Quentin Tarantino feels betrayed. Someone close to the director has done the unthinkable and leaked the script to his upcoming Western, The Hateful Eight, and now the film will have to be known as the postponed Western. Tarantino felt the knife in his back when his agent, Mike Simpson, started receiving calls from other agents who were trying to get their clients cast in the film’s smaller roles, according to Deadline, and that’s when Tarantino knew that one of the six people who had received a copy of the first draft of The Hateful Eight had dicked him over.
“I’m very, very depressed,” Tarantino said. “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.” (Via Deadline)
While I, like most of Tarantino’s fans, am excited about this new film, maybe he could instead pen and direct a detective mystery that gets to the bottom of which of a writer’s so-called friends would f*ck him over like this by letting an agent handle a copy of the script that the director holds so dear. It would be a “WHODUNIT?!?!” for the ages, as the awkward-looking sleuth cracks skulls and gathers evidence to prove his theories, all while set to forgotten 1960s soul music.
“I gave it to one of the producers on Django Unchained, Reggie Hudlin, and he let an agent come to his house and read it,” Tarantino said. “That’s a betrayal, but not crippling because the agent didn’t end up with the script. There is an ugly maliciousness to the rest of it. I gave it to three actors: Michael Madsen, Bruce Dern, Tim Roth. The one I know didn’t do this is Tim Roth. 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.”
Great f*cking job, Bruce Dern and Michael Madsen. I’m betting that Tarantino’s going to do something ridiculous to punish us all by starring in Destiny Turns on the Radio 2 or making his next project about a talking puppy that learns to be an assassin. Just kidding, that would still be amazing.
Alas, according to Mike Fleming’s exclusive access to the fired up foot-lover, Tarantino already had two scripts he was working on – one being The Hateful Eight and the other being an unnamed project – and he was already fired up about that second one, so it looks like he’ll make that first and then move back to his Western.
“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. I was thinking about the idea of maybe publishing it before I made it, but now that deal happens for sure, and I’m not doing it next.”
The other script was one he had on his mind lately, so it might not take that long. “The idea was, I was going to write two scripts,” he said. “I wasn’t going to shoot the Western until next winter, and I have been full of piss and vinegar about the other one. So now I’ll do that one.”
And even though he’s pretty sure that Dern’s agent is the culprit behind this leak, he’ll still write the 77-year old a role in the other film. So basically we’re the only ones being punished for this.
UPDATE: Quentin Tarantino To Wash Hands Of ‘The Hateful Eight’ Script Altogether?
UPDATE #2: After Script Leak, Has Quentin Tarantino Moved On To A Prison Film?
(Banner via Getty)