Released in 2019, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is Quentin Tarantino’s ninth feature as writer-director, and among the most personal films of his career. Set across a ten-day period in the summer of 1969, it follows fading TV western star Rick Dalton and his stunt double and closest friend Cliff Booth as they navigate a Hollywood on the brink of seismic cultural change. Next door, real-life actress Sharon Tate is living the dream Rick can only reach for. All the while, the Manson Family lurks at the fringes.

The film starred Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, and Margot Robbie, collected two Academy Awards from ten nominations, and took $392 million at the global box office. It is a love letter to the movies, the period, and the city of Los Angeles, and the behind-the-scenes story is as rich and layered as the film itself. We’re telling that story now with 45 facts about Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

You can also listen to our full episode on Once Upon a Time in Hollywood on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or on the ATRM website.

1. QT ditched a longtime collaborator at the outset (and for good reason)

All of Tarantino’s films from Pulp Fiction (1994) onwards had been produced by companies under Harvey Weinstein. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood had been in development at The Weinstein Company when QT severed ties with Weinstein in the wake of the MeToo movement. With his next film suddenly available, pretty much every major studio in Hollywood wanted it. It’s since been commented that Tarantino’s decision to rewrite what happened to Sharon Tate may carry a personal dimension: a wish, perhaps, to go back and do some things differently.

2. A major studio won the rights with a big deal

Tarantino took the project to producer David Heyman, whose company Heyday Films had produced every film in the Harry Potter franchise, and they pitched it around the studios. Sony ultimately won the distribution deal, agreeing to a near-$100 million production budget, total and final cut for Tarantino on the script, casting, and edit, a 25% share of first-dollar back end, and a contractual arrangement under which all rights to the film would revert to Tarantino after approximately 20 years. Few directors in Hollywood history have ever negotiated terms anything like that.

3. The lead actor took a significant pay cut

Tarantino had previously worked with Leonardo DiCaprio on Django Unchained (2012) and only ever wanted him for his lead character, struggling actor Rick Dalton. DiCaprio signed on, but agreed to a 25% reduction from his usual rate to do so. The creative collaboration clearly meant enough to DiCaprio to absorb the financial difference.

4. DiCaprio’s co-star no at first, and a megastar was next in line

Tarantino and Brad Pitt had previously worked together on Inglourious Basterds (2009), and Pitt was Tarantino’s first choice to play Rick’s charismatic stuntman Cliff Booth. Pitt initially turned it down, and Tarantino began discussions about the part with Tom Cruise. A few months later, Pitt changed his mind, and the DiCaprio-Pitt partnership was back on. For his performance as Cliff, Pitt was nominated for Best Supporting Actor at the Academy Awards and won, beating out Tom Hanks, Anthony Hopkins, and Al Pacino.

5. The female lead wrote Tarantino a letter at the right moment

Tarantino has said that when he was writing the script, he was thinking only about Sharon Tate as a character, not about which actress might play her. Then, just as he was finishing the draft, he received an unsolicited letter from Australian actress Margot Robbie telling him she was a huge admirer of his work and would love to collaborate one day. He has described the timing as “kismet.”

6. The studio logo is the period-authentic

Before a single frame of the film plays, Tarantino sets his stall out. The Columbia Pictures studio logo that opens Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is the one that was actually in use in 1969, the year in which the story is set. It was not recreated. The scratched, faded look it carries is entirely genuine. Screen Gems, which was Columbia’s television arm at the time, also gets a couple of name-checks during the film. The attention to period detail starts before the film has even begun. (Nowadays, Columbia is a subsidiary of Sony, hence the link).

7. Rick Dalton’s self-portrait was inspired by a real one

When scouting locations in Los Angeles, Tarantino visited the former home of spaghetti western icon Lee Van Cleef, who had died in 1989. Van Cleef’s widow showed him around, and Tarantino later described it as a “60s time capsule.” One detail stuck above all others: in the garage, Van Cleef had hung a huge painting of his own face. That image directly inspired the oversized portrait of Rick that sits on his driveway in the film.

