And with the specter of Richard Ramirez (night)stalking the plot (just as Murphy would have it). For it’s 1985, the height of his murderous rampage, and news reports urging L.A. residents to stay vigilant and avoid going out late at night are constant.
Maxine doesn’t seem to mind though, convinced she’s already dealt with a psychotic killer once before, so what’s another to her? When she tells Tabby she can “handle herself” walking home, Tabby ripostes, “Said every dead girl in Hollywood.” Tabby is also the one to point out that she supposed Elizabeth Short a.k.a. the Black Dahlia never would have become famous if she hadn’t been killed, so maybe it isn’t such a bad thing. You know, for publicity.
That Ramirez’s crimes were fueled by his dogged belief that he was Satan’s “foot soldier,” put on this Earth to carry out vicious and brutal murders in the name of the Dark Lord only adds to the near-boiling-point sense of moral panic that was simmering in America in the eighties. As West himself remarked, he wanted to “embrace the darker side of eighties movies. A lot of people think of eighties movies and think of John Hughes or they think of leg warmers and big hairdos and things like that, but that’s not all the eighties was. And so, to set a story in Hollywood, I really wanted to embrace the absurdity that is Hollywood and contrast that there’s this incredibly glamorous place…but then there’s a sleazy, darker underbelly. And 1985 in particular was a very unique year because there was a lot of moral outcry in the States about the type of movies that were being made, the type of music that was being made, and also in the summer of 1985, there was a serial killer, a satanic serial killer, in Los Angeles that they couldn’t catch, and the way that they were trying to advertise and trying to get people to help find him was by putting him in the news and newspaper, so hopefully that, by sort of making him famous, people would help find him.”
Undeniably, notoriety-based fame was becoming more and more of a “thing” in the latter part of the twentieth century, as not-so-talented people still wanted to secure what Andy Warhol dubbed their fifteen minutes of fame. So why not get it through more nefarious means? At the beginning of the movie, West wields archival footage of the day, ranging from Ronald Reagan saying that America’s glory years aren’t behind it to Twisted Sister’s Dee Snider giving a speech at a Senate hearing about labeling “offensive” music with what would eventually become the Parental Advisory sticker. In another clip, a mother complains about buying her daughter the Purple Rain album, only to realize too late that something as explicit as “Darling Nikki” was on it. The overarching motif? Parents of the eighties were appalled by a world increasingly unconcerned with not only desensitizing their children, but making them grow up far too fast. Sexualizing them far too fast.
In a decade like the 1950s, many believed it was “easier” to protect their children from the dangers of falling prey to “Satan” and “sin.” And, sure, maybe it was in terms of “salacious” content being far less dense at a time when TV and “rock n’ roll” music were still in germinal, analog stages for dissemination. But that didn’t mean those children who wanted to “seek out” trouble couldn’t still find it anyway. Like Maxine herself, who, despite being a preacher’s daughter, found her way toward “transgression” in spite of all her father’s indoctrination. And yes, Ernest Miller (Simon Prast) is once again featured prominently via a home movie from 1959 at the beginning of Maxxxine. A clip that smacks of Bette Davis as Baby Jane interacting with her own father in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? It is in this early “movie” of Maxine that she first gloms onto the mantra, “I will not accept a life I do not deserve.” Imparted to her by Ernest, the fire-and-brimstone televangelist (a so-called profession that would ramp up in the eighties).
Ernest’s specter is as prominent as Ramirez’s, which is to be expected considering X ended with him proselytizing about his daughter’s wayward existence. How she was taken from his “loving home into the hands of devils.” In 1979, those devils might have been pornographers, but, in 1985, it’s Hollywood in general, itself no longer abashed about being the biggest pornographer in the game, selling sex onscreen in order to compete with all the other media and mediums that had come about since its Golden Age. And right there in the center of it all on Hollywood Boulevard is Maxine Minx herself. For, in addition to working at The Landing Strip, she also works nights at a peep show called Hollywood Show World. A woman willing to do “whatever it takes.” But her interests are increasingly focused on the “prize” of “real” stardom. Which is why she’s over the moon when the director of The Puritan II, Elizabeth Bender (Elizabeth Debicki), casts her as the lead.
Bender (whose last name could very well be a nod to John Bender [Judd Nelson] in The Breakfast Club) knows she’s taking a big gamble on Maxine, and that, as she tells her, “Hollywood is prejudiced against artists.” The machine, instead, prefers to keep churning out the things they know are safe, and will keep audiences from being outraged. And, in 1985, audiences are outraged amid the moral panic that’s sweeping the nation. So outraged that they’re willing to show up outside the studio and picket against its “filthy” content. Including fare like The Puritan II. That everyone is well-aware of Maxine’s porn background only adds fuel to the fire. Nonetheless, Elizabeth can sense both a hunger and a star quality in Maxine that she’s willing to stick her neck out for—even though it could mean that neck being positioned on the chopping block if Maxine fucks up.
Unfortunately for both women, this is the exact moment when Maxine’s grisly night in Texas comes back to haunt her, with a private investigator going by the assumed name of John Labat (Kevin Bacon) threatening Maxine and her big break with a duplicated tape of the porno she made while staying in the guesthouse at Howard (Stephen Ure) and Pearl’s sequestered farm. But more than that, Labat knows how to pin the crime she committed on her. This, obviously, takes her mind off what it needs to be on, which is becoming the character in The Puritan II, a horror flick that takes place in the 1950s. Because, in true Ti West meta fashion, Elizabeth tells Maxine that she wants to really say something with this movie, that though the fifties seemed like this idyllic, picturesque time in America, the truth was that it was just as seedy as people think it is now.
