Quentin Tarantino Teases 'Once Upon A Time in Hollywood' Novel & Says Fans Will Learn Much More About Brad Pitt's Character Cliff

Quentin Tarantino is opening up about his much-anticipated novel of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

The director spoke on the “Pure Cinema Podcast” about the upcoming book and what fans could expect from it.

Click inside to see how the novel will not be exactly like the movie…

Quentin explained that the novelization of the hit movie, which starred Leonardo DiCaprio, Margot Robbie, and Brad Pitt, will be much more than the film.

“It’s not just me taking the screenplay and then breaking it down in a novelistic form. I retold the story as a novel,” he said. “So it’s not like, ‘Oh, OK, well he obviously had a few scenes left over, so he just took the screenplay and novelized it and threw in a few extra scenes.’ It was a complete rethinking of the entire story and not just a rethinking as far as throwing some scenes that were left out of the editing room. But I did so much research.”

Quentin added that he’s been writing the novel for “five years, so there was so much stuff that I wrote and I explored that I never even typed up, because there was no way it was going to make the movie, but it was edification, it made me understand the characters, it made me learn things about them…I’m trying to tell a novelistic version of these characters.”

“If the book existed first, then the movie would be me making a movie out of that material. You know how you take an unwieldy novel and try to turn it into a movie? Well, to me, the movie is that. This is the unwieldy version of the movie.”

The novel also expands more on one particular character – Brad‘s stuntman Cliff Booth, which would earn him an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.

“In the movie, Cliff is a real enigma, you’re kind of like, what’s this guy’s deal?” Quentin shared. “And one of the things in the book is, there’s these isolated chapters that tell you, like, this whole chapter will be about Cliff’s past. It goes back in time to tell you about Cliff at this point in time.”

He continued, “Then you go further on with the normal run of the story and there’s another chapter that goes back in time and tells you about Cliff’s past. And every isolated chapter that’s just about Cliff’s past is like a weird little pulp novel unto itself starring Cliff.”

The Once Upon a Time in Hollywood novel is available for preorder now and will be out on bookshelves June 29.

Did you know that this other famous star’s grandmother appears in the movie?