When Quentin Tarantino offered Brad Pitt acting advice: “Shut the fuck up and let the master do his job”
He might have wasted little time establishing himself as one of the most influential auteurs of a generation, but Quentin Tarantino originally had eyes on conquering Hollywood from the other side of the camera.
For a while, his dream was to become an actor, with Tarantino making his screen debut as an Elvis impersonator in an episode of The Golden Girls. However, as anybody who has seen his many questionable performances and stilted cameos over the years can attest, he was significantly better suited to filmmaking.
Still, once somebody is bitten by the acting bug, it’s hard to shake off the effects, which eventually put Tarantino in the position of thinking he was the best guy to offer advice to Brad Pitt. They’ve become close friends and regular collaborators, but it goes without saying that one of them is hardly in need of instruction.
Then again, Tarantino is known for visualising every frame of his features inside of his head during the writing and pre-production process, so by the time he’s on set with his cast and crew, he knows exactly what he wants and how he expects his actors to achieve it.
Even an A-list megastar and versatile thespian like Pitt wasn’t immune from Tarantino thinking he knew best, but despite his status as an enduring heartthrob and sex symbol since the early 1990s, the two-time Academy Award-winning auteur had some suggestions for how the actor should take his shirt off.
The scene from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, where Pitt‘s Cliff Booth removes his shirt and reveals his glistening abs to the world, made hearts flutter in cinemas around the world, but Tarantino was under the impression that there was a better way to achieve the disrobing.
“I go, ‘So, I’m thinking maybe you unbutton the Hawaiian shirt, and you peel that off and then peel off the Champion T-shirt,'” Tarantino explained on the 3 Girls, 1 Keith podcast. “He was like, ‘Really? You want me to go through all that button bullshit? I’ll just take it off in one bit.'”
No stranger to onscreen shirtlessness, Pitt’s method was both economical and effective, leaving Tarantino with no other choice but to admit he was in the wrong. “I’m like, ‘OK, this guy knows exactly what time it is,'” he confessed. “Shut the fuck up and let the master do his job. Even when you see him in the work shed and the way he puts on the leather gloves and puts the wire in his mouth, all butch and macho. He just knows what time it is.”
Needless to say, Pitt made the right call in ditching Tarantino’s unbuttoning idea in favour of doing it all in one, and the end result was one of the most memorable scenes from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood for obvious and aesthetically pleasing reasons.
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