This echoes West’s sentiments about people in the present still romanticizing the eighties as a better, more “innocent” time despite all the unseemly behavior going on just beneath the surface. Which is exactly why West brought up the ultimately wholesome nature of John Hughes movies as a major emblem of the decade, belying the fact that this was a time of horrific serial killings, the advent of AIDS, systemic discrimination as buttressed by the Reagan administration and the next wave of political scandals mired in sex/infidelity-related shaming (see: Gary Hart and Donna Rice). To this end, although not a Hughes movie, St. Elmo’s Fire has a constant running appearance in Maxxxine, always displayed on the movie theater marquee near Miss Minx’s apartment. And then, of course, the John Parr theme, “St. Elmo’s Fire (Man In Motion),” plays on the radio as Maxine drives the streets of L.A. Funnily enough, that would also be the summer that David Blum branded this group of young actors frequently known for appearing together and/or in John Hughes movies as the “Brat Pack.”
With West creating a parallel, in many ways, between the 1950s and the 1980s, it bears noting that, when the fifties came to a close, it was as though that thinly-maintained veneer of “politesse” started to crumble in the next new decade. This couldn’t have been better exemplified than in the release of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho in September of 1960, the same year a “heathen Democrat” like JFK was elected president. In contrast, the eighties commenced with one of the most conservative presidents since Eisenhower. Elizabeth reminds Maxine that there was moral outrage in those Eisenhower years, too. The kind of outrage that transferred easily onto Psycho, an unheard of kind of film in that era. Elizabeth adds that Hitchcock was of course vindicated and further hailed as an artistic genius once the shock and furor surrounding the movie died down. As a result, the film “set a new level of acceptability for violence, deviant behavior and sexuality in American films, and has been considered to be one of the earliest examples of the slasher film genre.” With Janet Leigh paving the way for an actress like Jamie Lee Curtis to parlay her own career into a “respectable” one after starring in 1978’s Halloween. And yes, as soon as Maxine gets the part, she goes to the video store where Leon works to ask him to name five movie stars who got their start in horror. He rattles off Jamie Lee Curtis, John Travolta, Demi Moore and Brooke Shields before Maxine interjects, “Maxine Fucking Minx.” Marilyn Chambers is mentioned in this exchange, too, and 1985 was a big year for her in terms of getting arrested (in San Francisco and Cleveland, respectively) for “promoting prostitution” and “performing lewd acts” in a public place.
In any case, it’s Maxine’s way of telling Leon she’s on her way to the top, that everything is finally falling into place. Save for this unpleasant little “Nightstalker” of her own. And not just the Buster Keaton lookalike (played by Zachary Mooren) from Hollywood Boulevard whose junk she ends up crushing with her boot when he tries to attack her with a knife in an alleyway (this and many other elements reminding viewers of the Quentin Tarantino style—with Once Upon A Time in Hollywood being the most obvious of his films to compare Maxxxine to). No, there’s some other sinister force at work trying to hold her dreams back because that force itself finds her to be the sinister one. The “sinful,” “godless,” “amoral” monster further contributing to Hollywood’s grotesque power. Its chokehold over so many other “young girls” (though, in Hollywood, young tends to be the age of twenty and under) willing to do anything to get a place in the spotlight.
Just six years ago, Maxine was still that girl, telling Wayne (Martin Henderson), her “producer” boyfriend who orchestrated their film shoot, “I want the whole world to know my name. Like Lynda Carter or some shit.” And yes, Wonder Woman (or rather, someone dressed as her) does make a cameo on Hollywood Boulevard in Maxxxine. With such callbacks to the other movies in the X universe also being notable—for example, when, standing on Theda Bera’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Maxine puts her cigarette out on it. This, of course, is a nod to the alligator in Pearl being named Theda, for Pearl lived her own youth during the heyday of the silent movie star’s reign. What’s more, her subtle presence in the film is of importance because she was considered an scandalous sex symbol of the then-new medium called film. Other connections to non-X trilogy movies go back to John Hughes yet again, with a scene toward the finale of Maxxxine opting to soundtrack her red carpet arrival with New Order’s “Shellshock,” which also features prominently in the Hughes-penned Pretty in Pink as Duckie (Jon Cryer) rides his bike obsessively near Andie’s (Molly Ringwald) house and follows her to Iona’s (Annie Potts) apartment in Chinatown.
“Knowing” references such as these are also in keeping with the Ryan Murphy style, but something about the way West employs it doesn’t feel quite as self-congratulatory (perhaps a euphemism for masturbatory). Case in point, the Judy Garland allusions not just in the coroner (Toby Huss) “quipping” to Detective Torres (Bobby Cannavale) that “two homos cruising each other near Judy Garland’s grave” found the latest pair of bodies with pentagrams engraved on them (sometimes a signature of Ramirez), but also in the costuming Maxine wears at the end of the movie as her character in The Puritan II. Although Elizabeth gushes that she looks like a “Hitchcock blonde,” her dress is decidedly Dorothy Gale-coded. She’s finally made it to Oz and she “never wants it to end.” Not like movies themselves do.
And even if “the wizard” might turn out to be disappointing, Maxine can handle the skin-deep nature of things that only seem real in Hollywood. Like the Psycho house itself, a set she runs to when trying to escape the clutches of the persistent Labat. When she opens the front door to keep running, there is nothing actually there—nothing actually inside (save for her hallucination of the elderly version of Pearl). All there really is to it is the façade. This also being something Elizabeth comments on to Maxine when taking her for a little ride/pep talk in one of those studio golf carts for the first time: how Hollywood can make something appear so real that the illusion is almost the exact same as the real thing. Begging the question: who cares what’s real, anyway? Not when it’s about how the images and illusions make a person feel.
