By Erin Free
“You’re right, a short hand does develop,” says actor, Kurt Russell, when FilmInk asks him if reuniting with writer/director, Quentin Tarantino, provided them with a streamlined sense of communication, “but there’s nothing in short hand with Quentin. It’s too much fun to listen to him talk long hand. You don’t want anything in short hand, you want it in long hand! He’s more than willing to do that too, and it’s just a blast. And The Hateful Eight is Tarantino on display. This is Tarantino all the way.” After getting behind the wheel as the motor-vehicular marauder, Stuntman Mike, in Death Proof, Tarantino’s hard charging 2007 paean to bottom-of-the-barrel exploitation cinema, Kurt Russell now saddles up for The Hateful Eight, the director’s second western after his blazing 2012 effort, Django Unchained. “He’s absolutely relentless in going about his day, and wanting everybody to get the most out of it and enjoy it,” Russell told FilmInk of Tarantino just prior to the theatrical release of The Hateful Eight. “His crew is tight knit, and his cast is tight knit. It’s like being on a pirate ship. You’ve got this king pirate captain, and he’s leading you into strange situations all the time, but he knows where he’s going and you’re more than willing to ride it out with him. And you know that when you get there, all hell’s going to break loose, and it’s going to be a big time.”
Every film from the decidedly non-prolific Quentin Tarantino represents a big time for cinemagoers. Ever since he tore onto the scene in 1992 with the game-changing Reservoir Dogs, every subsequent film from the writer/director – 1994’s smash hit, Pulp Fiction; 1997’s Jackie Brown; 2003’s Kill Bill; 2007’s Death Proof; 2009’s Inglourious Basterds; and 2012’s Django Unchained – has been a pop cultural event, and his latest is no different. Tarantino’s new western is set in the harsh, lean years after The Civil War, and opens on grizzled, determined bounty hunter, John Ruth (Russell), who is pounding through a wintry, unforgiving landscape towards the remote hamlet of Red Rock, where he intends to bring his captive, Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh), to justice. On the road, they encounter two strangers: Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson), a former union soldier turned bounty hunter, and Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins), who claims to be Red Rock’s new sheriff. Stuck in a blizzard, the group seeks refuge at a stagecoach stopover on a mountain pass. When they arrive, they are greeted not by the proprietor, but by four suspicious men: Bob (Demian Bichir), the fill-in boss of the stopover; Oswaldo Mobray (Tim Roth), the hangman of Red Rock; cow-puncher, Joe Gage (Michael Madsen); and Confederate General Sanford Smithers (Bruce Dern). With a storm swelling and booming outside, a greater rage oscillates inside the stagecoach stopover, as John Ruth realises that not everybody is as they seem…
With a cast made up of largely returning Tarantino players and a few newcomers in Jennifer Jason Leigh, Demian Bichir, and Channing Tatum in a minor role, FilmInk asks Kurt Russell if he had any advice for the newbies on the film’s Colorado set. “You really can give them pointers,” the legendary actor replies on the line from the states, his voice filled with youthful energy despite his 64 years. “You really can say, ‘This is the way that it works, and this is the way that he does it.’ You can also say this to them, and it’s never going to be a lie: ‘You’re about to have the best experience that you’ve ever had. If you don’t, then tell me what was better, and I’m happy for you!’ It’s really the truth. Quentin is that much fun. He’s a fun person to know and to spend time with. He knows every story, actor, movie, and TV show. You hear about that, but when you’re on a movie for five months and you’re experiencing it every day, it’s really something. I always felt energised about going to work. I always felt invigorated and inspired, and I didn’t want to let him down. I wanted to do my very best to feel free, and to explore, and to come through with a character that’s going to push the story forward.”
Russell’s character in The Hateful Eight might just join his rogue’s gallery of tough guy cinema essentials, standing tall beside Escape From New York’s Snake Plissken, Big Trouble In Little China’s Jack Burton, The Thing’s R.J. MacReady, and Dark Blue’s Eldon Perry. With guns blazing and moustache and mutton chops flowing, John Ruth is larger than life, to say the least. “He’s one of those big characters, but he’s got a lot of sensitivity inside,” Russell offers. “That’s something that you rarely see, so when you do see it, it’s kind of shocking. He’s a character that I’ve never played before. I’ve never played a character that bombastic and uncouth. He’s so insensitive to anybody or anything around him. He’s determined to get his bounty in, but he does it for a very honourable reason. He’s the only bounty hunter that doesn’t just shoot people and bring them in. He believes in the system. With John Ruth, you die because a jury found you guilty. Then he stands there and watches you hang, or as he says, ‘watches you go purple on a rope.’ He watches you dance, and he says, ‘Alright, that was a mean bastard that needed to hang, and that’s one less that’s out there. Now I’m going to go get another one.’ But there are a lot of people out there that want your bounty, so when we meet him, he’s extremely paranoid.”
While westerns rolled at will across the cinematic frontier in the time of John Ford and Howard Hawks, they are now an endangered species, rarely raising their head in fear of it being blasted off by a bullet emblazoned with the words, “Poor box office.” In a strangely pleasing twist, however, Kurt Russell has now found himself starring in two of them back to back. Hot on the heels of The Hateful Eight comes Bone Tomahawk, a low budget indie western in which four men set out to rescue a group of captives from cannibalistic cave dwellers. “You don’t generally read a bunch of westerns,” Russell says. “It just so happened that the two were back-to-back. I’ve never done two genres back-to-back. But at this time in my life, I don’t care about that anymore. I don’t care about always doing something different the next time out. I really don’t. I’ve made my career doing that. These days, I’m not going to feel precious about it…if I like it, I’m going to do it. And what happened was, boom, boom, back-to-back, I got these two westerns. They’re very different, but they’re both very good.”
Kurt Russell has a long and storied history with the western genre. As a young actor starting out, he appeared on western TV series like The Virginian, The Legend Of Jesse James, Laredo, The High Chaparral, and Gunsmoke, and toplined the 1976 series, The Quest, alongside Tim Matheson. More importantly, he also starred as legendary lawman, Wyatt Earp, in 1993’s Tombstone, a rare post-1980 western success story. “I was thrilled to read it, but I knew that it was going to be difficult to get made,” Russell says of the wildly entertaining actioner. “I had to go out and get the money for it, and I was really happy that movie got made. The experience itself was difficult, but I was pleased to a large degree with the outcome of what we did, because first of all, it was a tremendous script. It had a great opportunity to be a great movie. It certainly has had the kind of impact that few westerns have had over the years. I was just reading some list of all-timers the other day, and it was seventh on that. That’s a good thing to be up there with those greatest westerns of all time. The western is not a genre that people write a lot of. It’s been seventeen years or so between Tombstone and The Hateful Eight and Bone Tomahawk…that’s a long time.”
And Kurt Russell feels right at home on the range, and would be more than happy to mount up again. “Hollywood works in funny ways,” the actor says, audibly smiling. “That is to say, generally, that you do something that’s successful and they, rightfully and understandably so, want to repeat it. They want some version of that to throw out there. If you’re a big component of it, they, of course, want to throw those scripts your way. That’s happened to me a number of times over the years with different movies. I don’t know how long it will be before I don boots and spurs and jump on a horse in a hat, but I do feel comfortable in that world, and I’ve been fortunate to be in the ones that I’ve done because they’ve been very good.”
The Hateful Eight is available on Digital now, and is released on DVD and Blu-ray on May 25. For more on Kurt Russell, click here. For more on Quentin Tarantino, click here. Bone Tomahawk is available now on DVD and Blu-ray.