The Mad Magazine cover we see framed on Rick’s wall was also specially commissioned, with Tarantino approaching the publication and asking them to create a cover featuring Rick in the specific style of Jack Davis, one of their most celebrated artists from that era. Mad later released a special Tarantino-inspired issue with Rick on the cover as a tie-in.

8. A Hollywood hall of famer legend was always part of Tarantino’s plan

Smooth-talking Hollywood agent Marvin Schwarz is played in the film by acting legend Al Pacino, most memorably in the scene where we find him watching movies in his enormous private screening room, brandy in hand. Tarantino has said that when he was writing the script, he was picturing Pacino from the very beginning, and that Pacino accepted the moment he was asked. Once filming started, Tarantino said he didn’t want the scenes between Leonardo DiCaprio and Pacino to end, because they were so good together.

9. The film-within-a-film was based on a real picture (and the flamethrower was real)

Early in the film we see footage of Rick’s World War II TV movie The 14 Fists of McCluskey, in which his character deploys a flamethrower against Nazi soldiers. Tarantino drew inspiration for it from a Roger Corman war film called The Secret Invasion (1964), directed by Paul Wendkos and starring Van Johnson, Rod Taylor, Sal Mineo, and Virna Lisi.

The flamethrower itself was not a CGI effect. DiCaprio was trained to use a real one, and the stunt performers were set on fire for real. Stunt coordinators Zoe Bell and Robert Alonzo had to persuade DiCaprio that the process was safe. During training, DiCaprio looked at the equipment and asked, “anything we can do about that heat?” The trainer replied, “Rick, it’s a flamethrower.” Tarantino found it funny enough that he lifted the exchange straight into the script.

10. Pitt gave Tarantino one of the most important lines

One of the emotional anchors of the film is the moment Cliff turns to a despondent Rick and tells him, “You’re Rick f***in’ Dalton. Don’t you forget it.” The line lands even harder later, when Rick, having finally nailed a difficult scene on set, quietly says to himself: “Rick f***in’ Dalton.” However, it was not in Tarantino’s original script. Brad Pitt told Tarantino about a man he knew in the early 1990s, when Pitt was a young actor finding his footing, who used to say “You’re Brad f***in’ Pitt. Don’t you forget it” to him as encouragement. Tarantino wrote it in.

11. The Drive-In was a real LA landmark

Cliff lives in a trailer at the Van Nuys Drive-In, introduced via a sweeping crane shot that rises up and over the venue’s marquee sign. That move was the miniature at work. The Van Nuys Drive-In itself was a real Los Angeles movie theatre that operated through the 1960s before being demolished in the late 1990s. Tarantino had it recreated using a combination of a life-size set and detailed miniatures.

Also, inside Cliff’s trailer, and in deliberate contrast to Rick’s walls of self-portraits, hangs a large photograph of Anne Francis from the 1956 science fiction film Forbidden Planet.

12. The cars in the film carry their own story

Picture Car Coordinator Steven Butcher brought exceptional care to every vehicle in the film. The 1966 Cadillac Coupe DeVille that Cliff uses to chauffeur Rick around Los Angeles actually belonged to actor Michael Madsen, and it is the same car his character Mr Blonde drives in Tarantino’s debut feature, Reservoir Dogs (1992). Madsen also has a cameo in the Bounty Law sequences.

Cliff’s personal car, the blue 1964 Volkswagen Karmann Ghia convertible, has a more personal origin: it was the car Tarantino’s stepfather drove in the late 1960s when Tarantino was a boy. The low, passenger-seat camera angles looking up at Cliff as he drives were a deliberate choice, replicating how a young Tarantino used to see his stepfather from that exact position in the car.

Further, the Ford Galaxy used by the Manson Family was a faithful recreation of the real vehicle, built from photographs and direct access to the actual car, down to its original dents. And finally, the truck from the FBI episode Rick appears in is the real truck from that broadcast.

