The new coffee-table book The Making of Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood, by Jay Glennie, takes readers behind the scenes of the director’s celebrated reimagining of the Manson Family murders. A romp through 1969 Hollywood, the film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Rick Dalton, a Western TV-series actor whose time in the spotlight is fading fast, and Brad Pitt as his charming deadbeat stunt double, Cliff Booth (a role that won Pitt a Best Supporting Actor Oscar).
In one of the film’s indelible scenes, DiCaprio’s Dalton, doing a guest spot on the series Lancer (which in real life ran from 1968 to 1970), suffers a crisis of confidence on set, flubbing his lines after a night of drinking, and retreating to his trailer for a sputtering, self-flagellating tantrum. In this exclusive excerpt, Tarantino, DiCaprio, and Pitt recount how DiCaprio pushed for the scene — not a part of the original script — and what Tarantino told his star to make it come together in memorable fashion.
“I went into those Lancer scenes thinking, ‘Oh, I’ve directed two Westerns. Wow, I get to make a third Western inside of this movie!’” says Tarantino.
“As I was writing them,” he adds, “I thought, ‘I can do what Richard Rush did when he was doing The Stunt Man, where he gets to make a kinda art movie, which is like Fifties television or Sixties television would be. But the Lancer scenes don’t look like Sixties television. They look like a really terrific Seventies western. It is because I am not treating it like Sixties television — it’s my Western.
“So, I am not shooting it like Sam Wanamaker,” he says. “I am shooting it like Quentin Tarantino, and I am asking for the type of performances that Quentin Tarantino would want, not the type of performances you would expect to see in a 1969 pilot for a TV show. Consequently, I am giving Leo two characters to play. I am giving him Rick Dalton, and I am giving him Caleb DeCoteau [DiCaprio’s character on Lancer].”
Then DiCaprio had an idea.
“I approached Quentin about looking at the worst fear an actor can have,” he says.
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Tarantino confirms DiCaprio’s account. “Yeah — yeah, he did. My recollection was of Leo approaching me saying, ‘You know, I just wish I had a little more to do in the film — to do a scene or something.’ So I went away and wrote another Lancer scene.”
However, Leo wasn’t necessarily looking for more screen time.
“Yeah, that didn’t solve Leo’s problem,” Quentin says. “It didn’t necessarily make him happy.”
What Leo wanted to embrace was Rick’s struggle playing Caleb DeCoteau.
“He wanted to turn it into a full-on acting mess,” the filmmaker adds.
“Yes, to me, I wanted Rick to encounter the worst fear an actor can encounter,” DiCaprio recalls. “And the worst fear you have as an actor is that you don’t know your lines, then you just blank and everyone is staring at you. It’s like going to school in your underwear. It’s the ultimate nightmare. We had him boozing it up too hard, and now he cannot get through his big monologue.”
“Look, I didn’t have Rick playing Caleb having a freakout in the middle of the scene because I liked my scene,” Quentin says. “There was a whole third act to that scene, and I wanted it to be my third Western right smack dab in the middle of Once Upon a Time in . . . Hollywood, so I wanted the scene to carry on playing out.”
This didn’t ring true for Leo, who countered Quentin’s argument by explaining, “We need to have Rick have a meltdown. I think you’re missing something, man. Things need to go bad for me. I need to kinda embarrass myself on the set.”
Quentin recalls that he knew that everything Leo was saying made “just perfect fucking sense, but it wasn’t what I wanted. I was almost fucking annoyed that it was making sense because that wasn’t what I wanted. What I really wanted was to have my Lancer [scenes] coexisting with the rest of the film. I was frustrated. I was almost fucking annoyed that it was making sense.”
Looking at Leo, he conceded defeat.
“OK, OK, I see what you mean, goddamn it,” the director told his star. “Fuck — you’re going to fuck up my Western. You’re going to fuck up my little Western in the middle of my goddamn movie. Fucking goddamn it. But, yeah, yeah, you’re not wrong, you’re not wrong, you son of a bitch. OK, OK, OK.”
The seed had been sown. Quentin went away and rewrote the scene.
DiCaprio wanted Rick to have some conflict — serious conflict.
“Quentin, you know the young Meryl Streep [Trudi Fraser, played by Julia Butters] has unlocked something in Rick,” he told the filmmaker. “He’s been fucking boozing, yeah, but more than that, he’s dealing with his own destiny as an actor — his own mortality. He’s been unable to get through this monologue — all the previous night’s work has been for nothing. It’s fucking Rocky going into the ring, but before that, he’s gonna beat himself fucking up. Quentin, I need to fucking crash and burn, and I need to rise.”
Leo had unwittingly opened a Pandora’s box.
What Quentin came up with was an emotionally distraught Rick hunkered down in the safety of his on-set trailer, where he begins to berate himself. He took DiCaprio aside and ran through what he was thinking.
“Look, Leo. I’ve been thinking about it, and I think you could be right. Now, I didn’t want to sit here and write a big old monologue for you to do, and now you have to learn the monologue. No, it’s gotta be a rant. So, here is what we are gonna do. I’ll give you a bunch of things to say, but not in a rhythmic way that you have to learn it — I’ll give you subjects. I’ll give you certain lines that you can say, and I’ll give you subjects that you can dwell on, but it has to come from you, from your improvisation. OK?”
