By Quentin Tarantino, Brad Pitt, Leo DiCaprio and Margot Robbie did a new Q&A session about their sprawling celebration of late-Sixties Americana Once Upon A Time In Hollywood over the weekend, and according to the Hollywood Reporter, they spilled a lot of new info, from life on Tarantino's legendarily anti-phone sets to how DiCaprio and Robbie built their characters around improv, and dancing around like a cloud, respectively. So what did we find out?
Leo's big breakdown was completely improvised
As written, the extended TV-drama-within-a-film section, where DiCaprio's Rick Dalton plays 'the heavy' on Lancer, was meant to be a straight pastiche, but DiCaprio had other ideas. "I need to fuck up during the Lancer sequence, and when I fuck up during the Lancer sequence, I need to have a real crisis of conscience about it and I have to come back from it in some way," Tarantino remembered DiCaprio telling him. "My response was, 'You're going to fuck up my Lancer sequence? That's my Western! I get two-for-one in this movie — I snuck a Western in here while no one was fucking looking!'"
Well, almost completely
Tarantino was there to shout out broad topics for DiCaprio to vent on. For instance Tarantino would say: "Get pissed off about Jim Stacy," and DiCaprio would go off. "Oh, that fucking Jim Stacy, just sitting up there watching me, thinking he's so fucking hot, he wouldn't be a wrangler on my show."
"The cutest part was how nervous [DiCaprio] was to do it," Tarantino recalled. "I've never seen him so nervous."
Quentin takes his no phones policy seriously
"You have to check your phone in — there are no phones, this is sacred ground — and one went off in between takes and you would've thought someone went into the Sistine Chapel and took a shit," said Pitt. "Not only did production come to a grinding halt — and no one would cop to it, even though we knew the general area — Quentin sent us home for the rest of the day and we had the afternoon off to think about we had done."
Like, very seriously
Tarantino was completely unrepentant. "I ask you for one thing," he said, "and if you have no more respect for me than that, then go home."
Leo got starstruck on set
Of all the gigantic stars on the Once Upon A Time... set, it was the late Luke Perry who knocked DiCaprio sideways: he "brought back to my teenage past and [I] felt starstruck," DiCaprio said, adding that Perry "couldn't have been a gentler soul".
Margot Robbie took inspiration for her Sharon Tate from clouds
"I find it a lot easier to go dark, a lot easier to yell and scream and cry and do all of that onscreen — I can get there a lot quicker," Robbie explained. "To be truly light all the time was actually hard, weirdly hard." So to actually access all that deeply buried sweetness and light, she "did a lot of weird stuff" with a movement coach, "like where you run around and pretend to be a cloud". She also banned herself from looking at emails for 24 hours before a shooting day to properly chill out (although anyone who's attempted an email hiatus will know that the stress of sorting your inbox is nothing compared to the gnawing terror of not seeing it and assuming something's gone horribly wrong).
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