Quentin Tarantino Says Leonardo DiCaprio Convinced Him to Change a Once Upon a Time In Hollywood Scene

One of the more memorable (and marketed) scenes in Once Upon a Time In Hollywood almost didn’t happen, and Leonardo DiCaprio is the man who pushed for it. Speaking with Deadline for a new interview, Quentin Tarantino revealed that the scene in which DiCpario’s Rick Dalton is filming a guest starring appearance on Lancer and forgets his lines was actually DiCaprio’s idea, and that he had to convince Tarantino to do it.

“Leo said, ‘I think I need to f*ck it up and forget the lines,'” Tarantino said. “I just wanted to do my Lancer scene, a way to do this Western through the back door. He said, ‘I know I’m kind of f**king up your scene, but I think that would be good for the character.’ I saw it as him ruining my fun, basically, but I say, ‘Fine. I’ll write a version, and we’ll do the Lancer scene straight, and with the f**k-up,’ knowing that in the editing room I was going to do what I wanted to. As soon as we did that second version, the take that is in the movie, I was like, ‘OK, OK, we’re obviously doing this now.’ He was right. It was terrific and it gave the whole thing an arc that worked wonderfully.”

The scene was featured in most of the trailers and ads and led to a scene where Rick goes to his trailer and has a breakdown. The two collaborated on that one as well, with Tarantino saying, “I said when you come back, maybe you’d been a bad actor, but now you’re going to be a slightly better bad actor who rises to the occasion. What it meant to the movie was, it became clear that his biggest enemy is himself. He’s not facing a bunch of bad guys in a Western anymore; his bad guys are his own demons. When he does that Wild Bunch walk to the Gilded Lily on the Lancer set, he’s facing his Mexican army, which is himself.”

DiCaprio discussed the importance of the scene for Rick’s arc, saying, “Here he is, face to face with the new hot s**t swinging d**k in Hollywood television who’s got his own show that Rick used to have. And Rick can’t get his lines out. He can’t do it. What’s so amazing about Quentin is, you bring up one idea like that, and then this whole other Pandora’s Box of possibilities opens up. He makes it a Western, within a Western. He says, we have to have Rick re-preparing himself, and then walking down that Western set to do a shootout with his adversary, but the shootout is within the context of a scene…”