Leo nodded his assent.
They then started to pen ideas that Rick would include in his rant.
“Quentin and I worked hard on the breakdown and it helped, I responded to it,” DiCaprio remembers. “Rick’s been lazy, but I wanted him to have the opportunity where he hits a home run, give him that victory, you know.”
Once they were done, they relocated to the set of Rick’s trailer. Cinematographer Bob Richardson set up his lights.
“Quentin is a one-camera man,” Richardson says. “I’m very happy with one camera. I think it brings out the best. Quentin’s line — and you’ve probably heard it before — is, ‘I’m a director, not a selector.’ It’s so true. With one camera, he knows what he wants, and he is beside the camera most of the time.”
Seated close to the action, Quentin could see that “Leo was nervous. He liked the idea, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t nervous about it. It’s pressure, you know.”
“Quentin says I was nervous about it, and I think, you know, I probably was,” DiCaprio confesses, “because usually, I like to prepare a lot, but that wasn’t this scene.”
It wasn’t. This was full-on Travis Bickle unraveling before your eyes. It had to be spontaneous. In the claustrophobic confines of Rick’s trailer, Quentin rallied Leo to “just go for it — just fucking go for it!”
Hidden behind the cowardly lion’s mane of Caleb, we begin to see the dark neurosis of a seemingly broken man.
“What the fuck was that? Jesus Christ! Fuck . . .”
Leo began to riff. Quentin was right by his side and if he felt there was anything else to add to the mix, he would shout out.
“Say that you’re not drinking anymore!”
“Eight fucking whiskey sours! I couldn’t stop at three or four? . . . Every fucking night! . . . That’s fucking it — that’s fucking it! . . . Stop fucking drinking right now. Make a promise to yourself . . .”
“Now pick up the fucking hip flask, Leo, and go to drink it,” screamed Quentin.
Pissed off at his weakness, Rick throws it out of the door.
“Talk about the little girl!”
“That fucking little girl!”
“Go for [Lancer lead James] Stacy!”
“That motherfucking prick . . .”
Quentin was capturing lightning in a bottle.
The performance received high praise from DiCaprio’s wingman, Brad Pitt.
“Let me tell you, what Leo did in that scene was one of the great pieces of acting ever committed to film,” Pitt says. “He is so smart. I’ve said it before — it is one of the greatest breakdown scenes I have seen.”
That is a sentiment his director echoed.
“Leo had Rick fuck up, and we made a meal out of it,” Quentin recalls. “We made a big, big deal out of it, and it was really, really cool. Little by little, he loosened up. Little by little, he grew in confidence and tried different things. I told him that there’ll only be one setup, and I’ll do it with jump cuts. So we’ll do, like, three takes, and then I’ll just jump-cut the best bits. We’ll do it, and that is it. You don’t have to match anything — nothing. I’ll do it with the best sections from three different takes. But we’ll put a full [film] magazine on, and we’ll run until it runs out.
“It was exciting,” he adds. “It was exciting for the whole crew. I knew that we had something special.”
DiCaprio humbly recalls “just improvising for a few hours, and then Quentin spliced it together in a very creative way. Normally, you hold Quentin’s dialogue as modern-day Shakespeare, but here, I had the leniency to be able to go off and try things.”
“Look, Leo dug in deep, and he is just great,” Quentin adds. “By this time, he really knew Rick — he just knew the guy. It is one thing to learn the lines for a scene, but it is another to just know your guy. Leo really had to fucking deliver, OK? And he did. Everybody remembers the scene, and he is just terrific.”
Quentin concedes that it is “the best fucking idea that wins. I invested in it, and Leo invested in it, and he pulled it off, and it was really, really wonderful. And he was fucking right, alright?”
When the director and film editor Fred Raskin hit the editing suite, Quentin’s Lancer scene would stay fucked up.
“Now, look, Leo is entirely right, but it is not what I wanted,” the filmmaker explains. “I have cut a version of the movie where he doesn’t have the fuck-up, when it just plays out the way it is. And I like that version. It is not better, but I like it. I don’t believe in going after the fact and doing director’s cuts. No, my director’s cuts play in 3,000 theaters. But if I ever released a longer version of the movie, it would be done that way. Now, not because it is better, but because you have already seen that other version — just watch that if you like. This is another way of doing it — not better, not the way, just a way, the way I like.”
“Man, let me tell you, when I saw this scene, it just blew me away,” Pitt says. “It was so, so smart of Leo, but it is also a sign of a great director. Now, it must have been hard for Quentin because it is his own words, but he knew it was a great idea when he tried it on, and the two of them worked it through.”
Rick Dalton is ready. The self-flagellation is over — he’ll show them motherfuckers that time hasn’t passed him by. There is still time to have some of what the fucker McQueen is enjoying.
“It was an exorcism for him of his own self-doubt and feelings of worthlessness, and then hyping himself back up,” DiCaprio explains. “Then Quentin did an old-fashioned shot of my feet coming down the studio. Rick’s going to war — he’s psyched.”
Provided courtesy of Insight Editions & The Story Factory, from Jay Glennie’s The Making of Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, published Oct. 28, 2025.
From Rolling Stone US
