The Hateful Eight

FOREWORD BY ELVIS MITCHELL

I think I was asked to write this foreword because I have a particular—and peculiar—relationship to "The Hateful 8." Partially because I'm lucky enough to be someone who gets to spend time with Quentin Tarantino, and those hangs can sometimes become an occasion where he'll suddenly dash off into a room at stately Tarantino Manor and emerge with a grin and a notebook, trailed by a flurry of loose pages: "So, I got this thing I was workin' on that I wanna try out on ya…" (He's up for sharing his writing with anyone he likes; a friend of mine got to enjoy this experience while seated next to Tarantino on a transatlantic plane ride.) And what he reads can be a chapter from a long-threatened treatise on a favorite director, or… OK, I know, this is completely unfair to bring stuff up that may never see the light of day (and which I mention in hopes of getting him to publish his unfinished books of film essays and director analyses). But—SPOILER ALERT, as they say on the worldwide net—this story has a happy ending. And almost no casualties.

Let's set the stage like this: Quentin Tarantino has taken a stab at almost any genre you can think of—often in the context of action film. And before you say, "Wait, not the musical…" I'd answer that with the dance scene in "Pulp Fiction," or for a more specific conflation, the Bride taking on the Crazy 88s in "Kill Bill, Vol. 1." (In fact, the similarity between musical and martial arts sequence is so easily limned—John Woo has basically made a career of it—that I'll leave that for someone else's intro, or graduate thesis.) Screwball comedy… really, do you have to ask? Romantic melodrama? "Kill Bill Vol. 2" is "Written on the Wind" as if staged by King Hu. Before we wear ourselves out here, I imagine there's one genre you'd be surprised to discover his interest in: the drawing room mystery. One of the first conversations we ever had included my embarrassed admission for a 1965 film, an approbation Tarantino shared. The film was "Ten Little Indians," which starred a Hugh O'Brian whose brow remained spectacularly unfurrowed as the plot ground inexorably towards a denouement in which a group of wan, guilt-ridden and overly tweeded swingin' Brits were eliminated as ruthlessly as comedies from NBC's prime time schedule. And it was Hugh's tanned superiority—even in black and white, he threw off a hearty Southern California glow (I think he even played a character named Hugh)—that led me to seek out the original source material.

Of course, you'd think Tarantino's attraction towards such a film would be about as likely as seeing a black person (a) starring in a premium cable series (b) starring in a Martin Scorsese movie or (c) alone on the cover of Entertainment Weekly. And those points of comparison come into play here for a reason. The 1965 film was an adaptation of an Agatha Christie novel called "Ten Little Niggers," complete with an equally glibly offensive song woven into the plot. And because Tarantino is one of the few working filmmakers eager to explore questions of race and identity in his work, the ugliness intrinsic to Christie's original conception was something he couldn't get out of his mind.

My contact with "Hateful 8" starts with its original incarnation; it was born as an intended print sequel to "Django Unchained," passages of which Quentin would enthusiastically read aloud from handwritten notebook pages, acting out every single action and character. Then, when it turned into "Hateful 8," I got to hear sections of that as well. When Tarantino asks for an opinion after he puts the writing down, the author-actor (acteur?) does more than listen for a response—he pores over body language and inflection from an audience as if he were Christie's Hercule Poirot, scanning the grounds in a demitasse cup for clues. Finally, the "8" script was finished and was on its way to production when it was leaked online. Now, that's a turn of events that demands its own Poirot, but the unhappy conclusion was that Quentin withdrew the material. It seemed it would never see the light of day.

And here's where what they call in TV shows the B-plot emerges. Film Independent at LACMA—where I'm curator—has a series called Live Read, where Jason Reitman and I put together a group of classic film scripts. Jason then casts them and for one night only, a group of actors reads the script before a live audience. (It's not streamed or recorded—if you're not there, you don't see it.) In the first season—we're now in the fifth—one of the biggest successes was a black recasting of "Reservoir Dogs" starring Laurence Fishburne, Cuba Gooding, Jr. and Terence Howard. It's the first—and to date—only production to receive a standing ovation after ten minutes in. In a reversing of the original casting, there'd instead be one white actor (in the movie, Holdaway, the detective who briefs Mr. Orange, is black). I asked Quentin to do it, and he was interested but too busy preparing the "Django" shoot.

While the smoke was still clearing from the explosion caused by the leak, I met Quentin for dinner. This was during Live Read's third season, and I'd invited guest directors since Jason was away making a movie. Earlier, I'd approached Quentin about being one of these special guests, but again, timing seemed to conspire against him getting to it. (I'm still hoping he brings the scripts he wanted to do to Live Read). So, I was caught off guard when he asked about stepping in as a guest director. I had to tell him the slots were all booked and there was no room left in our schedule. "What," he asked, "if I said I wanted to do a live read of 'Hateful 8'?" "I think we can make some room," I replied. Thanks to my agile staff at Film Independent, "The Hateful 8" had its world premiere April 19, 2014, on the stage at the theater at the Ace Hotel before a crowd of sixteen hundred people. What gets left out of this story when most people bring it up is that attendance was conditional. The entire audience had to check cell phones at the door for obvious reasons; Tarantino didn't want this staging turning up anywhere else, and Harvey Weinstein graciously paid for the extra security. And the place still sold out within an hour. That night, people from around the world watched as the writer-director cajoled, caressed and called-out a cast that included Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, Tim Roth, Michael Madsen, Walton Goggins, Bruce Dern and James Parks. If you're chewing your lower lip about having missed your opportunity to see them do it live, don't worry: they're all in the film version of "Hateful 8," joined by new arrivals Jennifer Jason Leigh, Demian Bichir and Channing Tatum. The period racism of Christie's novel becomes the foundation of this post–Civil War mystery, in which casual and blunt ugliness functions as a kind of original sin—something that stains every single character in the piece.

At the end of the "Hateful 8" Live Read evening—four a.m. the next day, actually—a handful of us remained. And as we smoked celebratory cigars, Quentin pulled me aside and confirmed a possibility he'd teased about—and which had to be kept on the d.l. between us—when he proposed the "Hateful 8" read: "This is it. I'm gonna do it. I'm making the movie." He broke into a reassuring chuckle, exhaled a plume of Cuban smoke and wandered back to the crowd, where he led them in a toast. The final chapter of that story that was years in the making is this, "The Hateful 8" script that—as Stan Lee used to write—you hold in your hot little hands, true believer. And me? As someone says in a movie by one of Mr. Tarantino's favorite directors, I just happened to be there when the wheel went 'round.