Quentin Tarantino’s much-anticipated new film ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’ will run in competition at this month’s Cannes Film Festival, organisers said Thursday, after initial doubt over whether it would be shown.
The film, which stars Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio and Margot Robbie, will compete against works by veteran directors Ken Loach and Terrence Malick for the coveted Palme d’Or at the festival which begins on May 14.
“We were afraid the film would not be ready,” festival director Thierry Fremaux said, adding that Tarantino had finished it early after spending four straight months in the editing room.
“He’ll definitely be there — 25 years after the Palme d’Or for ‘Pulp Fiction’ — with a finished film screened in 35mm and his cast in tow,” he said.
“His film is a love letter to the Hollywood of his childhood, a rock music tour of 1969, and an ode to cinema as a whole,” he said of the work, which is about a Hollywood stunt double and runs for two hours 45 minutes.
Last month, Fremaux hinted he would hold the door open for the maker of ‘Reservoir Dogs’ until the very last minute.
Loach, 82, who won the Palme d’Or prize in 2016 with ‘I, Daniel Blake’, returns with ‘Sorry We Missed You’, an indictment of the gig economy, while Malick will premiere his World War II story, “A Hidden Life”, about a German conscientious objector guillotined by the Nazis in 1943.
