The Hateful Eight DGA Q&A with Quentin Tarantino and Christopher Nolan

well that's a hell of a movie isn't it and I I just want to say thanks to the projectionists I mean seeing the 70mm roadshow version hopefully what an incredible thing what an incredible way to bring back the atmosphere and the beauty of seeing a film in the theater just amazing well you know the way you you said that and and throw it to the reject meanness I throw to the rejection is to and by the way we've had a long association with the projectionists here at the DGA theater because one of the things that ended up happening was uh we made this film and as I'm editing it I didn't want to get used to watching it in the avid I always wanted to remind ourselves what we were doing and why we were doing it and how big the film was so there wouldn't be any big oh my god what the [ __ ] that doing in this frame all right uh when we got to it so one of the things was um every Wednesday they screened our work print here about basically where we were up until that point and so I got used to seeing it on this screen every Wednesday we would see where we were up to that point and so we screened it here many many times so this was the theatre that we did all of our our testing on and all of our just kind of just getting used to seeing it this way and these projectionists were just really really amazing so let's just give them a round of applause so this really is home then yeah really this really is home base for me actually well just to start I wanted to ask you about whether you found and it's a bit of a leading question but whether you found the format that selfish at on 65 ml five per with their special lenses my feeling watching as film as it felt like it had an increased level of formalism I suppose it's a there's there's a real calm and thought to where the camera is always and it's also perhaps in the music having a score for the first time that there is a there's a great sense of the history of cinema in it but also as I say this kind of common is kind of formalism do you think that was related anyway to the choice of format or is it the other way around no no I think you're probably right actually uh and I like what I like the adjective you're saying about calm thinking compared to this movie actors this is lovely but I knew do it I do know what you mean um there is a that aspect about this movie I tried not to change that much of how I do what I do just because I was working with this pickup formatter just because I was working in 70 I found myself the only two movies I watched as far as other films that use the ultra Panavision 70 the only ones I watched in preparation for this was it's a mad mad mad mad world which always was a big fan of which was shot with these lenses I mean literally these lenses and and I watched about the Bulge which was shot with these lenses and and I decided not to um I didn't I decided not to treat editing any different I tried not to treat try to cinematically not treat anything that different and one of the things that was really nice about dealing with the weinstein company in here is um I've usually come from the aspect that film is the cheapest thing on the set so I'm not going to worry about hoarding it I'm just going to shoot the way I want to shoot I was Cavaliere when it came to shooting in the 70 millimeter footage I wasn't cavalier about I didn't waste it but I didn't really like you know I didn't save it I didn't bank it per se I I did what I needed to do if I need to do it over again I did it over again I didn't think about stuff like that um however you know there is a thing about it frankly that you don't need to cut as much because there's much more information in every single shot now I didn't really think of it I didn't plan on that in advance but I never really plan on my unless I'm trying to pull off some very specific Wow II shot I never try to plan on that in particularly so it just became okay I'm filming Joe gage talking to whoever and then we would just frame it at that moment at that time but one of the things that did come across that was very interesting and I was very proud of it when I looked at it put together later was um you know using once you're in Minnie's haberdashery in particular is there's always two series of scenes going on there's the actor there's the characters who are in the foreground of the scene and that is what the scene is about and that is the their area that they're dealing with but then there's they're the characters that are in the background of that scene whether it be Joe gage at his table or whether it be John Ruth and Daisy at the bar and that is very important because I am trapping these characters together and they are you know chess pieces on a chess board to some degree and if the suspense is supposed to work and by the way if the suspense doesn't work then the movie is going to be boring so there really has to be this a sort of damocles of violence that is hanging over the entire movie and you're waiting for it to fall and when is it going to fall and when it does fall what does that mean and what does it happen and I don't want you to know the answer to those questions but you are waiting and you're waiting and you don't even know what you're waiting for but I believe knowing where all the characters were in any given moment unless I didn't want you to was a very very important part of it and and I just did it organically but frankly I don't think I would have done it as well I don't think I was as good of a director when it comes to blocking in the 90s as maybe I am now but from having done this is my eighth movie having done eight movies I've gotten a little better at it and I think in areas like that it showed it the most but where the only limitation I had from how I'm used to working is a good III I never had a situation where I was bummed out by how big the frame was that was never the situation I was always just luxury adding it and just loving looking through the viewfinder and just loving it I mean literally loving it um my only limitation that I had and I don't even think of it as a limitation now but maybe I did the the first half of the movie was we didn't have a zoom lens and I'd really gotten use to using a zoom lens you know the the small creep of a zoom and everything um but uh you know uh I mean that forces you to think about physical proximity on the camera it doesn't want to close up you've either gonna swing a lens or physically move closer yeah well I've been using it very psychologically as like a little tiny creep that you don't quite perceive until all of a sudden you realize the form the format is different all of a sudden you realize the composition is different