On Set With Quentin Tarantino and…

Day One: Last Stage To Telluride

Blood and snow: these are the only two things you can be sure of in Quentin Tarantino’s eighth movie, a film he announced quietly, after months of speculation, with an ad in these very pages. It featured the striking image of a six-horse stagecoach leaving a splash of crimson on a stark, white background. Tarantino has filmed in snow before, in Kill Bill and Django Unchained, but for The Hateful Eight he wants to conjure up a seething winter’s hell, a genuine, raging, terrifying no-VFX blizzard.

But on a bright February afternoon when Empire arrives at Canyonfields Field Airport, Utah, a three-hour drive from Telluride, Colorado, where the film is shooting, the weather is troublingly beautiful. As the dazzling sandstone arches of Moab become the stately mountains of Colorado, there is snow on the ground but none in the air. So little is happening that Samuel L. Jackson, one of the Eight, has been given the week off to promote his new movie, Kingsman. Indeed, the situation will later become so desperate that the cast and crew attempt a pagan sacrifice, throwing wooden skis onto a bonfire in prayer to Ullr, the Norse god of winter. But for now, while Tarantino and his crew sit on standby for the first flake of snow, Empire is taken to a ski lodge in the town of 2,000 and simply asked to wait. And as the production waits on snowfall, so we will wait to speak to the director.

In the meantime, things get interesting. We’re handed a script with the title page torn off in a familiar hand-scrawl that reads, “Chapter One: Last Stage To Red Rock”. We are sworn to secrecy. This isn’t the script that Tarantino nearly abandoned in January 2014 after gossip website Gawker leaked it, or the version used at Tarantino’s live on stage reading in Los Angeles the following April. This is the new version, the one Tarantino dangled in front of potential buyers at this year’s American Film Market. “There are five chapters,” explains producer Stacey Sher. “For a certain period of time people could only read chapters one through four, and then people on the crew slowly got chapter five — but it didn't have the ending of the movie.”

The reason for all this secrecy is that The Hateful Eight is the director’s first mystery-thriller. It starts with bounty hunter John Ruth (Kurt Russell) bringing in wanted criminal Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to stand trial in Red Rock. Along the way he first meets two strangers, Major Marquis Warren (Jackson) and Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins), who claims to be a sheriff. These four make up half of the titular gang, who will assemble at the supposedly snowbound Minnie’s Haberdashery, where things get interesting.

It’s unusual for Tarantino to be this cagey with his scripts. This one, though, went out into the world before he was through with it. “Quentin's never been a person who's shy about sharing his work,” says Sher. “But what he didn't want to share was a work in progress, and every artist deserves the right to guard their creative process. So it felt like a violation to him.”

Empire hands back the manuscript and returns to waiting. Luckily, Telluride is a surprisingly sophisticated town full of distractions: beside the stunning views and skiing, fine dining, and a bookstore where copies of Charlie Hebdoh magazine can be bought, there are four head shops where marijuana is legally available in many forms. Their gummy bears have been selling well lately.

Day Two: Six-Horse Judy

The Steaming Bean on the main drag is a coffee house that sounds so much like a Quentin Tarantino joint that it comes as no surprise to find him in there, wrapping up a chat with one of his heads of department. It’s around 6pm and it becomes swiftly evident he is about to leave, but he, at least, invites us to join him later. “Come over and see the dailies,” he offers. And with that, he’s gone.

Sitting nearby, mercifully, is Zoe Bell. More used to punching, roundhouse kicking and neck snapping than dragging her feet, but Tarantino’s longtime stuntwoman and Death Proof star is actually enjoying her downtime.

The Hateful Eight is Tarantino’s fifth movie with Bell and the third in which she plays a character rather than a stunt double. “I don't carry a single gun in this one,” she notes. Not one of the titular Eight, Bell is Six-Horse Judy, a woman so named because she drives a six-horse carriage.

“I got the script the day it got leaked,” she remembers, being one of the select few to get it, “so then it looked like it wasn't going to happen. But it was kind of a cool progression, because then he went on to the idea of doing the staged cast read-through.” She remembers the live reading that the director put on at LA’s Ace Hotel in April of last year, a version of his second draft. “I was in a room with Sam, Kurt and Bruce Dern and all these people, going through the script, watching Quentin workshop with these legends. I was super-comfortable with the script before I ever realised we were going to make a movie out of it.”

