In the director’s seat

It’s a mystery. You have to find out who the bad guys are,” grins Quentin Tarantino, chatting to Total Film about his blustery, brilliantly bonkers-looking latest film, The Hateful Eight. “Don’t just jump to conclusions,” he warns.

Set almost entirely inside a Wyoming stagecoach ranch – Minnie’s Haberdashery – and starring a who’s who of Tarantino’s previous collaborators, it’s the director’s second western after 2012’s Oscar-nominated ‘southern’, Django Unchained. Exclusively talking Total Film through the film’s production ahead of its roadshow tour, Tarantino shares concept art and wild tales from the set of his eighth feature. But he has to be a little cagey... “I can’t talk too in-depth about these guys,” he cautions, “it’s like Ten Little Indians. You’re only supposed to know what you know, and then you find out during the course of it...” “The idea of shooting in 70mm was to give the film a big, epic look, and since it’s a pretty claustrophobic movie, that really opens it up. I actually think you can use 70mm for more than just shooting mountain ranges or landscapes of Saudi Arabia. It actually makes claustrophobic pieces more intimate, more in your face. There is a quality to this movie that’s semi-similar to Reservoir Dogs. They’re all in a warehouse in that one,

and no one can trust anybody, and there’s the haberdashery in this one, and no one can trust anybody. The set that we built, it was on a completely

empty spot of land. It was this one big ranch in Colorado that this rancher owned, and all his stuff – his ranch and everything – was down on the bottom of a hill that you don’t see in this movie. The area we had was just a completely open range, and it had these beautiful

mountains in the background.”