you know or I do a Hong Kong boom all right and there but I do that I like do with that that's a cool thing um having said that though um I don't think it was the worst thing for me at this time of my life to not have a tool that I'd come to rely on alright I think there was a almost a liberating aspect no I can't do it that way with that but one of the things that that forced me and Bob Richardson to do which he was very happy with it I was very happy with too is we used a crane the way you'd use a zoo we used a crane the way you would use a dolly we used a crane the way you would use Steadicam once you took out the back wall and you could have the ass of the crane do everything then we did everything on the crane we shot you know uh you know moving in close-up of this bottle would been done on the crane because why [ __ ] not it's so magnificent I I felt like I was Max opus out there just you know swirling around on the crane and it was lovely so where did you shoot it there you're talking about a techno current so obviously the not the techno crane oh I'm talking about the one with the dude is on really yeah yeah yeah I never I don't like the techno crane I don't like the technic rain I like though it's Bob Richardson flying in the air like a like cross and the stuck man alright with his white hair just wrong did you have that second directorial seat did you get to ride - no I don't I would never do that to my grips to deal with my fat ass you know uh up there a log with Bob's I wouldn't do that to my crew I care for them too much so I let Bob EE like cross and go hotel is King Kong so how did you get the tie in shots did you build a set on location and yeah on a stage yeah really build the whole thing twice absolutely build it twice we built it on in that mountain range where you saw it um in Colorado and and thank God we did I mean that was always the idea I mean if I had completely my druthers what I would have done is I would have shot the entire movie in Colorado on the set and then came to Los Angeles and shot the entire movie again at least interior-wise in Los Angeles I compromised a little bit alright uh but it ended up helping us out because as you can see we got all the weather that we needed but it was mercurial and we had to wait a while to get the weather so and there were like days upon days upon days where just the Sun was out and that was what we were dealing with and then on those days we just went into minis and just kept shooting and kept making it through the piece and so basically all the the daytime stuff was shot in Colorado then once it became night then we moved to a set in Los Angeles and shot it but the good part about the set in Los Angeles was because the weather was mercurial in Colorado you couldn't count on the breath all the time however once we were in Los Angeles we can make the the set as cold as we want it so we got breath every day every shot all right the cast was always drinking hot tea all the time all the time you know but that was also right because well now it's nighttime so now it actually is bitterly colder so then that was when the breaths need to emphasize everything right well gives a great great sense of space and location an incredible I particularly love you know that when the camera pulls back the window at sunset you know takes your honor I think it's one the more beautiful shot just seemed kind of that orange light you peeking through the slats in the the the walls oh it's absolutely absolutely beautiful this project I mean famously or infamously the script leaked you did a very well-received reading of the script with some of the actors are in the film now and most of them in with most of them did the script change much from that point did that inform your process in some way did it develop in different directions or is it or is this basically the script that you did with the reading no it's not the script I did in the reading but but it didn't change because of that um one of the things that that disturbed me so much about this script linking at that time why it was such a kick in the shins to the process I was putting in place was um I decided to write the script differently than I had ever written a script before normally I am I'm connected to this script the way somebody is connected to a novel and you work in this long way to you get to the very end and then it's boom that's it and that's kind of how I've done everything for at the very least um I think it's for all the script yeah all the way back to true romance that's pretty much how I've done it and I decided on this one to do do it a different way and so far as um when you get to the ending when you get to the last 30 pages and you know it was always like well whatever happens is what happened I've been writing it for this long and now I know the characters and they dictated that this is what happened and that's what happened I decided I'm gonna do it that way this time I want to spend time with the material and I made a decision to write three drafts of the script before I like let it out and say okay this is what we're making so the idea was to go through a first draft and then a second draft and then a third draft and to just basically spend time with the material and just see how I felt and and maybe that ending would be different three different times but I like the idea of telling the story three different times and seeing what would happen from it and like just to give you an example in that regards um the the Lincoln letter which became an important part of the movie and the first draft was only brought up in the stagecoach when John Ruth reads it and that was it because I really wasn't ready to do anything further with it but I knew I had a couple more drafts so I could think about it so it was just brought up there I remember my agent reading it anyways I saying you know that's a really neat idea we should do more with AG well III intend to but I'm gonna get there I'm not quite ready yet and um so that when that draft got released that's why I reacted so badly because it seemed like they were it seemed like they were truly [ __ ] up this process that I was trying to do they were kicking me right in the shins I I got over it um and you know we had the script reading and it was pretty well received and and that gave me a lot of confidence in the material as did rehearsing it for three days where the actors before the script reading um but I still had you know I still had a ways to go and like just to give you an example um what we end up doing with Daisy ie hanging her was always my conception that you know they would fulfill John roofs destiny by hanging her which is her sentence per se um that was always my idea