At the beginning of X, Wayne said to everyone in the car, “No ma’am, we don’t need Hollywood. These types of pictures turn regular folks into stars. We’re gonna do it all ourselves.” To a certain extent, that’s what Maxine has been doing all along—everything herself, whatever it takes. But in the end, she still needs the approval of the Hollywood Establishment in order for her hard work to be recognized in a mainstream setting. Through all The Neon Demon-esque debauchery/macabre competition, and the onslaught of faux moral outrage, she proves what Pearl never could: “I’m a star!” (Or, as Maxine says in the mirror, “You’re a fuckin’ movie star!”) And, as an added cherry on top, she even gets to see Lily “Emily in Paris” Collin’s chopped-up body roll down a staircase.
So, to quote the Maxine of X after she finally offs Pearl and then snorts some cocaine in celebration: “Praise the fuckin’ Lord.” Jesus was on her side rather than that of the moralists, after all. And yes, Maxine Minx definitely needs to play Mary Magdalene at some point in her career. No, make it the dual role of Mary Magdalene and the Virgin Mary à la Goth playing Maxine and Pearl.
Nestled on a quiet street a stone’s throw away from the bustle of Paris’ fifth arrondissement, La Clef cinema, one of the city’s most enduring rep houses, has been saved from closure following a five-year battle involving lawyers, developers, and government officials.
Cinéma Revival, the activist group behind the campaign to save the venue, has purchased the cinema building, which had been put on the market by its previous owner, Caisse d’Epargne banking group. The group bought the building with €2 million raised through an online fundraising campaign. €400,000 was raised from 5000 individual donations with contributors including filmmakers and actors such as David Lynch, Wang Bing, Leos Carax, Céline Sciamma, Sophie Fillières, Agnès Jaoui, and Irène Jacob.
The remaining cash was raised through a series of what the group described to us as “major” cash donations from Pulp Fiction filmmaker Quentin Tarantino and two other anonymous patrons who have asked to remain anonymous. The group plans to reopen the cinema for four days from June 27 to 30 before closing for one year to renovate the decades-old building. A bar will be installed onsite alongside three film post-production rooms, which will be run for profit to support the cinema operations. The Cinéma Revival fund will employ two full-time staffers to run the public-facing for-hire business while all cinema programming will continue to be conducted by volunteers.
“The cinema remains community-run, relying on volunteers with complete political, cultural, and economic autonomy, the group told us this week during a video interview conducted onsite at the cinema, which is currently undergoing minor renovations.
“The fund owns the building but it has no say in how the cinema is run. We have created a structure that has no shareholders, so the people who gave us money have no say in how the cinema is run. That’s how we preserve the independence of the cinema.”
Tarantino’s donation was the result of an impromptu meeting with two members of the La Clef collective at the Cannes Film Festival in 2023. The Jackie Brown filmmaker had been in town to promote his book Cinema Speculation and host a screening of John Flynn’s Rolling Thunder.
“He was really interested in the project and then sent us a mysterious email saying ‘How much do you need to get the cinema?’,” the group told us.
“The subject of the email was: ‘This is Quentin Tarantino.’ And then at the end, it said, ‘sent from my iPad.’ He asked how much we needed and then covered it all. That allowed us to complete the financing.”
Tarantino has been a long-standing public supporter of physical cinema spaces. The filmmaker owns two cinemas in Los Angeles. He bought the embattled New Beverly Cinema in 2014 and the Vista Theatre on Sunset Boulevard in 2021.
The first screening back at La Clef on June 27 will be Agnes Varda’s Cleo from 5 to 7. The seminal New Wave classic had been the film scheduled to screen in 2018 when bailiffs first entered the cinema to shut down operations. The screening will be presented by Agnes’ daughter, Rosalie Varda. The group told us future programming will prioritize progressive and militant world cinemas.
Billed as one of the French capital’s sole surviving community cinemas, La Clef is at the heart of Paris’s Left Bank fifth arrondissement, once associated with student activism and intellectual and political ferment. When the La Clef building was officially closed in 2019, a collective of moviegoers, film professionals, academics, artists, and local residents began an occupation of the building, hosting continuous daily screenings and talks in the cinema with guests including Leos Carax, Frederick Wiseman, Céline Sciamma, and Adèle Haenel. The building’s owner sued and the activists were hit with a 350 euros daily fine, which was later repealed by a local court. Legendary Killers Of The Flower Moon filmmaker Martin Scorsese even penned an open letter in support of the movement.
The La Clef collective has launched a separate fundraising round to aid with the building renovations. They need €300,000 to complete the work. But with the cinema’s immediate future somewhat cemented, the group is looking to spread their momentum across the city.
“Many cinemas in Paris are closing or are at risk of closing, so it’s still an ongoing fight. But I hope other collectives will use that example and use our example of a victorious struggle to find their own way to defend places that are under threat,” they told us.
“Given that we’ve made it I’m quite confident that this will be a space to invent new ways of programming, making, and discussing films.”
Maya Hawke has addressed the “nepo baby” phenomenon head on, saying the reason she was cast in a big film role was totally for “nepotistic reasons.”
Hawke, the daughter of Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke, was cast by Quentin Tarantino in his 2019 movie Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood. Hawke played Flower Child, one of Charles Manson’s followers, and at the time gave an interview saying she auditioned for the role.
She added that Tarantino deliberately added her to the cast, which also included Margaret Qualley (Andie MacDowell’s daughter) and Rumer Willis (daughter of Demi Moore and Bruce Willis), and that he was making an effort to “cast a lot of young Hollywood.”