13. Sharon’s snakeskin coat came from real life

Costume designer Arianna Phillips drew on meticulous period research throughout the film. When we see Sharon and Roman Polanski heading to a party, she wears a striking snakeskin coat. It was based on an identical coat the real Sharon Tate wore to the premiere of Polanski’s most celebrated film, Rosemary’s Baby (1968). The moment is accompanied by one of Tarantino’s great crane shots, the camera swinging from Rick in his pool, up and over the rooftop, before landing on Sharon and Roman departing next door.

14. Steve McQueen appears because Rick Dalton’s career was built on his

At the Playboy Mansion party, we meet Steve McQueen, played by British actor Damian Lewis. Tarantino contacted Lewis directly, telling him: “I’ve just always thought, man, that you’d be a great Steve McQueen.” McQueen’s presence is not incidental. A significant portion of Rick Dalton’s career arc was drawn from McQueen’s own trajectory through late-1960s Hollywood.

There is also a darker real-life connection. On the night Sharon Tate was tragically killed, McQueen had been invited to her house on Cielo Drive and had planned to go, before changing his mind at the last moment. Jay Sebring, the celebrity hairdresser depicted in the film, was McQueen’s personal hairdresser and had extended the invitation.

15. The song the Manson girls sing was written by Charles Manson

The Manson Family make their first appearance in the film when a group of them are seen dumpster diving for food near Spahn Ranch. Pussycat, played by Margaret Qualley, spots Cliff and gives him the peace sign. The song the girls are singing in that scene is called “I’ll Never Say Never to Always.” It was written by Charles Manson, who considered himself a serious singer-songwriter. Before licensing the track, Tarantino’s long-standing music supervisor Mary Ramos ensured all royalties would go to a trust established to support victims of the Manson Family, and not the convicted murderer himself.

16. The production designer grew up in the same Los Angeles the film depicts

Tarantino hired Barbara Ling as production designer, his first time working with her. A key factor was that Ling had grown up in Los Angeles in the 1960s and knew the setting from lived experience. She had also worked on period productions set in the era, including Oliver Stone’s rock biopic The Doors (1991). Ling brought in set decorator Nancy Haigh, who she described as “the greatest set dresser in Hollywood.”

17. Much of 1960s Hollywood had to be rebuilt

Many of the Los Angeles locations Tarantino wanted to feature had long since been demolished, and Barbara Ling’s team had to recreate them. Pandora’s Box, a famous club on the Sunset Strip that had been a major counter-culture hangout before being torn down, was reconstructed inside a restaurant called Joseph’s Cafe. The large James Dean mural we see the Manson girls walk past was inspired by the real practice of decorating building walls in 1960s LA with movie imagery.

On Hollywood Boulevard, Ling negotiated with every shopkeeper individually to have their facades changed back to how they had looked fifty years earlier. Most chose to keep the changes after filming wrapped, preferring them. Behind-the-scenes footage of the Hollywood Boulevard shoot is remarkable: clothes shops stocked with period fashions, coffee shops dressed inside and out, news stands full of 1969 magazines, hundreds of extras in authentic hair and costume. Everywhere you look, it is 1969.

And, for the Bounty Law western sequences, a complete TV studio western set was built and painted specifically to look its best when shot in black and white, as 1960s television sets were designed to do.

18. Mobile phones were banned on set (with serious consequences for infractions)

Timothy Olyphant, who plays western TV star James Stacy in the Lancer sequences, revealed that Tarantino operated a strict rule on set: mobile phones were banned entirely, and anyone caught using one would be fired on the spot. At one point during filming, a crew member’s phone went off. According to Olyphant, the crew member simply turned and ran in the other direction.

19. Rick Dalton was built on Steve McQueen’s early career, and Tarantino wrote him a biography

As mentioned above, one of the key building blocks of Rick’s backstory was the arc of Steve McQueen’s own career. McQueen’s breakthrough came through a 1950s TV western called Wanted: Dead or Alive, which followed a bounty hunter, and that became the template for Rick’s show, Bounty Law. The opening shot of the film shows Rick’s character tearing down a “wanted dead or alive” poster, which feels deliberate.

