It’s always an intriguing prospect when Quentin Tarantino announces a new film. He’s said he’s only ever going to make 10 or 11 movies, and if The Hateful Eight counted as his eighth film (which according to him it does; Kill Bill is one movie) that means he only has two or three more. One of them is, apparently, the head-scratching prospect of an R-rated Star Trek movie produced by J.J. Abrams, but the other seems to be much more in the Tarantino oeuvre, concerning Hollywood and the Manson murders. Deadline has revealed the title of this new film, its basic premise, and two of its stars.

Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio have been cast as the two leads in the movie, which Tarantino announced via Sony is to be called Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, a clear and unmistakable reference to his favorite filmmaker, Sergio Leone, who made the elegiac western Once Upon a Time in the West and the somber gangster movie Once Upon a Time in America. Tarantino has slowly been biting Leone’s steez for a number of years, and his most recent three films (Inglourious Basterds, Django Unchained, and The Hateful Eight) have all had the feel of those old spaghetti westerns in some fashion.

Pitt and DiCaprio have both appeared in Tarantino movies before of course (Pitt in Basterds and DiCaprio in Django) but this time out they’ll be a pair. Hollywood is “a story that takes place in Los Angeles in 1969, at the height of hippy Hollywood. The two lead characters are Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), former star of a western TV series, and his longtime stunt double Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt). Both are struggling to make it in a Hollywood they don’t recognize anymore. But Rick has a very famous next-door neighbor…Sharon Tate.”

With this movie, it seems like the director is bridging his earlier LA-based films (like Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown) with his later period ones. Tarantino is no stranger to bringing real life and real people into his historical films (*cough* Hitler *cough*) but I’ll be interested to see how much the movie deals with the murder of Tate and her friends or if there’s revisionist history at work. Reports have said Tarantino has been pursuing Oscar-nominee Margot Robbie to play Tate, but nothing official yet.

What are your thoughts on Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood? Let us know in the comments below!

Images: TWC/Universal

Kyle Anderson is the Associate Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!

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