Asked whether she thought famous off-spring deserved these kinds of leg-up opportunities, Hawke said:
“‘Deserves’ is a complicated word. There are so many people who deserve to have this kind of life who don’t, but I think I’m comfortable with not deserving it and doing it anyway. And I know that my not doing it wouldn’t help anyone. I saw two paths when I was first starting, and one of them was: change your name, get a nose job and go to open casting roles.
“It’s OK to be made fun of when you’re in rarefied air. It’s a lucky place to be. My relationships with my parents are really honest and positive, and that supersedes anything anyone can say about it.”
Hawke has recently worked with both of her parents on screen. She played opposite Thurman in The Kill Room, and starred in Wildcat, a biopic about writer Flannery O’Connor, directed by Ethan Hawke.
As far as movies that acknowledge the importance of stuntmen (because no one thinks of this as a profession for stuntwomen, clearly), the only one of mainstream note—up until now—has been Death Proof (unfortunately for Drew Barrymore, The Stand In doesn’t qualify). The Quentin Tarantino-directed film that was part of 2007’s Grindhouse double feature (which commenced with Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror), wherein Kurt Russell plays the part of Stuntman Mike (and there is actually some play for a stuntwoman in the form of Zoë Bell). Like David Leitch’s The Fall Guy, Death Proof delights in its cleverness and meta-ness, but in a way that isn’t, shall we say, quite as fun. Though Tarantino surely thought that “sweet revenge” ending was all the fun any audience could want. But screenwriter Drew Pearce seems to be aware that they want something more than “Tarantino cleverness”—they want some fucking Ryan Gosling “hey girl”-style romance peppered in. With a dash of Tom Cruise roasting thrown into the mix, too. And that’s exactly what they get.
Starting from the beginning, Gosling as Colt Seavers delivers on both ingredients, with one of the first scenes consisting of Colt being told that Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, making better movies than his wife at the moment), “the biggest action star on the planet,” wants to speak with him. The name alone is already a dead giveaway that this is a major troll on Cruise, who has often boasted about doing his own stunts. This includes declaring one of the bigger stunts in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning (namely, driving a motorcycle off a roughly four-thousand-foot high structure) to be “far and away the most dangerous thing I’ve ever attempted.”
Cruise’s long-running insistence that he does all his own stunts was parodied as far back as the 2000 MTV Movie Awards, during which a segment centered on Cruise’s supposedly nonexistent stunt double was featured, with Ben Stiller playing “Tom Crooze,” the stuntman in question. Presented as a behind-the-scenes documentary, even John Woo appears in it to say, “Tom Cruise does most of his own stunts. So he doesn’t really need a stunt double. But we make good use of the other Tom Cruise.” Meanwhile, The Fall Guy makes good use of both Tom Cruise (jokes) and the actor that’s clearly based on him and his ego: Tom Ryder. What’s more, seeing as how Pearce is credited as coming up with the story for Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (the fifth installment in the film series), the amount of Tom Cruise-related wisecracks feels particularly pointed. Almost like Pearce is putting him in his place for having such arrogance. To that point, we see what happens to Colt as a result of his own so-called hubris (that is, in Tom Ryder’s estimation, who never, never wants to be overshadowed—least of all by his stunt double).
Although Gosling has previously starred in movies heavy with action (including Drive), this is his first proper “Hollywood action movie” (even if action-comedy). One that, incidentally, pokes fun at the Hollywood action movie (complete with an over-bloated third act). And yes, it’s surprising that it took Gosling this long to become an action hero (in lieu of his usual anti-hero) considering this was the boy compelled to bring steak knives to school and throw them at classmates thanks to inspiration from First Blood. The sense of homage in general to action movies past is a constant presence in The Fall Guy as well, whether including scenes of famous stunts from classic movies, mentioning that stunt work doesn’t qualify for having an Oscar category despite being the backbone of most major films or simply quoting action movies in general. This last form of reverence for the stuntman being an ongoing bit between Colt and his friend/stunt coordinator, Dan Tucker (Winston Duke).
Indeed, the first thing Dan quotes to Colt is Rambo—specifically, “It’s not about how hard you hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward.” This is meant to serve as motivation for conquering his fear of getting back in the proverbial saddle for “stunting.” For, by this point in the movie, the audience has been flashed with the title card “18 Months Later.” As in: eighteen months after Colt embodied the literal meaning of being a fall guy by plummeting from a twelve-story building and botching the stunt by landing right on his back. Moments after the fall, viewers see him being rushed to the hospital on a gurney as he gives the crew his customary “stuntman’s thumbs up” to indicate he’s fine.
But, of course, he’s not fine at all. No longer a stuntman, but an emotionally stunted man who has lost all sense of identity in the wake of realizing, in a very humiliating way, that he’s not invincible at all. The shame of the incident prompts him to cut off all communication with everyone he knew from that part of his life, even Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt, coming for Emma Stone in terms of onscreen chemistry with Gosling). The camera operator with directorial ambitions who became as sweet on Colt as he is on her over the course of working on many film productions together.
Having descended into the depths of “normalcy” after hanging up his kneepads, Colt has become a valet at a restaurant called El Cacatúa del Capitán (and yes, later a cockatoo will figure into the plot, along with an attack dog named Jean-Claude who only responds to commands given to him in French). It is Tom Ryder’s go-to producer, Gail Meyer (Hannah Waddingham), that manages to track Colt down and call his new phone number to lure him to the set of a movie Ryder is currently working on called Metalstorm (something that looks a lot like a sendup of Dune, and even Edge of Tomorrow…an action-alien movie that Emily Blunt co-starred in with, you guessed it, Tom Cruise).