To help DiCaprio fully inhabit the character, Tarantino wrote several chapters of a fictional biography about Rick, titled The Man Who Would Be McQueen. He has said DiCaprio reading it was one of the things that convinced the actor to take the role. Tarantino also wrote a full separate chapter called “Misadventure” that details exactly what happened during Cliff’s boat flashback (where his wife mysteriously went overboard). He gave it to Brad Pitt to read, and has said he will never share the truth of it with anyone else.

20. Inserting DiCaprio into an all-time classic was a big effects challenge

One of the film’s most technically ambitious moments comes when we see Rick auditioning for Steve McQueen’s role of Captain Hilts in The Great Escape (1963), the classic World War II adventure directed by John Sturges. DiCaprio was dressed in copies of the same clothes McQueen wore in the film and shot against a green screen, with director of photography Robert Richardson carefully matching height and lighting to the original.

The visual effects team then had to digitally remove McQueen from the original footage and composite DiCaprio on top. The process took months. The visual effects supervisor was John Dykstra, a two-time Oscar winner who had served as visual effects supervisor on the original Star Wars (1977).

21. Rick was also shaped by two actors left behind by Hollywood

Beyond McQueen, Tarantino drew from the careers of real television actors who found themselves out of step with the New Hollywood movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Ralph Meeker was a talented performer who never made the transition. Pete Duel starred in the TV western series Alias Smith and Jones and struggled with alcoholism and bipolar disorder before dying by suicide in 1971. Tarantino has said DiCaprio studied both men in building his portrayal of Rick, and noted: “If Rick was offered Deliverance, he would’ve turned it down.”

22. The Rick and Cliff dynamic was inspired by Hollywood friendships

The relationship between a fading star and his loyal stunt double sits at the heart of the film, and Tarantino has explained how he arrived at it. A few years before making Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, he was on another production when one of his actors asked if there was a part for “my guy,” who turned out to be a former stunt double now working as the actor’s personal assistant. Tarantino was already familiar with the bonds between Steve McQueen and his stunt double Bud Ekins, who performed the famous motorcycle jump in The Great Escape, and between Burt Reynolds and stuntman Hal Needham, who went on to direct Smokey and the Bandit (1977). He thought that dynamic could be “a unique way in” to a story about Hollywood.

23. Tate’s sister was closely involved, and almost nobody knew the ending

Out of respect for the Tate family, Tarantino contacted Sharon’s younger sister Debra to let her know he was making a film in which Sharon would be a central character. Debra was initially uneasy, but after meeting with Tarantino and spending time with Margot Robbie, she felt her sister was in good hands. She loaned some of Sharon’s personal jewellery for the production, which Robbie wore during the Playboy Mansion scene, and Debra was present on set for much of filming. Tarantino also permitted a representative of Roman Polanski to read the script.

The ending was kept out of the script he circulated entirely. The only people who knew from the outset how the film would conclude were Tarantino, DiCaprio, Pitt, and Robbie. Even DP Robert Richardson did not find out until midway through production. Polanski’s representative was also allowed to read the ending separately.

24. A martial arts icon sparked real controversy

Mike Moh, who plays Bruce Lee in the film, had auditioned for other productions seeking to cast Lee on multiple occasions before this one, always without success. Tarantino put him through several tests and said what impressed him most was the depth of Moh’s knowledge about Lee. He got the part.

After the film’s release, Bruce Lee’s daughter Shannon Lee criticised the portrayal publicly, saying her father was depicted in the film as “an arrogant asshole who was full of hot air,” and that the movie perpetuated stereotyped Hollywood images of him. When Tarantino published a novelisation of the film a couple of years later, the portrayal of Lee was notably softened, making clear that while Cliff is a formidable fighter, he is ultimately no match for Bruce Lee.

25. The Fox Bruin Theatre scene was inspired by a true romance

The film includes a sequence where Sharon visits the Fox Bruin Theatre in Westwood to watch herself in The Wrecking Crew (1968), a Matt Helm spy comedy. She watches, barefoot, feet up on the seat in front, clearly delighted to see herself on screen. That detail is not incidental: Debra Tate told the production that the real Sharon would go everywhere barefoot, including restaurants.

