Quentin Tarantino felt like he was "really letting down" Brad Pitt by not making a Cliff Booth movie.

The actor is set to reprise the role in Netflix's The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth - a follow-up to 2019's Once Upon A Time In Hollywood - and Tarantino has admitted he "felt bad" after deciding against making the film his 10th and final directorial effort.

He told Empire magazine: "He was the one I felt I was really letting down when I didn't do it. I felt bad about that."

However, Tarantino was swayed to let Pitt's Fight Club director David Fincher helm the movie, to make sure it still got made.

He explained: "I mean, one of the things that made this all work was my excitement over David doing my material.

"I've gotten a lot of respect as a screenwriter, but I still feel that people think that I'm a director who just writes s*** for himself.

"The fact that a director of David's calibre would spend a year-and-a-half of his life doing my material was, I thought, wonderful. It said a lot about what was on the page."

Fincher admitted that Pitt's disappointment at not getting to play Booth again was the drive behind the follow-up.

He quipped: "We have a mutual friend who was disappointed that he wasn't going to play Cliff Booth again and he said, 'Do you want to read this [script]?'

"I said, 'I would love to.' He said, 'But do you want to read it?' And I said, 'I wouldn't do that unless you have permission.'

"And he came back and said, 'I have permission!' And I said, 'Okay, I will read it.' And I was smitten."

Fincher added that Pitt is "so into" the movie, which created a unique working "situation".

He revealed: "The weirdest, most interesting part of this, for me, is that I've never been in a situation where the person playing the character knows more about that character than you'll ever know.

"Sometimes you have to push back on that. I knew the new stuff, and Brad knew who the guy was, so Brad could withstand the hurricane of, 'What about this? What about that?'

"He was like, 'No, no, no. I got this.' "