A month or so later, Tarantino called. As he told a press conference in Cannes, the knife-in-the-back wound had “started to scab” and the director told Bell that the project was back on, using practically the same team she’d read with. It makes sense, then, when she describes Judy as “a girl in a man’s world”. Deftly sketched in the script as “a young female Calamity Jane type, dressed in buckskin”, Judy is one of the few characters without a hidden agenda. “Six-Horse Judy's obviously tough,” she says, “she's one of the few women in that time that was driving six horses. But the way he described her, I knew exactly who she was. I knew which part of me he was referring to: the childish, bouncy part. She's certainly not the comic relief, but she's definitely a bit of mood relief.”

Over the road at the 150-seat Mason’s Hall cinema, above the hardware store, producer Shannon McIntosh has installed a 70mm projector (“I built that out special,” she grins). The kit is enormous, with huge cans of film piled in the hallway, and the venue is surprisingly full. McIntosh and fellow producers Sher, and Coco Francini take the back row; Michael Madsen, who plays redneck cowpuncher Joe Gage (one of the Eight), has brought his son, and Tarantino sits with his DOP Robert Richardson. Everyone here is, by now, used to the sight of the director laughing wildly at his own dialogue, as if hearing it for the first time.

The images on the screen are positively luminous, with a warm, golden glow. 

This is Ultra Panavision 70 (“The original IMAX,” notes Francini), and though you might expect such a format to be used primarily for mountain ranges, ravines, funerals and rattlesnakes, it is strikingly useful for close-ups and reaction shots. The footage we’re watching comes from the scenes set in Minnie’s Haberdashery during the early hours of the intrigue; in one, Tim Roth’s Oswald Mobray delivers a crisp, eloquently witty speech about the “thirst-quenching” properties of frontier justice. Tarantino roars with laughter. “Do you like the way Tim’s channeling James Robertson Justice?” he enthuses in Empire’s general direction. We do, and dare to suggest a little Terry-Thomas too. Tarantino cracks a big smile.

Day Three: The Cowboy And The Mexican

Michael Madsen has made three films with Tarantino, four if you include biker flick Hell Ride — and he does — which the director punched up in the edit suite. Madsen is an imposing figure in a cowboy shirt and Stetson, his eyes obscured by RayBans that sometimes make it hard to know his mood. But underneath the tough guy exterior, Madsen is something of a pussycat; he has a warm smile and soft, chubby skin that gives us a hint of what the middle-aged Mickey Rourke could have looked like. His hotel, the Madeline, is up in Mountain village, 10,000 feet above sea level, and the bar where we meet has spectacular views.

“I just wanna say one thing,“ he begins, a propos of nothing. “When Budd pulls his sword out in Kill Bill, on Budd's sword it says, 'To my brother Budd, the only man I ever loved — Bill.' And I would just like to start by saying I have that sword. And there should be one from me to Quentin. Let's face it: I wouldn't have had a career if it wasn’t for him. I would have been dead and buried a long time ago if it wasn't for Quentin. My life would have taken a bad turn. He's a fuckin' genius, man.”

Madsen’s Joe Gage is a strong, silent cowboy type who claims he’s on his way to spend Christmas with his mother. “When I first read it, I wanted to be John Ruth [the Kurt Russell character],” he admits.“ I remember thinking, ‘Quentin, hey, Quentin, I'm John Ruth, man. Who's this Joe Gage? I don't wanna be the cowboy fella, man!’ But then I realised that Joe Gage is probably the best role in the film.” Madsen, you see, is a huge fan of Steve McQueen, and he saw that this was exactly the kind of role that McQueen would have played. “Steve, he didn't like to do explanation. He's just gonna be the guy that sits there, and you think, 'What the fuck is going on in that guy's mind?' I'm much better that way. I don't wanna have a lot to say.” 

The gondola ride back down to Oak Street station – a drop of 1,750, at 11mph, with 360 views – is both breath-taking and hair-raising. A stiff drink is required, so we head to the Esperanza restaurant on the main drag, where new-recruit cast member Demian Bichir is waiting. Bichir orders a drink in his native tongue and the barman is impressed. “Good Spanish, sir!” he nods. Bichir is somewhat taken aback. “Aw, yeah,” he deadpans. “Er, that's my thing.”

The Mexican actor came to the production recommended by Robert Rodriguez, who directed him in Machete Kills, telling him pretty much every day that he was “a Tarantino actor”. Surprisingly, he claims never to have been a big fan of Westerns before this. “But Quentin introduced us to this world, or at least he introduced me. He sent me a few DVDs and I just kept watching them and discovering more. Stagecoach, High Noon, Red River… I got hooked on this genre. I'd always heard of John Wayne and Gary Cooper but I’d never watched any Westerns — a full Western. I'm just very happy that I finally discovered them.”