The scene also carries a personal resonance for Tarantino. He has said it was inspired by something that happened to him at that same cinema after True Romance (1993), which he wrote, was released. He went on a date and told the manager he had written the film. The manager didn’t believe him until his date backed him up and other audience members recognised Tarantino and gathered around. The manager apparently said, “Who are these people?” His date replied, “They’re all his fans.”

26. The bookshop scene carries a quiet heartbreak

There is a brief scene where Sharon visits a bookshop and buys a copy of Thomas Hardy’s 1891 novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles as a gift for Roman Polanski. This reflects something that really happened. The real Sharon Tate bought Polanski the book and told him it would make a great film, and that she wanted to star in it. In 1979, a decade after her death, Polanski directed his adaptation, Tess (1979), and dedicated it “To Sharon.” Sharon gifting Polanski that book was reportedly the last time he saw her alive.

27. The trailer meltdown was entirely improvised

One of the best scenes in the film comes when Rick, having struggled to remember his lines on the Lancer set, retreats to his trailer and unleashes a furious, self-lacerating monologue at himself in the mirror. None of it was in Tarantino’s script. It was DiCaprio who suggested to Tarantino that Rick should forget his lines. Tarantino, who had written Lancer as a detailed film-within-a-film and was initially reluctant to disrupt it, agreed. With nothing scripted, DiCaprio improvised the entire breakdown. Editor Fred Raskin’s jump cuts during the sequence are among the sharpest in the film.

28. The child actress was discovered via a TV sitcom

In one of the film’s most warmly received scenes, Rick meets young child actress Trudi Fraser on the Lancer set, played by Julia Butters. Tarantino discovered Butters by chance while writing the film. He had the television on in the background (as he often does while writing), and an episode of the sitcom American Housewife was playing, featuring Julia Butters. The young actress delivered a monologue that Tarantino admired, and he brought her in to audition. The character was also partly based on Jodie Foster as a child actress, who appeared in several episodes of the classic TV western Gunsmoke.

29. Lancer was a real show, and the cast had notable backgrounds

Though Trudi Fraser is a fictional character, Lancer was a genuine television western that ran from 1968 to 1970, making it a natural fit for the film’s setting. Timothy Olyphant plays James Stacy, who starred in the real show as Johnny Madrid Lancer. Luke Perry plays Wayne Maunder, who played Scott Lancer (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was Perry’s final role before his death in 2019) and Nicholas Hammond plays director Sam Wanamaker. Hammond is best known for playing Spider-Man in the 1970s TV series The Amazing Spider-Man and, before that, he played Friedrich Von Trapp in The Sound of Music (1965)!

30. The film spent five years as a novel

Tarantino has said the first thing he came up with was the film’s ending, and then worked backwards to build everything that leads to it. He originally intended to write the story as a novel and spent around five years doing so before concluding he had too many ideas about how it should look on screen.

When it came to the script itself, security was exceptional. Tarantino’s script for The Hateful Eight (2015) had leaked online before filming began, nearly leading him to abandon that project entirely. This time, he sent an email to all major studios instructing each to send a single representative to his agent’s office in Beverly Hills. Every person had to sign a stringent NDA, read the script in person in front of Tarantino, and could take no notes. For his writing on the film, Tarantino was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, losing to Parasite (2019), written by Bong Joon-ho and Han Jin-won.

31. The soundtrack was built from real period radio

The most popular radio station in Los Angeles in 1969 was KHJ Boss Radio, and Tarantino had listened to it himself as a child. He managed to acquire 14 hours of KHJ tapes that listeners had hand-recorded that year, and used them as the primary resource for selecting the film’s soundtrack.

The band Paul Revere & The Raiders features on the soundtrack five times, which is no coincidence. Their producer Terry Melcher and the group’s lead singer Mark Lindsay had lived at 10050 Cielo Drive before Sharon Tate moved in, which is why Charles Manson, on arriving at the property, asks “is Terry is home?” According to some accounts, one of the factors that radicalised Manson was Melcher’s refusal to sign him as a recording artist. As an interesting aside, Terry Melcher was also the son of singer-actress Doris Day.

