Everything Going on With Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight

It’s often been said that the Western is a dead film genre. But we think it’s safe to say that Quentin Tarantino will (again) blast some new life into it and the film medium itself with this year’s The Hateful Eight, which just began shooting today.

As revealed via The Weinstein Company, production on Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight began earlier today in Telluride, Colorado with the plan to shoot later this year. Of course that is just the tip of the iceberg for the latest project from the eclectic filmmaker.

Having already tried his hand at the anachronistic Spaghetti Western by way of Nazi Occupied France circa 1944, and then again with some southern fried pasta in 2012’s Antebellum Django Unchained, the auteur has made plain that his next film will stop with subversion and embrace the true form in a post-Civil War epic that longs to stand tall in glorious 70mm with the monumental hombres of his favorite genre. Already scheduled for a nebulous (but likely December) 2015 release date from The Weinstein Company, Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight is a period piece that aims to have the last word on its era.

But before we take this undoubtedly loquacious trip to a blizzard somewhere in Wyoming (be it eight, 10 or 12 years after the Civil War), let’s first go over everything it’s actually about.

The Production

The heated Hateful Eight production will likely make a riveting film unto itself one day (perhaps the “ninth” QT joint?), considering that it almost was not meant to be.

It has long been known that Tarantino wanted to make his own official Spaghetti Western, in no small part due to his fascination with the subgenre, whose crowning achievement, Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Tarantino has repeatedly called the “best directed film” of all time. However, much to many a fan’s surprise, his Southern-based subversion of it with Django Unchained did not scratch that itch, and Tarantino made his first official announcement about doing a straight-ahead western on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno in November 2013.

By January, Deadline was reporting that Tarantino looked to cast Oscar contender Bruce Dern in the film, for which they also broke the title, The Hateful Eight. And it was soon again Deadline where Tarantino turned to announce that he was cancelling the project less than two weeks later. Blaming it on the script leaking around Hollywood, the writer/director said he’d soured on the material. Instead, Tarantino suggested he might revisit it in five years after he’s published it as a novel, but that he’s moving on. “I’ve got 10 more where that came from,” he promised with notable disdain for the Hollywood system.

That disdain boiled over when Gawker promptly published Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight screenplay online immediately after this announcement. For the record, we will not be linking or discussing that screenplay here.

Yet, despite his insistence that he was moving on, by April 2014, Tarantino was directing a live-reading of the script in Los Angeles that featured Samuel L. Jackson, Tim Roth, Kurt Russell, James Parks, Amber Tamblyn, Michael Madsen, Denis Menochet, James Remar, Walton Goggins, and Bruce Dern, confirming the small size of the cast. Yet for such a restrained ensemble, the story’s ambition is nothing short of massive with a narrative divided into five epic chapters on stage (the fifth of which Tarantino promised would be changed for the screen if/when it was filmed).

Then it was only a matter of time before Tarantino confirmed that he is indeed making The Hateful Eight, which came at San Diego Comic-Con later in July. Since then, Tarantino has confirmed via a teaser trailer (which we have below) that it will be filmed in “glorious 70mm!” And with production set to begin in early 2015, it has since been confirmed that the entire production will shoot in Colorado.

The Cast

While the live-reading in LA last April seemed to provide The Hateful Eight cast, there have been some intriguing changes for the final line-up. For starters Jennifer Jason Leigh has replaced Amber Tamblyn in the role of Daisy Domergue, and Demian Bichir is also taking on a major role in the film. However, the most intriguing new asset is that of Channing Tatum, who is the only cast member not part of the titular “hateful eight.” Could he be part of the new “Chapter Five” Tarantino promised earlier this year?

The full cast includes Samuel L. Jackson (Django Unchained) as Major Marquis Warren, Kurt Russell as John “The Hangman” Ruth, Jennifer Jason Leigh as Daisy Domergue, Walton Goggins as Chris Mannix, Demian Bichir as Bob, Tim Roth as Oswaldo Mobray, Michael Madsen as Joe Gage, and Bruce Dern as General Sanford Smithers. And of course, Channing Tatum.

The Plot

Much of the plot is (unfortunately) available online. For probably that very reason Tarantino and The Weinstein Company provided a very, very thorough synopsis for the upcoming event film. So why try to paraphrase? You can read it for yourself below:

Set six or eight, or 12 years after the Civil War, a stagecoach hurtles through the wintry Wyoming landscape. The passengers, bounty hunter John Ruth (Russell) and his fugitive Daisy Domergue (Leigh) race towards the town of Red Rock where Ruth, known in these parts as “The Hangman,” will bring Domergue to justice. Along the road they encounter two strangers Major Marquis Warren (Jackson) a black former Union soldier turned infamous bounty hunter and Chris Mannix (Goggins) a southern renegade who claims to be the town's new sheriff. Losing their lead on the blizzard, Ruth, Domergue, Warren and Mannix seek refuge at Minnie's Haberdashery, a stagecoach stopover on a mountain pass. When they arrive at Minnie's they are greeted not by the proprietor but by four unfamiliar faces. Bob (Bichir) who's taking care of Minnie's while she's visiting her mother, is holed up with Oswaldo Mobray (Roth) the hangman of Red Rock, cow-puncher Joe Gage (Madsen), and Confederate General Sanford Smithers (Dern). As the storm overtakes the mountainside stopover, our eight travelers come to learn they might not make it to Red Rock after all...

The Rest

Amusingly, after such a long touch-and-go pre-production crisis, our first The Hateful Eight trailer came long before cameras rolled on the project. Hell, they didn’t even have a cast yet! But below, you can watch a leaked version of the August trailer for The Hateful Eight, which gave us a stylish look of blood-spattered letters across a David Lean-inspired sand dune backdrop with promises of 70mm glory.

Also, it is amusingly worth noting that The Hateful Eight marks Tarantino’s eighth film (by his count), and thus will bring us one step closer to his planned retirement. Indeed, during an American Film Market event last month, Tarantino made an entrance (flanked by Harvey Weinstein and Samuel L. Jackson) to drop a supposedly shocking announcement: he is now definitely retiring after his 10^th film.

 “I’ve got two more after this,” Tarantino said. “I like that I will leave a 10-film filmography…It’s not etched in stone, but that is the plan.”

Tarantino again asserted that he’d move on to being a novelist and/or a playwright after his retirement from filmmaking. He also wonderfully, and ambitiously, suggested that The Hateful Eight’s 70mm is intended to thwart the move to digital filmmaking.

“I’m hoping it’s going to stop the momentum of the digital stuff, and that people will hopefully go, ‘Man, that is going to the movies, and that is worth saving, and we need to see more of that.”

At least in the meantime we have a heaping side of celluloid with our campfire cooked spaghetti waiting for us this time next year.

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