The awful mistake in Quentin Tarantino movie ‘The Hateful Eight’
When Quentin Tarantino‘s western thriller The Hateful Eight was released in 2015, the director faced significant backlash. Set in the late 1800s, the film follows eight strangers who meet in a stagecoach stopover whilst seeking refuge from a mighty blizzard.
The director’s treatment of race and gender was questionable, to say the least. Whilst Tarantino went against the tradition of many westerns, which often erase complicated racial narratives, The Hateful Eight was heavy-handed in treating such a delicate topic. Furthermore, the portrayal of Jennifer Jason Leigh’s character, Daisy, who is continuously subjected to physical and verbal violence, was highly criticised.
On the other hand, some critics praised Tarantino’s engagement with racial issues and his ‘equal’ treatment of female characters. Tarantino defended his depiction of Daisy, saying: “Violence is hanging over every one of those characters like a cloak of night. So I’m not going to go, ‘OK, that’s the case for seven of the characters, but because one is a woman, I have to treat her differently.’ I’m not going to do that.”
Although the film divided opinion, there’s universal agreement that one mistake definitely shouldn’t have happened. In a scene where Daisy is playing the guitar to pass the time, Kurt Russell’s John snatches the instrument out of her hands and smashes it to pieces. However, Russell was unaware that the guitar he was destroying was a 145-year-old antique on loan from the Martin Guitar Museum.
According to the film’s sound mixer, Mark Ulano: “What was supposed to happen was we were supposed to go up to that point, cut, and trade guitars and smash the double. Well, somehow that didn’t get communicated to Kurt, so when you see that happen on the frame, Jennifer’s reaction is genuine.” Although there were six doubles made of the Martin guitar, the prized antique reached its untimely end.
Understandably, the Martin Guitar Museum was not impressed by the mix-up. The museum’s director, Dick Boak, revealed that the production crew were not truthful about the guitar’s destruction either. He told Reverb: “We assumed that a scaffolding or something fell on it. We understand that things happen, but at the same time, we can’t take this lightly.”
Boak continued: “All this about the guitar being smashed being written into the script and that somebody just didn’t tell the actor, this is all new information to us. We didn’t know anything about the script or Kurt Russell not being told that it was a priceless, irreplaceable artefact from the Martin Museum.”
Although the film paid the museum the insurance value of the guitar ($40,000), Boak was left with a bitter taste in his mouth. He told SSN: “As a result of the incident, the company will no longer loan guitars to movies under any circumstances.”
As for Russell, Leigh explained in an interview with Billboard that the actor “felt terrible” when he realised what he had done. “His eyes literally welled up. It ended up being great for the scene, but very sad for the guitar, and for my guitar teacher, and for me.”
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