32. The shoot was hugely technical

Director of photography Robert Richardson, a multiple Oscar winner whose credits include JFK (1991) and The Aviator (2004), has described Once Upon a Time in Hollywood as one of the most demanding shoots of his career, largely because of Tarantino’s insistence on total visual authenticity. The film was shot primarily on 35mm, but also incorporated Super 8 footage, a popular consumer format in 1969, and 16mm Ektachrome stock for the black-and-white TV scenes, specifically to replicate the look of 1960s television.

Richardson has said one of the personal highlights of his career was the scene at Musso & Frank Grill, the legendary Hollywood restaurant that has been operating since 1919, in which he had Leonardo DiCaprio, Al Pacino, and Brad Pitt all visible within a single frame. He was nominated for an Oscar for Best Cinematography for the film, though the award that year went to Roger Deakins for 1917 (2019).

33. The home of The Family was recreated in painstaking detail

Spahn Ranch, where the Manson Family lived, was a real location that had been used as a Hollywood western film set in the 1940s and 50s before a fire destroyed the sets in 1970. Tarantino told production designer Barbara Ling he wanted an exact replica, but also that he wanted it to feel like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), director Tobe Hooper’s seminal low-budget horror film. Ling found a location twenty minutes from the real ranch and her team rebuilt it entirely from old photographs. George Spahn, the elderly owner who had allowed the Manson Family to move in during 1968, is in the film, played by Bruce Dern.

34. An icon was cast as Spahn originally

Before Bruce Dern took the role of George Spahn, it had been given to Burt Reynolds. Reynolds attended script readings and was actively learning his lines when he died in 2018, before filming began. Tarantino has said the last thing Reynolds was doing before he died was preparing to play Spahn. Tarantino has also revealed that the line Bruce Lee delivers to Cliff, calling him “pretty for a stuntman,” was originally Burt Reynolds’ idea, suggested during the script readings.

A similar situation occurred with actor Bill Paxton, who had been set to play Lancer star James Stacy before his death in 2017. Timothy Olyphant stepped into the role.

35. The Manson Family casting process was like no other

Tarantino and casting director Victoria Thomas devised a distinctive approach to filling the Manson Family roles, encouraging actors to improvise and create artwork they imagined the Mansons might have made. Mikey Madison, who plays Susan “Sadie” Atkins, created a painting and wrote a poem about Charles Manson. She said she knew she had the part when she arrived for her callback and found her painting hanging in Tarantino’s office.

The rest of the family includes Charles Manson played by Damon Herriman, who had also played Manson in David Fincher’s crime series Mindhunter; Lena Dunham as Catherine “Gypsy” Share; Dakota Fanning as Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, a role Jennifer Lawrence had auditioned for; Sydney Sweeney as Diane “Snake” Lake, the youngest family member at just 14 when she joined; Victoria Pedretti as Leslie Van Houten; James Landry Hébert as Steven “Clem” Morgan, a part Macauley Culkin reportedly auditioned for; and Margaret Qualley as Pussycat, a composite of real family members Ruth Ann Moorehouse and Kathryn Lutesinger.

36. Real people from the fateful day are in the film

Tarantino grounds the tragic events of August 8, 1969, in verifiable real-life detail wherever he can. Sharon is visited during the day by her friend Joanne, who brings her baby. This is Joanne Pettet, a British actress who was one of Sharon’s close friends and who did visit her that day. Joanne Pettet had appeared in the original Bond spoof Casino Royale (1967) and is played in the film by Rumer Willis, daughter of Demi Moore and Bruce Willis.

Less well known: Debra Tate has said she called Sharon that day and wanted to visit her older sister that evening. Sharon said no because she was having friends over. Debra was just sixteen years old at the time.

37. The four Family members are the same four who were there

The film represents the four Manson Family members who went to Cielo Drive accurately: Charles “Tex” Watson (Austin Butler), Susan “Sadie” Atkins (Mikey Madison), Patricia Krenwinkel (Madison Beaty), and Linda Kasabian (Maya Hawke, daughter of Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke). In real life, Kasabian was the only one who did not go to prison for the murders – she testified against the others and has said she tried to stop them. Tarantino’s decision to show her driving away in the car appears to reflect that historical record.

