By By and large, Leo DiCaprio gets what he wants. That might be an Oscar. It might be $35,000 of Russell Crowe's money for a dinosaur skull. But he gets it in the end.
However, Quentin Tarantino's revealed that he had to say no to DiCaprio when he decided that he really wanted to play stuntman Cliff Booth rather than stuttering Western star Rick Dalton in Once Upon A Time In... Hollywood.
"Everyone wanted to play Cliff," Tarantino told Entertainment Weekly. "Everyone wanted to play Cliff. I have a tremendous amount of respect for Leo as an actor, [and] he wanted to play Cliff, but he knew he was better for Rick."
Without having seen the film, it's hard to shake the sense that Leo was banging on Tarantino's door demanding to play 'Mistletoe & Wine' hitmaker Sir Cliff Richard. But what was it about Leo that made him better for Rick than Cliff?
"He's just better," Tarantino said, which doesn't really explain anything but you can see what he means. "I could see him as the star of a TV show. And, also, most stunt guys that are teamed up with actors, are usually 10 years older than the actor."
The two roles do feel like they were written specifically for DiCaprio and Pitt, but Tarantino said the going into the scriptwriting process assuming that he'd be able to bag the pair of them "would have been kind of silly".
"I really did not know if I was going to get, like, the greatest casting coup of the century. No, I hoped it would work out with those guys. But the thing about it was, to be realistic about it, I couldn't count on that."
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