In a characteristically verbose, expletive laden tirade that wouldn’t look out of place in, well, a Tarantino script, garrulous auteur Quentin Tarantino has resolved to literally shelve the production of his second Western, The Hateful Eight, upon learning that the first draft has today been leaked by a small pool of suspects – a star-studded ensemble cast in Hollywood’s most obscene whodunnit? since Ellen Degeneres’s copy of The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty surfaced on The Pirate Bay.
“I’m very, very depressed,” Tarantino tells Deadline. “I finished a script, a first draft, and I didn’t mean to shoot it until next winter, a year from now. I gave it to six people, and apparently it’s gotten out today.”
Of the six people shown the script, including one of the producers of Django Unchained, Reggie Hudlin, Tarantino believes he has narrowed down the culprit to the camps of three “motherfucking” marquee actors aligned with the project: Michael Madsen, Bruce Dern and Tim Roth; the latter, says Tarantino, is no longer a suspect in this “ugly maliciousness”, a guilty party complicit in an unthinkable act of “betrayal”:
“One of the others let their agent read it, and that agent has now passed it on to everyone in Hollywood. I don’t know how these fucking agents work, but I’m not making this next. I’m going to publish it, and that’s it for now. I give it out to six people, and if I can’t trust them to that degree, then I have no desire to make it. I’ll publish it. I’m done. I’ll move on to the next thing. I’ve got 10 more where that came from.”
While Tarantino maintains he’s flattered that people “like [his] shit, and that they go out of their way to find it and read it,” news of the untraceable leak (he didn’t emboss each copy with a personalised watermark) has given him cause for serious concern and a total change in direction: “I could totally change my mind; I own the fucking thing. But I can tell you, it’s not going to be the next thing I do. It’s my baby, and if the muse calls me later to do it we’ll do it.”
Speaking where muses are concerned, Tarantino concludes that he also “hadn’t given [the script] to Christoph [Waltz], [or] Sam Jackson. I gave it to three motherfucking actors. We met in a place, and I put it in their hands. Reggie Hudlin’s agent never had a copy. It’s got to be either the agents of Dern or Madsen.”
“Please name names.”
On that note, I think we all remember what happened last time Quentin started crossing names off a list in the pursuit of vengeance.
via Deadline
