David Fincher cut 60 pages from Quentin Tarantino’s script for The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth before he shot it. Speaking to Empire, Fincher said the first draft he read ran to 230 pages, which he described as “essentially two movies.”
It is an unusual detail to hear from a director, and a useful one for anyone writing a feature. Here is what was said, what the numbers mean, and what the cut can teach about trimming your own script.
What Fincher said
The film is a standalone follow-up to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, with Brad Pitt back as Cliff Booth. Tarantino wrote it, Netflix acquired the script in 2025, and Tarantino chose not to direct it himself.
In the Empire interview, as reported by TheWrap, Fincher said he cut about 60 pages. He described the version he shot as the overlap between what Pitt wanted to do, what he wanted to do and what Tarantino wanted. He also described it as less about plot than about how its characters collide in 1977 Hollywood, and said that early on there was a real question of whether it should be a film or a series.
Tarantino, in the same feature, compared the tone to an Elmore Leonard novel and said he does not see it as a hangout movie.
What 230 pages actually means
The usual rule of thumb is one page per minute of screen time. By that measure, 230 pages is a film of almost four hours. Most feature scripts run between 90 and 120 pages, which is why “two movies” is not an exaggeration.
Take 60 pages away and you are left with roughly 170, still far above the usual range. The film is reported to run about two hours and twenty minutes. According to What’s on Netflix, Fincher’s first assembly came in at 2 hours and 18 minutes, far shorter than the four and a half hours Tarantino had expected. Fincher has not said how long the shooting script ended up, so the arithmetic only goes so far. It is a reminder that the page per minute rule is an average, not a law: dense dialogue plays fast, long action takes time, and the edit decides the rest.
Why the rule exists at all, and why page count is the first thing a reader notices, is covered in How to Format a Screenplay.
Why Tarantino can hand in 230 pages
Tarantino is one of the few writers whose script gets read whatever its length. A 230-page draft from him is a starting point for a negotiation between a director, a star and a studio, all of whom already want to make the film.
A spec script from a new writer is in a different position. Many competitions set a page limit, and readers see the page count before they read a word. A long script tells them the writer has not yet decided what the story is. That decision is the job Fincher did here, and it is the job most writers have to do before anyone else reads the pages.
How to cut a script without losing the story
Fincher’s description of the cut points to a method any writer can use on their own draft.
Find the overlap
Fincher kept what the three people making the film all wanted. Working alone, the test is simpler: keep what serves the story you can state in one sentence. If your logline needs two sentences to hold everything in the draft, the draft is probably two stories. How to Write a Logline shows how to build that sentence.
Cut sequences, not sentences
Sixty pages is not a trim. At 10 to 15 pages per sequence, it is four to six whole sequences, or close to a full act. Cuts of that size happen at the level of structure: whole stretches of story that do not serve the main line come out together.
That is easier to do on cards than on pages. Lay out the outline, find the sequences whose results do not push the story forward, and remove them there first. How to Outline a Screenplay walks through the method.
If it is two movies, choose one
Fincher faced a version of this choice early on: was the story a film or a series? It stayed a film. When a draft holds two films, they usually belong to two different wants. Ask which one the protagonist is actually chasing from the first act to the last, and build the cut around that. The other story is not wasted. It may be your next script.
Then trim the scenes
Only after the structure is right does line-level cutting pay off. Enter scenes late, leave them early, and cut greetings, goodbyes and anything a character says that the audience already knows.
When you can see the result
The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth opens exclusively in IMAX cinemas on November 25 and arrives on Netflix on December 23. It is also one of the six films for which Netflix has said it will report box office numbers, as covered in our piece on Netflix and box office reporting.
When it arrives, it will be worth watching with the 230 pages in mind: what kind of film survived the cut, and what kind of film was left on the desk.
What is the longest draft you have ever written, and how much of it survived? Tell us in the comments.
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