Quentin Tarantino Has Added More Sharon Tate Scenes To 'Once Upon A Time In... Hollywood'

We were warned that Quentin Tarantino might tweak Once Upon A Time In... Hollywood after its showing at Cannes, and so it's proved. Hoping to take a leaner film to the festival than other filmmakers, the version of Once Upon A Time In... Hollywood which Tarantino showed at Cannes lost a couple of scenes which have since made it back into the film.

Though Tarantino says he was "happy with the Cannes cut," he has added a little more footage which he had trimmed - which "amounts to two minutes".

"Even when we finally looked at the final mix just before we were going to get the print made, I cut out two little scenes," Tarantino told Deadline. "My magnificent post-production supervisor, Tina Anderson, did that. I just wanted a tight movie. So the only thing I actually put back basically, I extended a slight little bit of a scene with Sharon Tate, when she picks up a hitchhiker. Then the scene where James Stacy [Timothy Olyphant] talks to Rick [Dalton, DiCaprio’s character] and you suddenly see Rick in The Great Escape, and what would have happened if he was in that movie."

Tarantino had been a bit irked by some reaction to the amount of screen time and dialogue Margot Robbie's Tate got in the Cannes edit, but said that part of the revisions made to the film helped to round out the sense of her as a person.

"Unfortunately she’s a woman who has been defined by the tragedy of her death," he said. "While not making the Sharon Tate story, I wanted to explore who she was, the person. In doing research on her she sounds almost too good to be true from everybody who knew her. She knew a lot of people so there’s a whole lot of verbal historical accounts of her. She just seems to be one of those too sweet for this world kind of person."

So what can we expect from these Tate scenes?

"A day in the life, driving around, running errands, doing this, doing that, and just being with her. I thought that could be special and meaningful," Tarantino explained. "I wanted you to see Sharon a lot, see her living life. Not following some story, just see her living, see her being."