however as I got to that last chapter in the first draft I questioned is that misogynistic not that I think Daisy needs a whole lot of you take care of her um but I I questioned well do I know Daisy enough to kill her that way I don't know if I know Daisy enough to kill her that way uh I don't know if my own biases as a male maybe are playing into this um so she ended up dying in kind of a random way in a way that wasn't like a big build-up to a big conclusion she died a little bit more arbitrarily I think basically I think if I'm not mistaken in the first rap she went when she gets shot in the foot in this chapter he just shot her dead alright and I think there was there seeing the real integrity in the arbitrariness of taking her out in that way and so that was the end of the first chapter now I'd like that and I thought that worked but I still wasn't satisfied I still liked the idea of the hanging so then I did a second draft and in that second draft not getting tricky about it but I wrote it from Daisy's point of view all right and I didn't none that I don't think I played any games with the pros but me myself the writer was looking at it from Daisy's point of view and to me Daisy was the audience figure in it and I didn't really change her personality I but she was the audience figure and it was my attempt to really get to know her now in that version Mannix ended up dying and it was Daisy and Warren that had the moment at the very end they're both going to die but but they were the last survivors of it and when I finished the second draft I felt I really knew Daisy I knew who she was I had no mysteries about her I felt really good and then I knew I could kill her then I knew I could hang her from the highest beam in the habit a Cherie and feel okay about it but I needed to go through that fair enough um I wanted to ask you a little bit about influences obviously there's a danger asking you about influences getting a lot in response but either way there were two films that I just want to mention one of atropine which of music because the first was Key Largo which I had never seen just happen to watch right before I saw this no kidding wow that's an interesting relation so I was gonna ask you about that but also as I watched the film I suddenly when I saw that Ennio Morricone had done the music I was thinking oh okay obviously a great history of westerns everything but I in watching the film suddenly thought about the thing yeah and I wondered a few Irrfan of that whether with Kurt Russell army they were just a couple of things that I felt felt yeah Oh Maj nn-now and look in particularly um the thing is probably the one movie that is the most influential on this movie per se as a movie um in a lot of ways I was influenced mostly more than any other movie that there's not that many movie touchstones so this one the thing is absolutely the thing in Reservoir Dogs are absolute the two biggest and actually Reservoir Dogs was very much influenced by the thing so that goes a long way the biggest influence that I was holding on during the writing was I was always was a big fan and I've been a big fan especially in the last six or seven years I've watched a lot of them of the Western American Western TV shows from the 60s and one of the things about those Western TV like The Virginian and Bonanza Gunsmoke one of the things that was interesting about those shows in particular is the ones that I like to watch are usually ones that have guest star that I'm a big fan of and so you know if you watch a Virginian episode where William Shatner is the guest star or Robert Culp is the guest star William Shatner is the star of the episode it's about him the story of that episode is about him and Doug McClure as [ __ ] as' or Michael Landon as little Joe are supporting characters there they're either the antagonist of that character or they're helping that character out but the thing that was interesting about these guest stars like Vic Morrow or James Coburn or any of these fellows when they would show up Charles Bronson is um these guest stars would show up the story would be about them and they were always there was an unknown quality about them we didn't know who they were they weren't just the blacksmith in the town they were always entering the town and then at some point in the first act you would learn something about their past they had an interesting shady controversial past of some kind and you didn't know how true the story was that you heard or not true the story was you heard but you didn't really know about them and usually it was a situation the whole second half of the story was are they a protagonist or are they an antagonist is Michael Landon gonna end up being his friend and help him buy the variant or as Michael Landon going to end up killing him at the end because he's a bad guy that concept of a character became very very interesting to me and I thought about what if I could take eight of those characters and trap them in a room during a three-day blizzard where if they try to leave certain death so they have to deal with each other they all have a backstory we can't trust a [ __ ] thing they say and we can't trust anything that they say they are and we just have to figure it out as we watch the story yet there is no Doug McClure there is no James Arness there is no Michael Landon there is no moral Center there is no hero that you can gravitate towards there only is these guest stars that you have to deal with so that was the epital going forward however the thing cannot be ignored it's the only movie that I showed the cast insofar as like okay here's you didn't show to Kerberos I did show it to Kurt Russell he loves the thing so he else and he loved watching it with the cast cuz he was just that's my baby that's what I did but the thing about it was um uh you know but I mean but there are so many things that that are applicable to it but uh because of the setup the the cold the snow Kurt Russell you know Morricone the fact the paranoia going on but but truly and I was trying to do this in Reservoir Dogs as well the real correlation to the thing isn't those elements it was the way I felt watching the thing the first time I saw it in a movie theater and my metaphoric way of breaking down my feelings I thought because I was really I was really connected to that movie I thought it was crazy suspenseful suspense leading almost a terror in a weird way that suspense rarely gets to and I thought part of the reason for that was no one could trust anybody else and the paranoia amongst the characters was so strong and it's trapped in that enclosure for so long that the paranoia is just bounced off all the walls until it had nowhere to go but the fourth