The project is already (down) underway in, where else, Sydney (a place that must be offering a lot of tax breaks lately if we’re to go by the recent rash of films shot there, such as The Invisible Man, Thor: Love and Thunder and Anyone But You). Although Colt is initially quick to rebuff Gail’s request to come and assist her with keeping Tom in line, he can’t help but respond positively to the dangled carrot (or “sexy bacon,” in this case) of her insistence that Jody, who has been hired as the director, expressly asked for him to be the stuntman.
Seeing an opportunity to right the wrong he did by ghosting her, Colt hops on the next plane, greeted promptly by facial scans from the set’s resident “effects person,” Venti Kushner (Zara Michales). When Colt asks why there’s suddenly all these bells and whistles, Venti informs him that they’re taking the scans so they can seamlessly computer-generate Tom’s face onto Colt’s face for any stunt scenes. Colt replies, “Like a deepfake situation? If you get a chance, turn me into Tom Cruise.” Oh my, Leitch and Pearce are really overestimating Cruise’s sense of humor about this sort of thing. An actor whose ego has steadily ballooned since he started out in the 80s, the decade when the TV series, The Fall Guy, originally aired. Because, yes, of course, it’s a movie based on a TV show (as LL Cool J once meta-ly complained at the beginning of Charlie’s Angels upon seeing the opening credits for T. J. Hooker: The Movie, “Another movie from an old TV show”).
This is something that Leitch and Pearce give a nod to via a post-credits scene focused on two cops played by Lee Majors and Heather Thomas (a.k.a. the stars of The Fall Guy). In the series, Lee Majors’ Colt is also a bounty hunter on the side (which is where that element comes into play for the movie) and Thomas’ Jody is a fellow stuntwoman whose last name is the more anglicized Banks instead of Moreno (and no, there is nothing about Blunt that makes her look like a Moreno).
As for being “upgraded” to director in the movie version, Jody is also given the chance to shine as a singer, with a lengthy karaoke scene providing her with the occasion to belt out Phil Collins’ “Against All Odds” (granted, Mariah Carey delivers a possibly superior cover on Rainbow). Blunt kept right on singing for her cameo in Gosling’s monologue on SNL, during which the two duetted a parody version of Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well” (a song that features prominently in the movie). In their version of the song, they explore letting go of the characters that made them part of two of the biggest blockbusters of Summer 2023, Barbie and Oppenheimer (so yes, Barbenheimer did manage to reanimate in 2024 by way of Blunt and Gosling working together).
In something of a missed opportunity, SNL didn’t opt to include a sketch of Gosling as a stuntman. But that’s fine, one supposes, for Gosling is no stranger to playing a serious stunt performer instead, having also done so in Drive and The Place Beyond the Pines (the set where he and Eva Mendes would translate their onscreen romance into an offscreen one). What’s more, it probably would have been too much for Gosling to play Tom Cruise in one of the sketches (for whatever reason, choosing to play Beavis was more important). Because even in the promo interviews for The Fall Guy, Gosling and Blunt still find time to rib Cruise. Case in point, when Gosling admits to IMDb, “I have a fear of heights,” Blunt replies, “Who doesn’t? Who doesn’t have a fear of heights?” “Tom Cruise,” Gosling says without missing a beat. But, for the most part, the duo keeps the focus of their interviews on having a deep respect and appreciation for what stunt people do. “It’s a love letter to the stunt community,” Gosling reiterates in an interview for MTV. Blunt adds, “They risk their souls, their bodies, their lives for us to make us look cool.” Gosling then concludes, “They risk more than anyone… You can’t separate the history of film [from] the history of stunts.”
History that continues to be made with The Fall Guy, which just secured an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records for showcasing the most cannon rolls (eight and a half) ever performed in a film (executed by stunt driver Logan Holladay). It also happens to be the kind of laugh-a-minute film not seen since The Lost City(a movie that Argylleattempted to heavily emulate with less success). And that’s hard for someone like Tarantino, the only other person with as much well-documented “love” for stuntmen, to compete with, even when he also paid homage to the stunt community in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood via Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt). A character who, in addition to Stuntman Mike, doesn’t exactly make for the best representation of the “average” stuntman.
Funnily enough, Leitch would also enlist Pitt for the lead in Bullet Train, a far less intelligent (read: not intelligent at all) action movie than what the director has on offer here. Thus, whatever “bad mojo” he was suffering from in 2022 (*cough cough* a bad script), he seems to have recovered from it as nicely as Colt Seavers after his massive, back-breaking fall…with more than just a little help from Pearce and a leading man as charismatic as Gosling and his “tousled just so” coif.
Before his solemn turn in The Revenant, DiCaprio had been on a run of playing doomed titans. In 2013, he starred in both The Great Gatsby and The Wolf of Wall Street, respectively playing literary icon Jay Gatsby and disgraced stockbroker Jordan Belfort. Gatsby and Belfort are, if nothing else, smooth operators, and DiCaprio tackles them with a twinkle in his eye. While Gatsby is mysterious and Belfort is a little stinker, DiCaprio leans hard into their charm. Both characters throw the sickest parties ever and lord over them like bacchanalian gods.
The biggest criticism of The Wolf of Wall Street was that Scorsese and DiCaprio weren’t hard enough on Belfort, that an uncritical eye could still read him, despite it all, as a Dude Who Rocks. Both Gatsby and Belfort obtain their wealth and status through nefarious means, but they’re also cool. And this is a mode in which DiCaprio is extremely comfortable. It’s one he deploys in Catch Me If You Can, way back in 2002—the first post-Titanic movie to really test what he could do. There he plays con artist Frank Abagnale Jr., who uses his boyish good looks and gift for sweet-talk to cash forged checks and pose as a doctor or an airline pilot.
