Quentin Tarantino Explains Leonardo DiCaprio's Crazy Improvised Scene in ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD

In Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, there’s a great scene where Leonardo DiCaprio’s character Rick Dalton goes into his trailer and has a complete meltdown after he forgets his lines on set. This meltdown is one of my favorite parts of the movie, and it was completely improvised.

In a recent interview with 2 Bears 1 Cave podcast, Tarantino talked about this scene and detailed how he helped DiCaprio prepare for it, explaining:

"What happened there was, I knew I wanted to have that scene but I didn’t want to write it out. I didn’t want it to have to be dialogue he remembered. So I got Leo and I was saying, 'So look, here’s what I want to do: I want you to come in having f**ked up on set not knowing your lines and I want you to come in the trailer and have a whole mad anger at yourself, detest fest, a complete temper tantrum against yourself. Just a gigantic pity party where you just lose your sh*t, but against yourself, nobody else. And I want it to have the randomness of an improv, it just comes out of you.'

Tarantino went on to talk about how he helped DiCaprio along, saying:

"Now, what I did do though, is I gave him different subjects he could rant about. 'Here’s a subject, here’s a subject, here’s something you could say.' And he goes, 'Great.' He was a little nervous. It was actually very cute that he was nervous that day because it’s on him and he knows that. So we’re shooting this scene and I’m right by the camera and we just do a few different takes and it was great. And then, from time to time, if I thought he ran out of something I could throw something his way."

Well, DiCaprio was awesome in the scene! That was such a great performance, and it was entertaining as hell.