El Coyote, the Mexican restaurant Sharon and her friends visit on one fateful August night, let production film in the same booth the real Tate sat in. Musso & Frank’s, the restaurant where Dalton has lunch with a pushy agent played by Al Pacino, has barely changed its interiors over the years. Together they were able to create a mental topography of a vanished Los Angeles, ready to be resurrected.įortunately, some local landmarks from the era were still standing. Ling, who was a teenager at the time, remembers hitchhiking around to different neighborhoods with the sense that the entire city was open. As a child, Tarantino was entranced by the town’s light-up theater marquees, which get a third-act montage all to themselves in Once Upon a Time.
“He’ll say things like ‘Imagine an 8-year-old laying in the back of a car and looking out the window, what would he see?’”īoth Tarantino and Ling grew up on the outskirts of Los Angeles, and had pivotal memories of the city in the 1960s. (In this case, the script didn’t include the film’s ending, which wasn’t revealed until weeks later.) “He knows how he wants to see something,” says Ling. Pre-production on Tarantino movies often takes the form of one-on-one conversations at his home, where the filmmaker breaks out a copy of his latest script and outlines his vision for the project. Over the course of two separate phone calls with Vulture, Ling and Richardson explained how they brought the dream of the ’60s back to life. Coincidentally, the pair both worked on Oliver Stone’s The Doors, making them experts on cinematic recreations of late-’60s L.A. The director’s vision would not have been possible without the work of collaborators like cinematographer Robert Richardson, working on his sixth Tarantino film, and production designer Barbara Ling, her first.
Until the very end, there’s not much plot instead, Tarantino just wants to tune in, turn on, and drop out.Įven the most auteur-y of auteurs doesn’t work alone. This is a world where Old Hollywood exists in uneasy tension with the new counterculture, as unshaven hippies scrounge for food alongside old drive-in theaters and legendary industry lunch spots, and the best possible Friday night is a pool party with Mama Cass. You get the sense that, for Tarantino, the opportunity to wallow in the mire of the period was the whole point of making the movie.
ONCE UPON A TIME IN LA MOVIE
The director’s latest, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, takes place in a loving recreation of late-’60s Los Angeles, as former TV cowboy Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) grapples with a career that’s gone to seed, his stuntman Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) takes a fateful visit to an old movie ranch, and Rick’s neighbor Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) basks in her newfound stardom. Cinematographer Robert Richardson tracks Margot Robbie on the set of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.įew filmmakers working today are as skilled at creating their own cinematic world as Quentin Tarantino.