He sees The Hateful Eight as a very human drama, despite its genre dressing. “The fascinating thing about this story,” he says, “is that these guys are exactly the way we human beings are. We have our fantastic sides and our terrible sides — we have this duality. We cannot only be good or bad but interesting and funny. That's the way life is. Demons are always nice people. The devil is always disguised as a really charming person.”

The character Bichir plays is Mexican caretaker Bob, but it is impossible to discuss Bob’s role in the film without getting into major spoiler territory. “I hope you don't get this the wrong way,” he says, “but I have a have a hard time trying to explain or talk about my character. But…” He grins. “Bob is one of those eight motherfuckers.”

Day Four, Volume One: Checking In At Minnie’s Haberdashery

The Schmid Family Ranch is a Centennial farm — a property continuously owned by a single family for 100 years or more — on Wilson Mesa, about ten miles west of Telluride. Ordinarily it is beautiful, but the sight that greets us is authentically grim. What snow has fallen in recent weeks is melting, turning the hillside into a morass of mud and sludge that instantly brings to mind Robert Altman’s McCabe And Mrs Miller. Like the snow, Tarantino is elusive. So, after stopping off at the costume truck to borrow a set of ice grips we head into Walton Goggins’ trailer.  

The part of Mannix makes up for the actor’s bittersweet experience on Django Unchained, for which his role, as Billy Crash, shrank in the final cut. “On that movie,” he says generously, “my collaboration with Quentin may not have been fully realised for the audience to see, but it didn't take away from my personal collaboration with the man. Django really changed my life as an artist, and that collaboration led to this opportunity.”

The Hateful Eight, he thinks, picks up where Django left off, in a sense. “Quentin always says something with his material that is often masked by humour and these visually stimulating shots. But I think he's saying something important with this film. For me, it’s a war crimes tribunal. Every participant, with the exception of one, is guilty of one atrocity or another. Maybe multiple atrocities in some characters' cases. And we're all judge, jury and executioner of each other. Everyone will pay, whether physically or emotionally, for the crimes that they've committed.”

By this time, news comes that Tarantino has abandoned his quest for snow and reorganised the schedule to continue shooting interiors. We are finally to be allowed onto the set, an extraordinarily detailed log cabin, plus outhouse and stable, built by Yohei Taneda, who created Kill Bill’s House Of Blue Leaves. This is Minnie’s Haberdashery, where around 80 per cent of the film’s intrigue – give or take the odd cutaway to events that flesh out certain characters’ back stories – unfolds. Like a pimped-out version of Reservoir Dogs’s warehouse, Minnie’s is a huge timber rest-stop-slash-trading-post filled with arcane bric-a-brac, where Tarantino is directing Russell and Leigh in a scene that takes place shortly after their arrival. Seven of the Eight are here. To recap: John Ruth (Russell), Daisy Domergue (Leigh), Bob (Bichir), Joe Gage (Madsen), British hangman Oswald Mobry (Tim Roth), and confederate general Sanford Smithers (Bruce Dern), with stuntman Clay Donahue Fontenot standing in for the absent Jackson.

Russell is a regular Yosemite Sam, a whiskery varmint trying to fix himself a decent cup of coffee while handcuffed to a deadpan psychopath, much to the amusement of the others. John Ruth wasn’t originally written for him, or for anyone in particular, he says — there simply came a point when Tarantino called and said, “I'm hearin' your voice here.” He was happy to accept, first for the live read, and then for the movie.

“As a human being,” he muses, “John Ruth is one of those bombastic forces that has gone through his life having learned to live by his wiles. He just crashes through everything. He's not as smart as he thinks he is — he's like a man who took a high dive in a low well. He's been chained to this woman for a week, so he's probably had zero sleep. So he's reaching his wits' end. He's extremely paranoid about what might be occurring at all times, so, given his nature, he's more than a bully, he's a bombast. A bull in a china shop.” 

He agrees that, despite the remote location and period setting, The Hateful Eight has a lot in common with Reservoir Dogs. “It's pure character, and once you move inside Minnie's, primarily you're in one room. But the room is big and the people in it are big. I think what we're all enjoying as actors, working together, is just naturally finding the tonal changes that go with what he's saying. You're gonna laugh. But you're also gonna think, 'Woah, holy shit. Are you kidding me?'”