Time and time again, DiCaprio has played guys who experience monumental highs and even greater lows. The lows were what made the work dramatically stirring, but having been one of the most-desired celebrities who ever lived, he could also channel the feeling of having the world at your feet, only to lose it all. As Howard Hughes in 2004’s The Aviator, his second collaboration with Scorsese, he starts out palling around with movie stars and ends up an emaciated recluse peeing into jars in his screening room. Frank is finally caught, the feds catch up to Belfort, and Gatsby is shot by his pool. And yet at certain points in all of these films, these guys are living out some sort of dream.
Ernest Burkhart in Killers of the Flower Moon never does that. From the outset, it’s clear he’s pretty dumb, and people around him treat him as such. In the very first scene they share, Ernest’s uncle, William Hale (Robert De Niro), repeats questions to emphasize how slow on the uptake Ernest is. This is a grim movie about the systematic genocide of the Osage people, but there’s a pitch-black humor to the way Hale and his lackeys berate Ernest throughout the film. The character has all the greed and ambition of a Gatsby or a Belfort, but none of the savvy, and DiCaprio, with his mouth near-permanently downturned, leans into Ernest’s confusion and his worthlessness. He plays the fool extremely well, and it’s to the movie’s benefit—for this story to work, you have to believe that Ernest is dim enough to convince himself he still loves his wife Mollie (Lily Gladstone) even as he orchestrates the murder of her family members. In turn, Mollie seems to love him because of his naivete.
Ernest and Rick feel like echoes of one another. They’re both trying to emulate others they perceive as successes; they’re both their own worst enemies. (In between these movies, DiCaprio played an astronomer in Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up, channeling his earnest passion for the environment into a self-deprecating performance as a nerd who everyone ignores.) In both parts, you can see DiCaprio wrestling with the limits of being Leonardo DiCaprio. For years, no matter how hard he tried to subvert it in his work, DiCaprio was defined by his beauty—as tragic as they are, Gatsby and Belfort are still desirable. Now, at 48– past the point where he can play with a Super Soaker in public without looking goofy—he’s embracing the character actor he’s clearly always longed to be, exploring what it feels like to get older and feel unwanted, allowing himself to be a punching bag, fully debasing himself and his image to the needs of the film he’s in. It’s utterly captivating.
Welcome toAlways Great, a new Awards Insider column in which we speak with Hollywood’s greatest undersung actors in career-spanning conversations. In this entry, Walton Goggins talks about his memorable roles on TV favorites like The Shield, Justified, and George & Tammy—as well as everything in between.
When Walton Goggins first auditioned for Quentin Tarantino a little over a decade ago, he was asked to pick between a few Django Unchained characters. He chose one; he performed it well. Then Tarantino started wrapping things up, but Goggins said he wasn’t leaving—he told the iconic director that he was going to read every role on those script pages. “I said, ‘Man, I don’t even care if I get this job, I don’t care if I get to work with you—I’m here with you now, and I’m getting to say your words. I’m going to say as many words as I possibly can,’” Goggins says. “He could have easily said, ‘All right, dude, you’ve got to get out of here.’ But I stayed in there for another 45 minutes reading [maybe] 10 scenes. He not only let me do it—he celebrated it, and he read every other role in the scene with me.”
Goggins ultimately secured the small, memorable part of the malevolent Billy Crash in the Oscar-winning epic, a collaboration that’d lead to a meatier role in Tarantino’s next film, The Hateful Eight. The auditioning experience also speaks to Goggins’s unique tenacity as a performer—willing to go big, to try anything and give himself a real shot. Fame never really interested him; the idea of building a career had barely taken shape by the time he moved to LA from the South in the early ’90s to make a go at acting professionally. “I genuinely just wanted to understand what it was I was trying to ask myself to do—I was ready for a big life adventure,” he says—speaking to the memory of deciding to make a life out of performance. But the sentiment extends decades later to that moment standing opposite Tarantino too.
Like any young unknown, Goggins came up against typecasting and limited opportunities in his early years. In his wild, Emmy-nominated ride—through beloved TV series like Justified and The Shield; gonzo comic detours in Vice Principals and The Righteous Gemstones; and now, shifts between rich smaller parts in major projects (George & Tammy) and true lead roles (the upcoming Fallout)—he’s proven that sometimes, it takes very nicely not taking no for an answer to prove just how far you can go.
Born in Alabama and raised in Georgia, Goggins left college at 19 and drove across the country with his father to start his new life. The trip took 10 days, and by the time he’d reached the outskirts of Los Angeles County, he felt overwhelmed by the world he was walking into. “Storytelling and acting was always my passion, but I didn’t even want to be good at it—I just really wanted to understand it,” he says. He scraped together guest-acting gigs, and worked however he could to break through. One piece of advice, shared with him on a set, stuck most firmly: “You see this camera? This camera is your friend. It’s not something to be intimidated by…. There’s no magic to it.”
It’s not hard to see how that resonated with him—if nothing else, Goggins is never an actor who seems intimidated by the demands of the day. He goes there, catching everything with his eyes and never reacting like you’d expect. At 24 years old, he nabbed a colorful small part in the Robert Duvall vehicle The Apostle, as a deeply lonely young man who gets saved by a preacher. It’s a bold performance that announces a fresh talent. “I had people whispering in my ear, ‘This is your shot, man; you’re going to be something; you’re going to work,’” Goggins says. “Then I remember getting so fucking caught up in my own insecurity, and I was asking this producer, ‘I need to get a publicist? How do I capitalize on this? What do I do? Oh, my God, it’s going to be my one shot and it’s going to be over.’” The producer replied calmly that getting a spotlight in an Oscar-nominated Duvall movie was the win for Goggins—and that if he didn’t carry that over into whatever came next, a lot of heartache and disappointment awaited.
