The Hateful Eight doesn’t hit wide release for another week, but Quentin Tarantino’s latest has already seen more drama than a low-budget Bravo reality series. It was leaked by a pirate! Its script was leaked by… someone else! It was boycotted by police! It inspired Channing Tatum to pull too hard on Bruce Dern’s arm! It was so stately and explosive that it shocked Mike Ryan!
Got room for one more?
Just kidding, there’s no more drama. Now that we’re so close to Hateful Eight‘s release we can almost taste it (wait, let’s not taste it, everyone’s so dirty), everyone’s starting to calm the hell down and the studio is dropping some serious promotional breadcrumbs. Today’s morsel: A new featurette centering on Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson), a former union soldier turned “infamous bounty hunter.” In it, Jackson unpacks his character’s motivations — “he joined the war, he says, to kill white, Southern crackers, but he killed pretty much anybody who got in his way” — and the film’s cast and crew unpack Jackson himself. “Sam is one of those very few people that sometimes can get Quentin to step outside of the words on the page,” says director of photography Bob Richardson. “That level of respect I’ve only seen with Sam.”
Even our boy Kurt Russell’s singing Jackson’s praises. “I really looked forward to working with Sam because he’s a bold actor,” says Russell, who I at first thought said “old” actor, then was really disappointed when I rewound it. “He’s inventive, creative. He’s right there with you, for you. You should be there for him.” Jackson goes on to wax poetic about the relationship he has with Tarantino, which he elaborated on in a recent New York Magazine story (basically, they are the happiest work husbands on Earth).
Let’s hope the rest of this week’s Hateful Eight stories are this benign and pirate-free, and that nobody else harms Bruce Dern, who is, in fact, an old actor.
