Quentin Tarantino - Back In The Saddle With 'The Hateful Eight'

Midway through postproduction on his eighth movie, the Western 'The Hateful Eight' - about a band of outlaws trapped in a saloon during a blizzard - the director discusses the country's legacy of white supremacy, Obama, and why he doesn't worry about a Transformers future.

- Lane Brown, photograph by Amanda Demme

We’re five months from the release of The  Hateful Eight on December 25. How close to finishing are you?

We’ve got a little bit more than an hour finished right now. I just got back from seeing an hour of the movie cut together.

Are you happy with it?

I’m not committing suicide yet. It is what it is. We’re rushing and trying to get to the end. Then you go through it and try to make it even better. But first, you just get to the end.

Every movie I’ve ever done, there has always been some date we were trying to meet, whether it was with Reservoir Dogs, trying to meet the Sundance date, or Pulp Fiction, meeting the Cannes date. But we always pull it off. And this way you don’t have that situation where you finish the movie and then the people who paid to make it get to sit around and pick it to death.

So you don’t get notes from the studio anymore?

No, you do. Oh, yeah. 1

Is it different now, coming off Django Unchained and Inglourious Basterds? Those were the biggest hits of your career.2 Did that box office change things?

I don’t think so, as far as me telling the story I want to tell. But I learned a big lesson with Grindhouse,3 and I try not to repeat the mistake. Robert Rodriguez and I had gotten used to going our own way, on these weird roads, and having the audience come along. We’d started thinking they’d go wherever we wanted. With Grindhouse, that proved not to be the case. It was still worth doing, but it would have been better if we weren’t caught so unaware by how uninterested people were.