Good advice, since for many years, Goggins played more parts like this—standing out in substantial projects without necessarily being the face of the thing. In many of these situations, Goggins was cast as racists. “If you’re Italian from New York, you’re going to play a mobster; if you’re white from the South, you’re going to play a redneck,” Goggins says. “You have to work your way outside of that box, but at least you have a sandbox to actually play in.” When he was cast in FX’s acclaimed police drama The Shield as racist cop Shane Vendrell, he really got that room. Airing at the dawn of prestige serialized TV, it provided the unexpected—for basic cable, unprecedented, really—opportunity to chart a narrative arc over 80-plus episodes. Goggins played modes ranging from monstrous to devoted to tragic. “That defining moment is when you show up and you’re not auditioning for Redneck Number Two or Redneck Number Three,” he says. The moment had come.
If you really go digging into Quentin Tarantino’s career, you’ll find tons of ideas that never made it to the big screen. One of those is a James Bond movie.
When Tarantino was arguably at the height of his hype, right after Pulp Fiction, he had big plans for his next movie. He contacted Ian Fleming’s estate about acquiring the rights to adapt one of Fleming’s novels for film. Unfortunately, it seems they misled him or didn’t quite understand the implications of a deal they had made just a few years earlier.
We reached out to the Ian Fleming people, and they had suggested that they still own the rights to Casino Royale. And that’s what I wanted to do after Pulp Fiction was do my version of Casino Royale, and it would’ve taken place in the ’60s and wasn’t about a series of Bond movies. We would have cast an actor and be one and done. So I thought we could do this.
That’s what he thought. But it was not to be. According to Tarantino, the Broccolis, the family that has controlled the James Bond film franchise rights since the 1960s, realized “somebody was going to try to do what I did” and made the Fleming estate a massive deal to the movie rights for the author’s entire career. (“Like every short story, every travel book. If I want to make a movie of Thrilling Cities, I need to go to the Broccolis,” Tarantino quipped.)
And thus Tarantino’s dreams of a period James Bond were dashed. It still seems like a great idea though. Maybe it’s not too late for Tarantino — or someone else — to try it?
Rick Dalton, the actor best known for the 1960s television series Bounty Law and a string of Westerns shot in Italy, has died, according to the Hollywood podcast Video Archives. The performer, whose notoriety saw a boost after an encounter with his neighbor Roman Polanski and a bizarre home invasion led by deranged followers of a failed Ohio-born singer-songwriter, is survived by his wife Francesca. He was 90 years old.
Okay, okay, we’ll quit it now. Rick Dalton was not a real person, but the name of the character Leonardo DiCaprio played in the Oscar-nominated 2019 film Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood. But that doesn’t mean the man who created the story of a striving actor (and his stunt double best pal) caught up in late 60s California lore, Quentin Tarantino, isn’t allowed to have a bit of fun.
The Twitter account for Video Archives, the podcast Tarantino created last year with Pulp Fiction co-writer Roger Avary (named for the Manhattan Beach tape rental shop where they once both worked), decided to kill off Dalton when making a programming note. Rather than just tell fans that their next episode (one about Norman Jewison’s 1975 sci-fi/roller derby exploitation film Rollerball, starring James Caan—as if there could there be a more quintessential selection?!?) was delayed, they decided to blame it on this deadpan announcement. The account teased a forthcoming tribute episode to Dalton’s best work.
Coincidentally, the gag came less than 24 hours before the Cannes Film Festival debut of DiCaprio’s next picture, Killers of the Flower Moon, directed by Martin Scorsese and co-starring Robert De Niro and Lily Gladstone.
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As a New Yorker who just visited the Tarantino-owned New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles for the first time, I was tickled to see framed one sheet for Rick Dalton’s movies (i.e. props from Once Upon a Time …) mixed in with promotional ones for repertory titles in rotation like Aliens, Sorcerer, and Jackie Chan’sStrike Force. The two I caught were for Comanche Uprising, a fake movie co-starring real actors Robert Taylor, Charles Bronson, and Joan Evans, and Nebraska Jim, a Western credited to real director Sergio Corbucci in which Dalton co-starred with Daphna Ben-Cobo, with whom Dalton had a whirlwind affair. (This part was played by Tarantino’s wife, Daniella Pick.)
No word at all from the Video Archives group about Dalton’s forever BFF, Cliff Booth, the part that won Brad Pitt the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.
Tarantino, meanwhile, is prepping his next and perhaps final film, The Movie Critic. Though no cast or studio deal is set up yet, it is believed that it will start production this fall. Details on the project are hush-hush, but he has denied early rumors that it is a biopic about Pauline Kael. At Cannes this week, Paul Schrader spilled a few beans, suggesting that the movie might include reshot versions of New Hollywood classics. (Once Upon a Time … did this with The Great Escape.) Apparently, Tarantino is hoping to tweak the ending of the 1977 film Rolling Thunder, which Schrader co-wrote.
By now, paying homage to Quentin Tarantino movies in music videos and songs has been done to death (no pun intended, or whatever). Among others, there was Lady Gaga and Beyoncé’s “Telephone,” Iggy Azalea and Rita Ora’s “Black Widow,” Aminé’s “Caroline” (also featuring the lyrics, “Let’s get gory/Like a Tarantino movie”) and Rob $tone’s “Chill Bill” (complete with what has become known as “the Kill Bill whistle” a.k.a. the Bernard Hermann-composed theme for 1968’s Twisted Nerve). Being that Tarantino himself is the king of delivering postmodern pastiche, he likely isn’t (/can’t be) vexed in the least by all this constant “homage” (often a polite word for stealing someone else’s shit and trying to make the public assume it’s your own). Especially not SZA’s latest, “Kill Bill,” which not only goes whole hog on a Tarantino reference in the song title itself, but also in the music video that goes with it.
