David Fincher’s ‘Cliff Booth’ Clocks In at 140 Minutes — 60 Pages Trimmed From Tarantino’s Original Script: “It Was Essentially Two Movies”

So, this is interesting. Two movies. That's what David Fincher says he was handed when Quentin Tarantino's screenplay for “The Adventures of Cliff Booth” landed on his desk.

“The first draft I read was 230 pages. It was essentially two movies,” Fincher tells Empire Magazine, adding that he cut 60 pages, bringing the film in at around 2 hours and 20 minutes. “Somewhere in there was the Venn diagram of what Brad wanted to do, what I want to do, what Quentin wanted to do. Not ‘want to do,’ but the areas we would focus on.”

Now, let's talk about that runtime.

At roughly 140 minutes, ‘Cliff Booth’ sits right in Fincher's comfort zone. It's basically “Fight Club” length (139 minutes), a bit shorter than “Gone Girl” (149), and well short of his true epics: “Zodiac” (157), “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” (158), and “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (166), which remains his longest (and sloggiest?). It's also a step up from his recent, “leaner” work: “Mank” ran 131 minutes, and “The Killer” clocked in under two hours at 118 minutes.

As for the math, the unwritten rule of thumb is that a 170-page script usually means a three-hour movie. Still, I can't help but wonder about those 60 missing pages. Tarantino is not exactly known for writing filler. Fincher calling the original draft “two movies” suggests there was a whole other film in there that we'll never see. Maybe that's for the best.

In that same chat with Empire, Tarantino chimes in to set his own expectations for ‘Cliff Booth.’ "I don't think of it as a hangout movie at all," he says. "Once Upon A Time In Hollywood was a hangout movie, but you know you're going to Cielo Drive (site of the Manson murders). It has this force, thus I didn't need a lot of plot. This script was very different." Think “Jackie Brown” more than ‘Hollywood.’ "To me, it had the flavour of an Elmore Leonard paperback: a crime-story paperback feel."

Alongside Pitt, the cast of ‘Cliff Booth’ includes Elizabeth Debicki, Scott Caan, Carla Gugino, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, and Peter Weller. There's no Leonardo DiCaprio as Rick Dalton — he declined a $3M offer to cameo. Or did he? Maybe that was just a decoy, and he'll surprise us when we see the film. I'm just speculating.

‘Cliff Booth’ opens on November 25, over Thanksgiving weekend, exclusively on around 350 IMAX screens.