The four people inside Sharon’s house that night were Sharon herself, celebrity hairdresser Jay Sebring (Emile Hirsch), heiress Abigail Folger (Samantha Robinson), and Polish actor and writer Wojciech Frykowski (Costa Ronin). A fifth victim, Steven Parent, who was outside the property and shot dead when the family arrived, is not represented in the film.

38. Several details from that night are woven carefully in

We see Abigail Folger at the piano singing “Straight Shooter” by the Mamas and the Papas, the American 1960s pop group. This is because, when police arrived the following morning, they found the sheet music to that song on the piano. Wojciech Frykowski is shown asleep on the couch, which is historically accurate. He was woken that night by Charles Watson pointing a gun at his face. When Frykowski asked who he was, Watson replied: “I’m the Devil. And I’m here to do the Devil’s business.” That line is spoken by Watson in the film.

39. Two Tarantino regulars appear in small but telling roles

Rick Dalton’s Italian actress wife Francesca Capucci is played by Lorenza Izzo, the wife of filmmaker Eli Roth, a long-standing Tarantino collaborator. And the girl who sells Cliff a cigarette dipped in acid for fifty cents, setting in motion the events of the climax, is played by Perla Haney-Jardine, who played B.B., the Bride’s young daughter, in Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004).

40. Robbie has a cameo you might have missed

There is a later scene in which Rick, flying back from Italy, is served a cocktail by an air stewardess. We see only her arms, and hear her say, “Enjoy, Sir.” That is Margot Robbie. It is a quietly deliberate touch: Robbie first came to prominence in America playing an air stewardess in the television drama Pan Am (2011–2012).

41. Tarantino curated a television event to promote the film

In the run-up to the film’s release, Tarantino put together and presented a “Swinging Sixties Movie Marathon” of films that had influenced Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. It was broadcast on television in 80 countries, drawing from Columbia Pictures’ classic catalogue, and included Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969), Easy Rider (1969), and The Wrecking Crew (1968).

42. A global superpower refused to release the film, and Tarantino refused to make changes

China declined to grant Once Upon a Time in Hollywood a certificate rating, preventing its theatrical release there. The stated reason was the portrayal of Bruce Lee. The Chinese film authority indicated that removing the Bruce Lee scene entirely would result in a certificate being issued. Tarantino declined, and the film did not release in Chinese cinemas. It is worth noting that Tarantino’s subsequent softening of the Bruce Lee portrayal in the novelisation suggests some reflection on the criticism that had been levelled at the original depiction.

43. QT mapped out what happens after the credits roll

Tarantino has talked in some detail about Rick’s life beyond the events of the film’s climax. With his stock having risen after the incident at Cielo Drive, Rick goes on to land a measure of real success. He appears in a couple of low-budget studio features and becomes a more recognised television presence, landing villain roles on shows like Mission: Impossible. Tarantino’s assessment: “He’s doing okay.” Tarantino also submitted a fictional filmography for Rick Dalton to IMDb to flesh out the character’s career. IMDb declined to include it.

44. The film was a major success

From a production budget of approximately $90 million, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood took $392.1 million at the global box office. It received ten Academy Award nominations and won two: Brad Pitt for Best Supporting Actor, and Barbara Ling and Nancy Haigh for Best Production Design. A huge return for the studio.

45. The audience verdict remains a point of debate

On Rotten Tomatoes, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood holds an 86% approval rating from critics. The audience score sits at 70%, notably lower, and it is in fact the lowest-rated Tarantino film from audiences on the platform. On IMDb it holds a score of 7.6 out of 10. Whether that reflects the film’s deliberate pacing, its unconventional handling of real-life events, or simply the difficulty of making a mainstream audience feel as at home in 1969 Hollywood as Tarantino himself clearly does, it remains one of the most distinctive films of his career.

And that’s 45 facts about Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Tarantino’s richest and most personal film. Please share on your social media channels, and subscribe to our YouTube channel for lots of great video content.