Of course, no one who watched the Dave Meyers-directed “Shirt” video (that was also heavily influenced by Tarantino) can be surprised by the tone of its “follow-up,” of sorts. Granted LaKeith Stanfield isn’t the one to betray her trust in the trailer modeled after Budd’s (Michael Madsen) in Kill Bill: Vol. 2. This time directed by Christian Breslauer (known for videos like Lil Nas X’s “Industry Baby,” Tyga and Doja Cat’s “Freaky Deaky” and Anitta’s “Boys Don’t Cry”), SZA spares no detail on really driving the (Pussy Wagon) point home that this is all about showing love for a Tarantino classic that itself shows nothing but love for the idea of killing an ex.
And, like Beatrix Kiddo (Uma Thurman), SZA only feels obliged to exact that kind of revenge because her erstwhile boyfriend tried to kill her first. In matters of love, that usually tends to be more metaphorical. But by making it literal, SZA (de facto Tarantino) emphasizes how fragile the heart can be. Particularly when handed a note by one’s boo that reads, “I wish it didn’t have to be this way, really I do, but sometimes in life we have to protect our own heart, even if it means ripping it out of our chest. Au revoir mon amour.” In other words, he’s trying to say that 1) he has to be callous now and 2) he’s only hurting himself more than he’s hurting her by deciding to leave—and then summoning a bunch of his goons to shoot up the trailer. Such sentiments echo Bill’s delusions before aiming his gun at Beatrix, assuring her, “I’d like to believe that you’re aware enough even now to know that there’s nothing sadistic in my actions… No Kiddo, at this moment, this is me at my most masochistic.” And then—bang! He thinks he’s killed her.
The same goes for SZA’s ex thinking she’s been left for dead in that trailer. But no, she emerges semi-triumphant and determined to take down the bastard who would presume to do such a thing to her as she sings, “I’m still a fan even though I was salty/Hate to see you with some other broad, know you happy/Hate to see you happy if I’m not the one drivin’.” This last line conjures the image of Beatrix herself driving to get to Bill’s house as she vows to the audience, “I am gonna kill Bill.” In a scene that Thurman had to fuck up her back and knees for in order to give Tarantino the shot he wanted. But surely Tarantino would shrug that off as a “hazard of the trade.” And besides, he might add, look at not only the great art it created, but the great art it’s still spawning. Ah, the director when his “ego” is stroked in such a way—with imitation being the sincerest form of allowing one to believe in their continued relevance.
To further accentuate her commitment to the film, SZA even drags out Vivica A. Fox, who played Vernita Green a.k.a. Copperhead, to serve as her driver (and flash a scandalized look when SZA mellifluously croons, “I just killed my ex/Not the best idea”). The one taking her from her trailer to the dojo where she can quickly practice some swordplay techniques but mainly show us how her tits look in her version of Beatrix Kiddo’s iconic yellow moto jacket and matching pants. Breslauer then cuts to her riding a motorcycle through a tunnel (just as Kiddo did), after which we suddenly see SZA in the same House of the Blue Leaves-esque setting where Kiddo took on the Crazy 88s. This then segues into Breslauer including a scene that mimics the same anime style of Kazuto Nakazawa in Kill Bill: Vol. 1, used when even Tarantino thought the gore would be too cartoonishly over the top, so he actually made it into, well, a cartoon.
For SZA’s purposes, it was likely less burdensome on the budget to display her taking her final revenge on the man who broke her heart in animated form. And she does so in such a way as to throw the words he used in his note right back in his face by tearing his heart out of his chest. Which we see dripping with blood in “real-life” once she’s extracted it (by briefly making him believe she wants something sexual instead of violent to happen) in her animated guise. Parading it in her hand with calm blitheness, she then licks it—something that, to be honest, feels pulled out of the Jeffrey Dahmer playbook rather than the Beatrix Kiddo one. But hey, creative license and all that rot when reinterpreting someone’s work.
Which SZA did not only visually, but cerebrally. Specifically by claiming of Bill’s motives, “I feel like he doesn’t understand why he did what he did. He’s void of emotion, but he loved The Bride so much that he couldn’t stand her to be with anyone else. That was really complex and cool to me. It’s a love story.” But there’s nothing “complex” or “cool” about it (which speaks to how Tarantino has normalized psychopathic behavior by making it seem, let’s say, “slick”). What’s more, Bill himself breaks down his straightforward “reasoning” for killing her (or so he thought) by admitting to Beatrix what he was thinking at the time of concocting her murder: “Not only are you not dead, you’re getting married to some fucking jerk and you’re pregnant. I overreacted… I’m a killer. I’m a murdering bastard. You know that. There are consequences to breaking the heart of a murdering bastard.” In this scenario, SZA wants to be the murdering bastard. Just as Kiddo did after suffering the “slight” that went on during the Massacre at Two Pines.
In the end, though, SZA does feel obliged to provide her own little (rope) “twist” on the narrative. Having commenced the video with a snippet of “Nobody Gets Me” (which provides similarly possessive lyrics such as, “I don’t wanna see you with anyone but me/Nobody gets me like you/How am I supposed to let you go?”), SZA closes it with one from “Seek & Destroy.” And all while offering Armie Hammer his wet dream on a platter by featuring a scene of herself tied up in a shibari rope harness. Does it mean she’s the masochist now for having killed her ex? Maybe. Or perhaps this is just how she celebrates a satisfying kill.
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