“Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” actor recalls Quentin Tarantino threatening Brad Pitt on set: 'You'll be dead in this business'

Raechal ShewfeltFri, May 22, 2026 at 2:59 AM UTC

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Quentin Tarantino and Brad Pitt attend the 2023 Golden Globes in Beverly Hills
Credit: Christopher Polk/NBC via GettyKey Points -

Bruce Dern played George, the owner of Spahn Ranch, in the 2019 movie Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

The actor says that, during shooting, director Quentin Tarantino scolded costar Brad Pitt when he cut, even telling him that his career would suffer if he did that again.

Pitt and Tarantino previously worked together on the 2009 movie Inglourious Basterds.

At least one moment on the Once Upon a Time in Hollywood set was no fairytale.

Director Quentin Tarantino admonished his star Brad Pitt during the making of the 2019 film, actor Bruce Dern recalled in an interview with PEOPLE at the Cannes Film Festival.

The '60s-set dramedy about Leonardo DiCaprio's Rick Dalton trying to make a comeback in the entertainment industry features a scene in which Pitt's Cliff Booth (Dalton's stuntman) comes to visit Dern's George Spahn, the owner of a ranch where movies were once filmed that has been taken over by the Manson Family. Booth wants to check on his elderly friend, because he doesn't trust the unfamiliar young men and women staying there, so he visits Spahn in his trailer.

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"When Brad Pitt wakes me up, I'm in the bed and I get up and I'm a little groggy and stuff, and I just say, 'I'm not really sure what's going on,'" Dern recalled. "I'm looking at him. [Pitt] cut the camera. He cut the camera. The look on Quentin's face — I mean, he was insanely grave — and he said, 'Brad, what did you just do?' He said, 'Well, I cut the camera.'"

As Dern recalled, Tarantino said, "'Never again in your life will you ever cut a camera, or you'll be dead in this business. That's my domain. Don't stop behavior.' So then we went on and did the scene and all Brad did was say to him, 'Well, that wasn't in the script what he said.'"

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Dern noted that he ad-libbed his character's goodbye to Booth: "I don't know who you are, but you touched me today. You came to visit me, now I gotta go back to sleep."

Entertainment Weekly has reached out to both Tarantino and Pitt.

Brad Pitt and Bruce Dern in 'Once Upon a Time in Hollywood' (2019)
Credit: Hulu

The director and Pitt had previously worked together on 2009's Inglourious Basterds, which was nominated for eight Academy Awards. Christoph Waltz won the film's only Oscar for Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role.

Pitt won the best supporting actor Oscar his turn as Booth in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, alongside a cast that also included Margot Robbie, Timothy Olyphant, Dakota Fanning, Lena Dunham, and Austin Butler.

The movie was such a hit that a sequel, The Adventures of Cliff Booth, is coming to Netflix.

on Entertainment Weekly

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