The Quentin Tarantino scene that featured Kurt Russell’s only regret: “I only felt bad about that”
There’s not a genre that Quentin Tarantino doesn’t seem knowledgeable about, from 1960s exploitation films to modern rom-coms. The filmmaker is incredibly well-versed, with each of his movies featuring references and paying homage to different directors and iconic relics of cinema history.
In 2012, he made his first western, Django Unchained. As a huge fan of the genre, Tarantino was finally able to dig his teeth into creating his own, inspired by some of his favourite western filmmakers, like Sergio Leone and Sergio Corbucci. He evidently enjoyed making a western so much that he made his next film one too, with The Hateful Eight.
Released three years later, the film follows eight characters, played by actors like Kurt Russell, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tim Roth and Samuel L. Jackson, as they shelter from a snowstorm. Set in the late 1800s, the group soon succumbed to violence as tensions rose, with hardly anyone making it out alive.
The movie was praised by certain critics and condemned by others due to the use of violence. In particular, the treatment of Leigh’s character, Daisy Domergue, one of the only women in the film, is relentlessly brutal. Although she is labelled as ‘crazy’ herself, the character is often subjected to intense verbal and physical abuse, as seen in one sequence where she can’t even play her guitar without Russell’s character snatching the instrument out of her hands and smashing it to pieces.
However, this scene caused significant controversy when it was revealed that Russell had accidentally smashed one of the oldest Martin guitars in the world. Leigh was meant to play the 1870s guitar (which the Martin Guitar Museum had loaned to the film) before the scene was cut to allow a prop to be used instead. Yet, something got lost in translation, and Russell smashed the original.
When Russell found out that he’d just ruined an incredibly expensive and iconic piece of music history, he was embarrassed. In fact, he feels deep regret over doing so, even though he genuinely had no idea. As a result, the museum has refused to ever loan a guitar to a movie again, telling Reverb that the incident was “very distressing” as they were not notified that the script included a direction to smash the guitar.
Referring to the moment he realised he’d smashed the antique, Russell said (via Esquire), “When we did the take, you can even see it. I kind of give it an extra beat, and nothing. I go ahead and smash the guitar. I can tell – when I grab her [Leigh] and sit her down, I can tell she’s not happy about this. It’s like: Something’s wrong. So as soon as it’s over, I say, ‘Tell me that’s not the guitar you’ve been practising with,’ and she [nods].”
Tarantino was reportedly quite happy with the result because Leigh’s reaction was totally authentic. Still, Russell felt guilty, “I only felt bad about that. I give a shit about the guitar,” he explained.
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