When The Hateful Eight hit cinemas in 2015, a big selling point for Quentin Tarantino's Western was the 70mmm Roadshow Cut. That version of the movie, complete with overture and intermission, has never been released on home entertainment formats. Yet a new take on the movie has popped up – on Netflix, where it's been edited into a miniseries format.
Some questioned whether Tarantino had any input into it and now, talking to Slashfilm, he confirms that he was very much involved. "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," the director recalls. "And 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."
The result was Tarantino reconvening with editor Fred Raskin and blending roughly 25 minutes of new footage into a cut that is split into 50-minute chunks. "We didn’t re-edit the whole thing from scratch, but we did a whole lot of re-editing, and it plays differently. Some sequences are more similar than others compared to the film, but it has a different feeling. It has a different feeling that I actually really like a lot. And there was a literary aspect to the film anyway, so it definitely has this 'chapters unfolding' quality."
So now you know: if you watch the extended version on the streaming service, you're getting a Tarantino-approved product. And after working on the evolving Eight also had him thinking about his other films. "I’ve actually cut a director’s cut of Django Unchained, he says of his 2012 movie that also mixed bloody violence and Western themes. "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."
Finally, asked about the unclear status of his plans for a Star Trek movie at Paramount, he confirmed that it's still on his mind, even if Hollywood again naturally takes prominence right now: "It’s a very big possibility I haven’t been dealing with those guys for a while cause I’ve been making my movie. But we’ve talked about a story and a script. The script has been written and when I emerge my head like Punxsutawney Phil, post-Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, we’ll pick up talking about it again." For more from the director, head to Slashfilm.
Once Upon A Time In Hollywood arrives in UK cinemas on 14 August.
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