Quentin Tarantino has made his first TV show. Kind of. Recently, fans of his noticed that Netflix released an extended version of his 2015 movie The Hateful Eight. Only instead of just being presented as a movie with additional footage, it was cut into four, 50-minute episodes, effectively turning his snowy western into a miniseries. There was some debate as to whether or not this was something Netflix did on their own, or if Tarantino had some say in it. As it turns out, Tarantino actually spent a great deal of time with his editor personally putting this together.
Given the confusion, Quentin Tarantino recently did an interview explaining how the project came to be. Basically, Netflix approached him with the idea. The Pulp Fiction filmmaker liked the idea enough to actually give it a shot and, as a result, got together with his editor Fred Raskin and cut together The Hateful Eight miniseries. Here’s what Tarantino had to say about it.
“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. So about a year after it’s released, maybe a little less, me and my editor, Fred Raskin, we got together and then we worked real hard. We edited the film down into 50 minute bits, and we very easily got four episodes out of it. 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 [already] a literary aspect to the film anyway, so it definitely has this ‘chapters unfolding’ quality.”
Another point of interest for viewers had to do with the additional footage included. The Hateful Eight was toured around certain venues in a 70mm presentation with some footage not shown in most theaters, known as the “roadshow” version. Some seemed to think this miniseries was just a repackaged version of that. However, the director refuted that as well, estimating that there are at least 25 minutes of totally new footage in this cut.
“Yeah, it’s really frustrating that on one hand, it seems like every website in the world wants to write about it, but no one wants to actually watch it. So they could actually see for themselves if it’s different. Like, 42 different websites would rather speculate on if it’s different rather than just watch it. So it’s all this misconception. ‘Oh, they’re just replaying the credits…it’s just only what was in the roadshow version.’ No! I don’t know [an exact] timeline as far as how much new footage is in it, but it’s something like about, like, 25 minutes if not more. And there are sequences that play very different. You know, one of the things in it that I like a lot, and it was one of the things [that] didn’t quite work in the feature, we had moved on, but in this kind of situation it was different.”
This is, all around, pretty interesting. Quentin Tarantino ruled out doing something like this for Kill Bill, but seemed open to the idea, in general, in the future. Considering he says he’s going to retire after his tenth movie, which may or may not be a Star Trek movie, this could set up a future on the small screen. The Hateful Eight miniseries is currently streaming on Netflix. This news was first reported by Slash Film.
