Cabin fever

Quentin Tarantino goes west with The Hateful Eight.

Director Quentin Tarantino Starring Kurt Russell, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Samuel L. Jackson, Tim Roth, Michael Madsen ETA 8 January 2016

January 2015, Southwest Colorado. A stagecoach passover nestles in 900 acres of snowy wilderness. Inside, a ragtag bunch of no-good varmints huddle, eyeing each other distrustfully as they shiver into their furs. It’s below freezing and, while outside the storm of the century is raging, here tempers are reaching boiling point. “You could see our breath,” Samuel L. Jackson later recalls. “But the stuff that we were doing was amazing...”

It’s now just three short months until Tarantino’s eighth feature – and his third historical epic after Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained – rattles into cinemas. A post-Civil War western, it zooms in on an octet of ne’er-do-wells as they shelter from a blizzard in a remote Wyoming haberdashery. Chief among them is lawman John ‘The Hangman’ Ruth (Kurt Russell), who’s escorting suspected murderer Daisy ‘The Prisoner’ Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to trial when they’re forced to seek refuge – and things soon get heated between them and the other residents (Tim Roth, Michael Madsen, Bruce Dern, Samuel L. Jackson, Walter Goggins, Demián Bichir). Unlike Tarantino’s two previous historical outings, The Hateful

Eight is a mostly single-location potboiler. That doesn’t mean it’s small, though. Filming in Colorado on a refrigerated set, the director shot his western on 70mm, a rare film stock that afforded movies like

The Master and 2001: A Space Odyssey their lush, expansive scope. As ever, he was ahead of the curve. “We used those Ultra Panavision 70 lenses,” he gabbles breathlessly, “and now, Star Wars is doing the next movie with those lenses.”

And though the film sees him reuniting with the likes of Roth, Madsen and Russell, key to his film was the casting of Jennifer Jason Leigh. Beating Geena Davis, Hilary Swank and even, reportedly, Jennifer Lawrence to the role, she was pivotal to the creation of bruised and beaten Daisy, whom Tarantino had struggled to fully flesh out. “She’s such a weird hot potato,” he says, revealing he’s more than happy with his choice of actress. “She bloomed into this truly amazing character. She’s one of my favourite female characters I’ve ever written.”

In the end, the script leak that almost put paid to the film back in January 2014 (“I’ll publish it; I’m done,” raged QT) seems to have had little impact. With a new big finale, that dramatic post-Civil War setting, plus original music by Django collaborator Ennio Morricone, The Hateful Eight looks set to continue the director’s singular brand of wordy, whip-smart action-thriller. Though he was inspired by western TV shows like Bonanza and The Virginian, Tarantino references one of his own early works as a touchstone. “In the back of my mind, Hateful Eight is sort of like a western Reservoir Dogs,” he reveals. “I think there is something very apropos about that. There’s a full-circle quality.”