"If you like Tarantino movies," says Tim Roth, "you'll love this one". He's talking about Quentin Tarantino's latest, The Hateful Eight, which marks the first time the actor and director have worked together since the 1995 anthology film Four Rooms, which followed Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994).
Aptly named, it is the writer-director's eighth movie and also his second western in a row, following his 2012 Oscar-winning slavery epic, Django Unchained.
Set in Wyoming in the 1800s shortly after the American Civil War, The Hateful Eight has all the hallmarks of Reservoir Dogs, Tarantino's celebrated debut. Like that claustrophobic crime thriller, The Hateful Eight takes place largely in a single location as a group of grizzled gunslingers seek shelter from a violent blizzard. The presence of Roth, as hangman Oswaldo Mobray, and fellow Reservoir Dogs star Michael Madsen, only furthers the comparison.
In truth, though, The Hateful Eight draws from all over Tarantino's career – the cast also includes Django Unchained stars Walton Goggins and Bruce Dern, Death Proof's Kurt Russell, and Samuel L Jackson, his most frequent collaborator, who plays Major Marquis Warren, a bounty hunter.
Calling Jackson Tarantino's "leading man", Roth says: "He speaks Quentin's words in a particular way. I think Sam is his Cary Grant." There are also newcomers to Quentin-world, including Jennifer Jason Leigh, who was nominated for a Golden Globe for her performance as the fearsome bandit Daisy Domergue (she lost out at Sunday's ceremony to Kate Winslet in Steve Jobs).
“I had the time of my life – I really was one of the guys and they didn’t treat me differently,” Leigh says with a chuckle as she recalls the shoot in Telluride.
“I’ve never seen so many grown men cry at the wrap, y’know? Nobody wanted it to end.”
While for the ensemble cast the film might have been one big love-in, the same can’t be said for the characters. When Russell’s veteran bounty hunter John Ruth arrives with captured fugitive Domergue in tow, intent on taking her to be hanged in the nearby town of Red Rock, the tensions crackle.
To reveal any more would spoil the intricate nature of Tarantino’s plotting – suffice it to say that most of the people in the cabin are not who – or what – they seem.
Walton Goggins – star of TV hits The Shield and Justified – plays Red Rock's new sheriff, Chris Mannix. He says Tarantino screened a number of films to prepare his cast for filming, including Man In The Wilderness (1971) starring Richard Harris, an 1800s survival tale that essentially tells the same story as The Revenant, which is also currently in cinemas. Curiously, he also showed John Carpenter's sci-fi classic, The Thing, which stars Russell. "The claustrophobic nature of it, trapped in this space," says Goggins. "How could it not be a reference?"
The film’s whodunit structure was echoed before shooting began, when an early version of the script was leaked online. At that time, Tarantino had only shown it to six people, including Madsen and Dern.
“It was a first draft,” says Roth. “I think that was the hard thing. He’d just got through writing it.” So whose copy ended up online?
“It doesn’t matter who did it,” says Roth. “But in fact, it made the script evolve and be better and better and better.” Tarantino considered cancelling the film but relented. Gathering his cast at Los Angeles’ Ace Hotel Theatre, he organised a live reading of the script for charity.
"The audience went crazy for it," says Goggins. That was enough to convince the director that The Hateful Eight was a film worth making.
Shooting in the rarely-used film stock Ultra Panavision 70mm, Tarantino was intent on delivering a truly old-fashioned western. He even persuaded composer Ennio Morricone – who scored all of Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti westerns – into writing the film’s music, which won the award for Best Original Score at the Golden Globes on Sunday night.
While the cabin interiors were all studio-filmed, the production used giant air-conditioning units to replicate the freezing conditions – note the icy breath coming out of the actors’ mouths as they talk. “All of that’s real,” says Goggins. “You felt like you were in this experience.”
Audiences will feel the same watching a film that’s as bloody, profane and violent as any of Tarantino’s output.
“Nobody can do it like Quentin does,” says Goggins with a grin. “There are a lot of people who approximate it, or try to get close to it – but once Quentin stops making movies, I don’t know if there will ever be another one like him.”
• The Hateful Eight is in cinemas from today
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