As sadly confirmed this week, incensed filmmaker of award-worthy genre flicks and “deeply depressed” victim of “betrayal” Quentin Tarantino has pulled the plug on his eagerly anticipated Django Unchained followup, The Hateful Eight, because some careless “motherfucker” actor considered for a key part in the film, or, more likely, their agent, manager or personal assistant, leaked the unfinished version of the screenplay, forcing the revenge enamoured director to rage quit the entire project.
As Tarantino notes,
“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.”
Sure. That’s his prerogative as a filmmaker. We respect that. But that doesn’t mean we have to like it. Mainly because major plot points revealed in a summarised version of the script published today by The Wrap involve words like “blizzard”, “dead bounties strapped to the roof” and “Southern General”. What. The. Actual. Fuck?
But that’s not even the best/worst part. In an even more depressing revelation, we would have undertaken the first two-fifths of the film’s journey with a pair of cadaver-transporting bounty hunters played by the badass Tarantino regulars responsible for two of the baddest MF’s in his filmography: Pulp Fiction’s Samuel L. Jackson and Reservoir Dogs’ Michael Madsen.
Just let that sink in for a moment.
The script, according to The Wrap, “is an ensemble Western with obvious parts for Madsen and Dern, as well as Tarantino stalwarts like Samuel L. Jackson and Christoph Waltz. Jackson and Madsen would likely both play bounty hunters returning human plunder to a town called Red Rock in exchange for hefty rewards. Their characters, a former major in the Union army and a man named John Ruth, dominate the first two of the script’s five chapters.”
Uh-huh. Yep. Please don’t stop…
“They run into a Southerner named Chris Mannix on the road, and three of them, along with their driver — a living prisoner and three dead bounties strapped to the roof — arrive at a haberdashery to take shelter from an oncoming blizzard. Yet the proprietors, Minnie, Sweet Dave and her other colleagues, are nowhere to be found. In their place are four men, a Southern general (likely Dern), an alleged hangman, a Frenchman named Bob and a cowboy named Joe Gage. Mistrust, coffee and violence ensue.”
Mistrust you say?
The rest of the script has yet to be explained in detail. But we can only imagine that after an extended Mexican standoff resulting in the bittersweet shooting of garrulous eyepatch wearing barkeep Steve Buscemi, the duo reconcile at an old-timey fast food joint before picking off a ravenous horde of zombie Nazi slaveowners with sawn off shotguns they stole from the sheriff.
