As reported last weekend, Leonardo DiCaprio is now officially signed on for Quentin Tarantino's next film, the not-about-Charles Manson-but-set-around-that-time one, and was expected by quite a few to play the role of Manson.
Deadline's exclusive on that had it that DiCaprio was playing an aging actor, not Manson, and have now followed up with more details on the role. According to them, DiCaprio's character is "an actor who had his own Western show, Bounty Law, that ran on the air from 1958 to 1963. His attempt to transition to movies didn’t work out and in 1969 - the film is set at the height of hippy Hollywood movement - he’s guesting on other people’s shows while contemplating going to Italy which has become a hotbed for low-budget Westerns."
It's interesting that Tarantino's focusing on Italy and Spaghetti Westerns, as it's a genre he has a whole lot of love for. Django Unchained and Inglorious Basterds both heavily leaned on them, and The Hateful Eight saw Ennio Morricone - who wrote a number of soundtracks that defined Spaghetti Westerns - on scoring duties for that film.
The report also reiterates that the film is seen as a "Pulp Fiction-esque tapestry of Los Angeles during the summer of the Manson Murders," which is also interesting because ever since Jackie Brown, Tarantino's films have been sort of operating on a higher level of reality. What do we mean? Well, when Tarantino was doing press for Kill Bill, he described it (and we're paraphrasing here) as "the film characters from my other films would go see."
Django Unchained, Inglorious Basterds, and to some extent The Hateful Eight, have all operated with that kind of over-the-top sensibility, so to see him back to Pulp Fiction, possibly even Jackie Brown, sensibilities is pretty gosh-darn cool.
The untitled ninth film arrives in cinemas on August 9th, 2019.
Via Deadline