Day Four, Volume Two: Finally, Sitting Down With The Big Man

The set of Minnie’s Haberdashery is as close to being in the 19^th century as you could get. There are no heaters, and in the absence of real snow, a smattering of the fake variety flutters past the windows. There isn't one square foot that isn't filled with detail. You can see through the walls. Back in those days the wood wasn't joined together perfectly. Snow comes in through the cracks.

And here is Tarantino talking with DOP Robert Richardson about how to light a scene involving a roaring log fire when lunch is called. With little ceremony, he signals it is time to talk. “In the Tarantino theme-park,” he says, taking in the set as we sit at a long, wooden table, “there definitely will be a Minnie's.”

It’s been a year since the script was leaked, and the betrayal is still raw. “I was devastated,” he says softly. “I was devastated. Because it wasn't a work to be seen. The ending wasn't really the ending, it was just an ending. And the fact that it was somebody close who screwed me felt really bad.”

Did he ever find out who? “It's one of six people.”

Fittingly, this Agatha Christie element lends itself rather well to the plot. The Hateful Eight isn’t so much a whodunit as a who-will-do-what, a riddle that bubbles away throughout the film. Though this is his first crack at a mystery-thriller, he claims it didn’t require a change to his writing style, an intuitive process that reached its peak in Inglourious Basterds when he suddenly ‘realised’ that his characters were going to kill Adolf Hitler. “I didn't know who the bad guy, or bad guys, were when I started. I waited for them to reveal it to me. I didn't do the mystery thing where you figure out who did it and then you go backwards from there. I wanted to find out myself too.”

As Goggins hinted, this is a story where nobody is quite what they seem. “Everybody's got a big past,” says Tarantino. He sees the film as having more in common with ’60s Western TV shows like Bonanza, The High Chaparral or The Virginian than it does with big-screen oaters. “On those shows maybe Brian Keith or Charles Bronson is the guest star, and Trampas or the Virginian is helping them out. They usually have some big chequered past that's revealed at some point in the story. And it's usually not till the end of the episode that you really realise they’re a good guy or a bad guy. I always found that really interesting. So I thought, ‘Well let me take eight of those characters, but without the good guys to balance it out, so you don't have any moral compass that you can fall back on. Let’s take eight of those kind of sketchy guest-star characters, have them be played by the same kind of cool, groovy actors, then trap them in a room and just have them hash it out.’”

Though it would seem to be a pure genre exercise, The Hateful Eight stands to be the director’s most powerful piece of writing to date. Following, historically, almost directly on from Django Unchained, its questions about racism, violence and justice in a post-slavery society are explicitly relevant today (Tarantino’s later presence at an anti-police brutality march in New York is no coincidence). That, though, is the only connection, apart from a single line of dialogue about black bounty hunters and the in-joke that Django’s coat is hanging on the wall. “It’s political overlap, I think, more than anything,” he says.

Tarantino is effusive about the richness of the genre, how Westerns better reflect the time in which they were produced better than any other kind of movie. “I mean, the '50s Westerns had a very '50s kind of a Eisenhower kind of aspect about them. And then in the late '60s you had the Hippie Westerns and the Anti-Westerns. And in the '70s it was almost like we had the Watergate Westerns: now we're gonna rip down everything we believed about these heroes. All of a sudden you’re getting these fucked-up stories about Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday and Jesse James. All the Tyrone Power stuff goes out the window.”

He doesn’t hesitate to analyse his own Western along these lines, even if he insists it’s unintentional. “It really kind of reflects that whole Blue State/Red State divide that exists in America at this time. Everyone nowadays just keeps saying, ‘Well, the country's never been as divided as it was since after the Civil War.’ Alright, well that's when this takes place.”

The result is another extraordinary story that starts big and homes in on a tense, claustrophobic focal point, turning the screws on the audience until the tension can do nothing but explode. It may come packed with big ideas and social commentary, but this couldn’t be more QT. “When I wrote the La Louisiane scene in Inglourious Basterds, I thought, ‘Wow, I just wrote a 20-minute version of Reservoir Dogs with Nazis!’” says Tarantino. “And I feel that way about this. Except this time it’s with cowboys.”

In the meantime, has he given up on the snow? Is it, like the leak, a sign that someone, somewhere – some thing – doesn’t want this film to be made? Definitely, defiantly, not. “We’ll get it,” he says. “I just don't believe in adding it in later. Some things are worth faking 'cause you can make ’em bigger and you can be more operatic. But sometimes you just want real snowfall.”

Two weeks later a blizzard hits town.

* A version of this feature originally appeared in Empire magazine.