The strange event that led to Quentin Tarantino making ‘The Hateful Eight’
Few filmmakers have proven to be as obsessed with their own legacy as Quentin Tarantino, with many of the filmmaker’s critics and detractors bemoaning the fact he’s bowing out after his tenth and final feature for the express purpose of leaving his mystique intact.
Having experienced a meteoric rise that saw him become one of the most famous directors of the modern age after starting out as a passionate video store clerk with no film school experience, it was supreme self-confidence and borderline arrogance that got him into that position, to begin with.
As a result, audiences were almost robbed of The Hateful Eight entirely after Tarantino decided to scrap the entire project based on an incident that’s befallen no shortage of major productions in the internet age. His second consecutive western was originally announced to the world in January 2014, but it was mothballed that very same month after the script was leaked online and circulated widely. If people could read it beforehand, he reasoned, then what was the point?
Not only that, but Tarantino then launched a real-life whodunnit after whittling down his list of potential suspects, as he explained to Deadline: “I gave it to one of the producers on Django Unchained, Reggie Hudlin, and he let an agent come to his house and read it,” he said. “I gave it to three actors: Michael Madsen, Bruce Dern, Tim Roth. The one I know didn’t do this is Tim Roth. One of the others let their agent read it, and that agent has now passed it on to everyone in Hollywood.”
Describing it as “a betrayal” and an act of “ugly maliciousness”, Tarantino remarked that “if I can’t trust them to that degree, then I have no desire to make it.” He launched legal action against several websites that had uploaded the screenplay and continued to claim that the only way people would get to experience The Hateful Eight was if he opted to publish it as either a script or a novel.
However, three months later, he dipped his toes back into treacherous waters by directing a live reading of the leaked pages, making a point of noting that the performance would explicitly focus on the first draft that was made available in the initial leak, although he admitted to writing two new drafts and a fresh ending.
Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, Bruce Dern, Michael Madsen, Walton Goggins, Dana Gourrier, Zoë Bell, and James Parks weren’t just present and accounted for, but playing the roles they would eventually realise in the film. Amber Tamblyn and James Remar weren’t quite as fortunate, although Jennifer Jason Leigh and Channing Tatum proved to be more than adequate replacements when The Hateful Eight unfolded on a closed set.
Exactly a year after Tarantino was adamant he wouldn’t be making the film at all when the script was surreptitiously uploaded for anyone to peruse at their leisure, cameras were rolling on The Hateful Eight. It wasn’t easy to get there in the end, but after being announced, cancelled, staged as a one-off, and ultimately resurrected, it’s a minor miracle it managed to get there at all.
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