'The Hateful Eight' Panel: Quentin Tarantino Shows Off His Violent New Western
Quentin Tarantino, Kurt Russell, and Jennifer Jason Leigh (Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images)
Saturday’s Comic-Con panel for Quentin Tarantino’s western The Hateful Eight turned into a surprise film school master class. The writer-director launched into an explanation of the merits of the special ultra-wide Panavision 65mm lenses with which he shot his eighth feature film.
“We were just looking for really cool scope,” the Oscar-winning filmmaker told the audience. “Then we found this, which is the biggest format available, aside from that Grand Canyon stuff at Disney World. It’s not like they used lenses like these on Ben-Hur, they used these lenses on Ben-Hur. These are the lenses that shot Ben-Hur.”
Tarantino geeked out over the huge panorama that the old lenses could provide, and explained that, despite having much of The Hateful Eight set in a single inside location, shooting in 65mm and projecting in 70mm would very much enhance the look of his film. The lenses could “make you more intimate, take you closer to the actors and make everything more vivid and more vital,” he said.
And then, to prove his point, Tarantino showed off a seven-minute sizzle reel that introduced all of the film’s main stars, including Samuel L. Jackson, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Kurt Russell, and Bruce Dern. The footage began on a barren snowscape, with the wind whipping frost and driving snow across a mountain valley. A horse-drawn carriage charges forward, before it’s stopped by a solitary man perched atop a pile of dead bodies.
The man sitting on the corpses is Major Marquis Warren, a former US calvary leader played by a cool-as-ice Jackson. He commandeers the carriage, which is carrying several other members of the title’s Hateful Eight: John “The Hangman” Ruth (Kurt Russell), a bounty hunter who always opts for the latter option on the “Wanted: Dead or Alive” posters; Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh), the very feral woman that Ruth has caught; and Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins), the goofy new sheriff in town.
The group rolls up to an old inn, where the blizzard forces a pit stop. There, they encounter the rest of the group, which includes a mysterious Mexican named Bob (Demian Bichir), former Confederate general Sandy Smithers (Bruce Dern), the sketchy Joe Gage (Michael Madsen), and the wily Oswaldo Mobray (Tim Roth, doing his best Christoph Waltz).
“One of them fellas is not what he says he is,” Russell’s Ruth says ominously. “Maybe even two of them. He’s waiting for an opportunity to kill everybody in here.”
After the teaser, which felt very much like a Reconstruction-era Reservoir Dogs, the cast (minus Jackson) joined Tarantino on the dais, although most of the attention stayed focused on the filmmaker. He entertained several questions from the audience, including one about the infamous leak of an early draft of the script that nearly ended The Hateful Eight before it began.
“There were certain plot threads I didn’t tie up yet — that’s why I was disconcerted when it got out,” he said. “The second draft and the third draft is what I ended up shooting and was where I was going with it. So it just got more [early] public attention than I wanted it to get.”
Tarantino also addressed the speculation that he may retire from making movies after his tenth film.
“We’ll see what ends up happening,” he said. “That wasn’t a mission statement more than me trying to have a serious discussion of an artist’s vitality in public in a world where that’s not a very good thing to do, in a world where everything is broken into a 130 articles with all the paragraphs out of context. I do like the idea of 10 and done.”
He did point out that he is a rather slow worker, which means that it could take him another 10 years to release two more movies. And he wouldn’t exactly shut off his creative spigot anyway, noting that he could always move to TV, where he could film an entire eight-hour script for HBO.
For now though, Quentin Tarantino remains one of the few names in an increasingly digital world who can still convince theaters to show his pictures in the glorious film stock on which it was shot. In fact, The Hateful Eight will first be shown to the public during a retro road tour at 100 theaters that can project in 70mm, starting on Christmas Day. (It hits theaters nationwide on Jan. 8.) And, it will feature a score by old western master Ennio Morricone, who hasn’t done music for the genre in over 40 years. Just two more ways that Tarantino is going old school.
The newly-released ‘Hateful Eight’ poster:
