Quentin Tarantino Tells All About ‘Hateful Eight’ Netflix Miniseries, Reveals ‘Django’ Director’s Cut
Quentin Tarantino’s “The Hateful Eight” arrived on Netflix last week in a new version the streaming giant billed as the “extended cut.” What Netflix didn’t reveal but fans discovered was that the “extended cut” was actually a miniseries version of “The Hateful Eight.” The film had been broken up into four standalone episodes, each with an average length of 50 minutes. Tarantino broke his silence on the new “Hateful Eight” miniseries in an interview with /Film, revealing it was Netflix who first pitched the idea.
“Netflix came to us and said, ‘Hey, look, if you’d be interested…If there’s even more footage, if you’d be interested in putting it together and in a way that we could show it as three or four episodes, depending on how much extra footage you have, we’d be willing to do that,'” Tarantino said, “I thought, wow, that’s really intriguing. I mean, the movie exists as a movie, but if I were to use all the footage we shot, and see if I could put it together in episode form, I was game to give that a shot, give that a try.”
Tarantino started working with editor Fred Raskin about a year or so after “The Hateful Eight” was released in theaters on the project. The director said the film was not edited form scratch to create the miniseries version but was heavily re-edited. Tarantino said the film version already had a literary quality since the script was broken into six chapters, which made transitioning it into a series feel natural. An estimated 25 minutes of new footage is scattered throughout the miniseries.
“Some sequences are more similar than others compared to the film, but it has a different feeling,” Tarantino said. “It has a different feeling that I actually really like a lot…There are sequences that play very different.”
Tarantino admitted that he’s excited by the chance for “fuller versions” of his work to come out, but it all depends on the particular work. When asked whether or not he would do something similar with “Kill Bill,” Tarantino turned down the idea. The director said everything he shot for “Kill Bill” was included in the movie, which is one of the reasons he broke the film into two volumes. As for “Django Unchained,” Tarantino revealed a director’s cut is already being planned with bonus footage added back into the runtime.
“I’ve actually cut a director’s cut of ‘Django,'” Tarantino said. “That’s about like three hours and 15 minutes, or three hours and 20 minutes, something like that. That’s one I wouldn’t do as a miniseries, because it would just be better [as a movie]. I thought about that idea, but that would just work better as one movie. Just a longer one as far as I was concerned. So I’ve actually done that. We’re just kind of waiting some time after ‘Once Upon A Time in Hollywood,’ and we’ll release that eventually.”
When asked to pitch “The Hateful Eight: Extended Cut” to moviegoers, Tarantino said “it gives you more in a slightly different format.” The director argued that by taking the miniseries route over a more traditional director’s cut he was able to “use all of [his ideas]” that he originally wrote into the script. “Each episode ends it an emotional place and you’re also able to see the whole original narrative complexity of the whole piece,” Tarantino said.
“The Hateful Eight” miniseries is now streaming on Netflix. Tarantino will be back in theaters July 26 with “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.” Head to /Film to read more of Tarantino’s thoughts on the new “Hateful Eight” release.