wall out into the audience and that was what I was trying to achieve with hateful eight was to bounce that paranoia around until it has nowhere to go out but here well I think you achieved it I appreciate that okie long ago anything said oh no no no very much so I mean like you know Key Largo I mean frankly to tell you the truth um you know like I would say actually like the three plays would be a trifecta of Key Largo Petrified Forest and Iceman Cometh to one degree or another um but that theatrical hothouse quality yeah was what I was going for only enough though again getting back to the jumping-off point of these Western TV shows of the 60s every series at least once a season a bunch of Outlaws would take over the Ponderosa and hold everybody at bay like they do in Key Largo or take over Shiloh ranch on the Virginia there's one in Virginian in particular called the invaders that's our in particularly cool one where these bad guys take over the Shiloh ranch and the bad guys are Darren McGavin and David Carradine it's fantastic I'm we were talking aside about Ennio Morricone a little bit and I'd like to share that with the audience this is the first year films we've used a score in this way and I think it's incredible and marvelous and the question I'd ask you is whether Marconi had done all the music for the film whether it was all done bespoken and he was starting to tell me about about that process of it well it was interesting because we'd flirted with working with each other for a while but this thing like the one to do I had a little little uh voice in my head saying this material deserved an original score and I've never thought that way before I never had that voice in my head before um I didn't ever want to trust a composer with the the soul of my movie what was different here just a feeling I know I think was the material I think there was something about the material I guess the word integrity comes to my mind not to say that the other films aren't full of integrity but I mean there was something about this one that just I was just it was the little voice it was just this little voice I said this is this is the one and um and so uh so I took the first step which was getting the script within the first step when Marconi is getting the script the translated into Italian and I sent it to him and he read it and his wife read it and he really liked it and his wife really really liked it which actually might have been the proper way to go and um then I got together to talk with him about it and and the first thing he said was um well look I want to know where you're coming from here because you don't use a composer who writes a score that takes you from beginning to end you take other people's scores and you use them the way you want to use them and you do a pretty good job with it and people seem to like it so why would you want to change and then go well I mean frankly to tell you the truth I'm not a hundred percent sure I do want to change but I do want to talk to you about it I want to explore it with you you are my favorite composer and I don't mean movie composers I mean compared to Beethoven I mean compared to Schubert you were my favorite composer and if he's ever going to work it's going to work with you but if it doesn't work with you then I'll do it probably exactly that way however I did mention the little voice they said the movie deserved his score of its own and so then we started talking and he thought that I hadn't started to shoot yet little did he know I'd already shot and why would I need the score in a month and he's like well this is not gonna work I'm working with giuseppe de toro and he just finished shooting the other day and i got to do his score I mean this is not gonna work I was told a lot of things that aren't corrected I'm really sorry and I go well so am i but you know we're having a nice time and talking and I go okay well tell me what you thought about the script and so he starts talking about the script II because yeah you know so I I had this idea for a theme when I was reading the script that I should thought was kind of intriguing and bla bla bla bla bla bla let's go back a theme that you said you heard in your head um what was it and uh and he goes well you know I'm sure he was referring to what we use in the opening credits um he goes wow you know I just I see a theme that that that's moving forward it's it's it's there's a forward momentum to it that suggests the stagecoach moving forward moving forward but the important part of the theme is the fact that it truly suggests the violence that will follow eventually well that sounds pretty [ __ ] good yeah so the more we talked about it he said uh um well you know hold on now hold it hold it you know um just up he's gonna take at least two weeks to put his assembly together for me to see um here's what I can do I I can maybe write the theme for you I'll write the theme and uh and I already talked to him about the the carpenter thing all right the carpenter of music for the thing and then he told me a story he goes well you know um the thing was he came and showed me the movie and whatever then I wrote a whole Orchestra store and I wrote a whole synthesizer score because I knew that was what he was used to and I gave him everything and the only thing he used in the entire movie was the synthesizer main title so basically if you stay away from the synthesizer main title all that music that's on the soundtrack album the thing has never been used in a movie ever so he goes uh what I can do is I'll write the theme I'll give you a mixed version of the theme I'll give you a version of the theme that's just brass I'll give you a version of the theme that's just strings and then with the other thing of pieces of music now you have your original score that's never been used in a movie before and I go wow that sounds fantastic alright so that was kind of the deal and that's what I thought would happen but then we were at an award show the very next day and I saw him the next night and he came to me and he goes I'm gonna write you more music and I think I think he literally sat down that night and started composing the the theme that he was talking about and got more inspired and came up with more music and then all of a sudden ten minutes of music became 17 minutes and music became 35 minutes of music alright and so with that and the unused thing portions that I used uh is my original score Wow well I could sit here and talk with you all night unfortunately we're giving giving the wrap-up so I just want to take this opportunity to thank you for an incredible film for all of your work and thank you very much for coming to talk to us tonight oh it's my pleasure you

