By Philip Berk & Erin Free
Every film from the decidedly non-prolific Quentin Tarantino represents a major screen moment for keen 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…
Tricky and labyrinthine, the film is all about the concept of trust and the art of deception. “I wanted to play with the idea that in today’s world, nobody can get away with lying about almost anything,” Tarantino told FilmInk upon the theatrical release of The Hateful Eight. “You leave so many fingerprints that you can’t disappear anymore. But in the 1800s, when people showed up and said who they were, there was no backup. So I liked the idea of a movie where a bunch of characters are trapped in a situation and nobody can trust what anybody says. And we don’t let the audience know if they’re telling the truth or not either. I want you to make those decisions and answer those questions, and depending on how you answer those questions, you’ll have a slightly different view of the movie than somebody else.”
The set-up of The Hateful Eight echoes with the same kind of paranoia as Tarantino’s low budget wonder, Reservoir Dogs, in which a group of hardened crooks hole up from the cops and then unravel when they clock that there’s a traitor in their ranks. “The Hateful Eight is very similar to Reservoir Dogs,” the director happily admits, “but it’s grander in almost every way, certainly in terms of the budget, and the time that we had to do it.” One of the key differences between The Hateful Eight and Reservoir Dogs is that Tarantino shot his new western on now antiquated 70mm film, a method common in decades past but now unheard of in today’s digital age. A longtime proponent of celluloid over pixels, The Hateful Eight is the director’s big, bloody love letter to the medium of film itself. “This is very theatrical material,” Tarantino says. “I could do this in a ninety-seat theatre and it would be good. I could do it on 16mm and it would be good. But if cinema is going the way of the dodo bird, then let me do it on 70mm, and let me try to see that bigness. There was a lot of second guessing, and people would say, ‘If he’s doing a piece that is so set bound, why would he shoot it in 70mm? After all, 70mm is just to shoot mountainscapes or The Sahara Desert, right?’ But I don’t agree with that. I’ve opened it up, and 70mm has given me more elbow room inside of the stagecoach stopover. It makes the film more intimate.”
As well as the film’s vintage 70mm vibe, Tarantino has also taken a different tack with the soundtrack for The Hateful Eight. Moving away from his previous method of ingeniously stitching together pop songs and bits of pre-existing movie soundtracks to create a striking aural patchwork, Tarantino tapped veteran Italian maestro, Ennio Morricone (who famously scored Sergio Leone’s classic spaghetti westerns of the sixties, movies of which Tarantino is famously enamored), to create an entirely new score for the film. The move paid off, with the veteran maestro picking up a well-deserved Oscar for his work. “I resent when people call my scores needle drops,” Tarantino says. “If they get called second hand scores, I always bristle, and I’m vaguely offended. But for whatever reason, this piece of material – and maybe it’s just my preciousness about it – deserved its own original score. It deserves its own theme that you could whistle or hum to yourself for the next fifty years. That’s why we got together with Ennio Morricone, and along with just the excitement of working with him, it ended up being a very gratifying experience. It was wonderful going to Prague and watching The Czech Philharmonic in the recording session.”
Famed for his love of referencing films from the past, Tarantino’s touchpoints on The Hateful Eight were more televisual, despite its 70mm visuals and epic Morricone score. “If you remember shows like The Virginian or Bonanza or Gunsmoke, they were rarely about the lead character,” Tarantino says. “It was usually about the guest star, who was played by Charles Bronson or Robert Culp or James Coburn or Vic Morrow or actors like that. They would show up, and you didn’t know the truth about their character, and whether they were a scoundrel or not. You had one of the main characters helping them out throughout the course of the episode, and you were waiting to find out if this guest star was a good guy or a bad guy. So I thought, ‘Well, what would happen if we took all those guest star type characters and literally cast them with actors that would be terrific on a show like that? Then let’s put them in a room and have them hash out their situations without having the moral centre that a TV show’s lead characters usually represent.’ I wanted to do a movie where nobody is good, and yet they could conceivably be the anti-hero in another western. I didn’t want any of the characters to have any moral ground.”
