The mythic, epic long cut of any movie, aka when people don’t understand the difference between an assembly cut—all the footage actually shot assembled into a raw edit—and what a director would want with their final version of the best of the best material (generally much shorter than an assembly, filmmakers don’t want every frame of footage in their film, because not everything is always A+). And then there’s the mythic, epic purported length of a Quentin Tarantino film which generally becomes inflated and exaggerated. Take Tarantino’s “Once Upon A Time In Hollywood,” which has already become somewhat legendary with its supposed director’s cut or mythic cuts that are stored away in some imaginary basement.
Brad Pitt has added fuel to the fire of the supposed length of a longer version by revealing that Tarantino had thought about turning the film into a Netflix mini-series (like he had with “The Hateful Eight,” though it’s not really much longer and or different, just chaptered up in smaller episodes). And Margot Robbie dropped a whopper of what we would probably now consider a huge doozy, claiming there was a 20-hour cut of the movie (in retrospect, maybe she meant to say there were 20 hours of footage shot in total, including every take that was ever shot during production).
Well, we can probably officially put that all to rest. Tarantino was on the Marc Maron podcast this week, and he said his cut of the version, including everything he wanted in the film (emphasis, wanted, there could be things he shot that he doesn’t think are good enough even for a long version) if he didn’t have to worry about the run time, would run well under four hours.
“I think if I were to put it all together, in a way where I would use everything that I wanted and didn’t have to worry about time, it would probably be around 3 hours and 20 minutes or something,” he said when asked about the long version of the movie.
Tarantino didn’t really elaborate beyond that, but he talked about pacing, keeping a modern-day audience interested and entertained in general, and how the pace of one scene can affect another down the road, aka bagginess accumulates. “The thing is, especially when you’re doing a long movie and [you’re switching storylines to different characters], “throughout the whole thing, you’re pacing it,” he said. “You can’t wear out your welcome, like, ‘yeah, I could have this in [this scene] now, but would that wear out the welcome on this sequence coming up here?”
Tarantino explained the reason he took the Manson dance out of the theatrical version (recently witnessed briefly in the “Once Upon A Time In Hollywood” book trailer, which revealed a few new bits) was because he felt it might affect the pacing of the scene with Leonardo DiCaprio and the little girl in the film, Julia Butters.
Fans should note, the Tarantino “retirement” thing sort of gets passed away as an “out of context” thing, sort of, but Maron moves on before Tarantino has time to explain himself (he sort of mutters the one film left plan anyhow). There could be a there there if Tarantino hadn’t just doubled down on the retirement plan on Bill Maher just a few days earlier. So yeah, “Once Upon A Time In Hollywood,” yes, there’s a longer version out there if he were to recut it like that one day. Still, currently, there seems like there’s no plan to do that (or at least Tarantino doesn’t mention it), and it would only be only 40 minutes longer than the current theatrical cut. Listen to the full Marc Maron pod below.