Channel: Directors Guild of America

Views: 909,593

Keywords: Q&A, The Hateful Eight, Quentin Tarantino, Christopher Nolan, film, 70mm, DGA, Director, DirectorsGuild

Id: 1EN2PUQBNVY

Length: 30min 57sec (1857 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 29 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/FriesWithThat]

Never really thought of The Hateful Eight as casting 8 William Shatner unreliable guest star type characters from Bonanza in the freezing paranoia of the set of The Thing, but I see it now.

[u/ACurivan]

Enjoyed this, thanks for posting!

Really enjoyed the story about the original score and The Thing references

[u/Obi_Wan_Benobi]

If you like this it’s worth seeking out The Rewatchables podcast about Dunkirk featuring Quentin Tarantino talking about the film and Nolan.

[u/Irving94]

Crazy how much The Hateful Eight has faded relative to his other films. It’s to me, one of his absolute best. A true stage play on film.

[u/ewreytukikhuyt344]

I like the bit Tarantino says about how vital it is to have a violent 'sword of damacles' hanging over the movie. Good way of putting it and an interesting insight into how he structures his movies overall. Some of his absolute best work revolves around scenes and sequences where you know it will end in a bloody mess but you don't know when and you don't know how. At his best, he's able to string you along to where you almost forget that it's going to end badly entirely and find yourself hoping for the peaceful resolution. I think I felt this the most in Basterds, but Eight still does a good job at stretching out a scenario that kind of shouldn't work on paper and that hanging tension of the lit fuse or the frayed rope or however you want to describe it really goes a long way toward shaping that.

[u/Ororo5678]

Nolan films: mind-bending and epic

Tarantino films: gritty, violent, and visceral

Imagine if these two joined forces.

[u/hoilst]

"So, Quentin, what really puzzled me about 8 was that noise in some of the scenes."

"Whaddaya mean?"

"In some scenes, you can hear this weird noise. I don't know what it was, but it was synchronised with the movements the movement of the characters' mouths. You could hear it over the soundtrack and the sound effects."

"You- you mean dialogue?"

[u/MSG_ME_ANYTHING]

Around the 19 minute mark he's taking about his recent passion for western tv shows and their guest stars and it's cool how those also inspired Once Upon a Time

[u/cdark64]

The DGA has a podcast where one director interviews another about their most recent film. If you like this they also have an episode where Paul Thomas Anderson interviews Tarantino about Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.