Quentin Tarantino‘s entire filmography is set to get the coffee table book treatment from Insight Editions.
The series kicks off with “The Making of Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood’” out on Tuesday. Author Jay Glennie teases that he also plans a book on Tarantino’s forthcoming tenth and final film once its released. Details about the director’s swan song remain a mystery, as Tarantino has written and disregarded a few ideas since completing “Once Upon a Time” in 2019. Glennie claims to know nothing about the next film, but he will surely write about it. “I haven’t even discussed that one,” says Glennie, “I’ll cross that bridge when I get there.”
The first book tells the full story of how the director’s most recent film came to be, from Tarantino’s seedling of an idea after seeing a stunt double and actor chat it up on-set, to the film’s FYC campaign during the 2020 awards season. Stocked with copious interviews with the cast and crew, and featuring behind-the-scenes photos from Tarantino and Sony Pictures’ collections — many taken by set photographer Andrew Cooper — the weighty book is both a richly researched account of the film and a work of art in its own right.
Glennie has written books on the likes of “Performance,” “Raging Bull” and “The Deer Hunter,” and as his latest book’s introduction by Tarantino recounts, it was their common love of Michael Cimino’s 1978 Oscar winner that led the two cinephiles to meet for the first time. Tarantino writes that at the end of his first conversation with Glennie, he offered, “If you ever want to give one of my flicks the Jay Glennie Treatment, gimme a ring.”
Glennie adds, “He loved my previous books, which was, as you can bloody imagine, hugely gratifying to hear.” The author took the filmmaker up on his word, as they planned not just one, but ten books on Tarantino’s movies. Regarding the decision to start with “Once Upon a Time,” Glennie told Tarantino, “If we’re cooking up an idea to do a whole lot of deep dives, let’s go right to the end and let’s do ‘Once Upon a Time’ because it’s one of my favorites. I love the movie. It sounds a bit cheesy, but it was just an instant classic.”
With Tarantino on board, Glennie connected with the rest of the film’s cast and crew, piecing together the movie’s full story from the insider perspectives of Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio, Margot Robbie, Al Pacino, Margaret Qualley, Austin Butler, Mikey Madison, Maya Hawke, Dakota Fanning, Kurt Russell, producers David Heyman and Shannon McIntosh, assistant director Bill Clark, Sony Pictures chairman and CEO Tom Rothman and many more.
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No vantage point is too big or small, as the book includes multiple accounts of seemingly every decision made from pre-production through release. Memorable stories include Sharon Tate’s sister gifting Robbie the late actress’ perfume, the director striking a deal with the owner of the Playboy Mansion to shoot on the iconic property, location scouts knocking on doors in the Hollywood Hills to find the perfect driveway for a specific crane shot and production designer Barbara Ling creating the actual Rick Dalton board game seen in the background of the character’s house — a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it prop that Tarantino appreciated so much that he halted the shoot so the crew could play.
Glennie says that everyone he interviewed was “talking about a film that they absolutely adore,” and were generally pleased to revisit memories from the film time and time again. Even the studio heads at Sony were enthusiastic partners. “As soon as I mentioned it to Tom (Rothman), his team just said, ‘Yeah, whatever you need,’” Glennie says, “There’s a huge amount of trust in that. I don’t take that lightly.”
The author has already finished writing the next book in the series, which focuses on Tarantino’s sixth film, 2009’s “Inglourious Basterds.” He is currently writing the third book, focusing on the director’s seventh film, 2012’s “Django Unchained.” Tarantino will write introductions for each of the books and they will be released in 2026 and 2027, respectively.
“Quentin is such a distinctive guy. We decided we weren’t going to go chronologically. You’re going to have film nine, film six, and then film seven. Hopefully by the end of it, you’re gonna have to reinforce your book shelf,” jokes Glennie, adding, “I think ‘Reservoir Dogs’ is going to be the fourth and then ‘Pulp Fiction.’ We’ll play it by ear after that.”
The author does, however, plan to publish a single book for both “Kill Bill: Vol 1” and “Vol 2,” as Tarantino intended the two movies to be seen as one. They are even being rereleased as such this December as “Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair.”
To complete the ten-volume library, Glennie is unsure if he will try to document the making of Tarantino’s next film in real time, on-set, or if he will allow for distance and write the book via the same research tactics that he applies to the other nine volumes.
“I wouldn’t mind giving it some distance,” he said. After all, Glennie is a film historian, with his previous books focusing on titles from past decades. “Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood” is by far his most contemporary topic, though he notes, “It feels like it could be in that same canon of work. It doesn’t feel like it was made in 2019.”
Of the writing and research process, Glennie says, “It’s been a joy from the get-go to now, but the biggest joy has been the trust that people have given me to tell this story. With that there’s a huge amount of pressure, though. You can’t bastardize that trust. You’ve got to earn it. You’ve got to deliver.”
From Variety US