Is The Hateful Eight a homage of sorts to Stagecoach, the 1939 classic from director, John Ford, in which a group of people travelling on a stagecoach have their journey halted by the threat of an Indian attack, and then learn something about each other in the process? “I actually do love that film, although I’m not on the record for being a big John Ford fan,” Tarantino says of the filmmaker behind such classic westerns as The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and She Wore A Yellow Ribbon. “But I do think that a case can be made that Stagecoach was a big jump forward in modern filmmaking; it holds up beautifully today.” What would John Ford think of his movies? “I don’t really think that many of the directors of that time period would appreciate my movies,” Tarantino smiles. “They would find them too bloody, but more than anything else, the curse words would turn them off. It’s just a generational thing. I love Howard Hawks, but I don’t think that Howard Hawks would like my movies, and I don’t think that George Cukor or Ernst Lubitsch would care for them either. One of the few directors that I met of that time period who did like my movies, and who I loved, was Sam Fuller. But even he had a problem with the cursing in my movies. He loved Reservoir Dogs, but he didn’t like all the bad language.”
But despite its manifest nods to the genre, Tarantino actually claims that The Hateful Eight didn’t necessarily have to be dotted with horses and six shooters. “This movie could be set in a post-apocalyptic world, or maybe even an Australian wasteland,” the director explains. “You could have a wintry, ice-covered wasteland where the survivors of a society that have all been cut asunder are huddled together in this shelter, arguing about who started the apocalypse and whose fault it is. But in this case, the apocalypse is The Civil War.” That aside, however, The Hateful Eight is very much a western, and it might not be Tarantino’s last either. “I actually feel, at least in today’s modern world, that you need to do three westerns to call yourself a western director,” he says. “Any less, and you’re just dabbling in the genre. I need to do a third one.”
In classic western terms, The Hateful Eight experienced a stagecoach robbery of its own when an early Tarantino version of the script was infamously leaked online. Enraged in the knowledge that he’d only passed the draft onto six actors that he was considering for roles in the proposed film, the director initially planned to scuttle the project entirely. “I’m very, very depressed,” he said at the time of the leak. “Someone has passed the script on to everyone in Hollywood. I didn’t mean to shoot it until a year from now. That’s it for now. I gave the script out to six people, and if I can’t trust them to that degree, then I have no desire to make it. I’ll publish it. I’m done. I’ll move on to the next thing. I have ten more scripts where that came from.”
Was he serious about bringing the hammer down on The Hateful Eight? “Yeah, I did seriously consider not doing it,” Tarantino replies. “I was hurt, angry, outraged, and disappointed. I wanted to write this one in a different way. My scripts usually get out there when I start passing them around, and I’ve never had a problem with that. I’ve never wanted to do them on red paper, and I don’t want to have a big watermark all the way through it so you can’t enjoy it when you read it. Django Unchained got out there on the internet, and a million people read it way before I was finished with it. And it was the same with Inglorious Basterds. But I wasn’t ready for that process with the first draft of The Hateful Eight, which at that point was almost an exercise in the writing of it, especially the second half, and it wasn’t the right ending. So when that happened, and it happened with so few people, I was outraged. But I was really angry with this town, and with the permissiveness in Hollywood that has allowed bad behaviour to be accepted. It was a corruption in the culture, and when culture gets corrupted, there is a sliding scale and suddenly everyone does it. For the most part, it happened through agents, who represent artists, so this kind of behaviour is not okay. So by me making such a big stink out of it, maybe they felt bad about what they’d done, whereas a week earlier they might have bragged about getting their hands on something and passing it around. But for those two weeks, maybe they weren’t bragging about that kind of behaviour. But we’ll see what happens in the long haul.”
And what of Quentin Tarantino’s own long haul? The director has made public statements about wanting to retire after making ten films (The Hateful Eight is, appropriately enough, his eighth) to live out the rest of his life as a cinema owner. With his love of celluloid, famed collection of 16mm film prints, personal library of vintage movie memorabilia, and all-round love of film, how does Tarantino see the future of the medium? “I don’t want to make any blanket statements,” he replies cautiously, “but we’re at a weird crossroads. I don’t think anybody even knows what the next five or ten years will have in store for us. But one thing that I can say is that it usually takes me about three years to do a movie, and that is not me dicking around – it’s because I’m writing. And it always starts with me and a blank piece of paper, so that takes time. That was the case with Django Unchained, Inglorious Basterds, and The Hateful Eight. But every time that I do another movie, even in those three years, things are different. The protocol on the set, the way that things run, the way that the industry standard has changed to one degree or another…it’s always a little different. Even the crews are always slightly different. Look, I don’t want to be the oldest guy on the block always complaining about how the old days were better; I don’t even know if that is the case, but I do think that we are at an interesting tipping point. But what the next five to ten years has to offer? I have no idea…”
The Hateful Eight is available on Digital, Blu-ray, and DVD now.
