Quentin Tarantino is bringing The Hateful Eight to Comic-Con next week, but until the Western’s anticipated panel takes place, here’s another image from the star-studded pic, courtesy of EW.
Kurt Russell plays bounty hunter John Ruth, while Samuel L. Jackson is playing Major Marquis Warren. Both are definitely the kinds of guys you don’t want to end up stranded with – but that’s exactly what happens in the film, when a blizzard traps Ruth and Warren in a stagecoach stopover with an assortment of other rogues. Bloodshed ensues, but Tarantino assures the mag that there’s some humor on screen, too:
“I can definitely say that as bleak as our movie is, we are definitely the funniest snow Western ever made. This is funnier than The Great Silence, it’s funnier than Day of the Outlaw.”
The director also cites Bonanza and The Virginian as two influences on his latest movie, explaining:
“You wait the whole episode to find out, ‘Are they a good guy or are they a bad guy?’ So I thought, ‘What if I did a story that was made up of nothing but those characters?’ So there’s no good guys. There’s no Little Joe.”
Tarantino is one of those filmmakers I’ll turn out to watch at work in any context, and with a cast as thrillingly big as this, I’m expecting terrific things from The Hateful Eight. In addition to Russell and Jackson, the pic stars Jennifer Jason Leigh, Michael Madsen, Tim Roth, Walton Goggins, Bruce Dern and Demian Bichir. The movie arrives on Christmas Day in the premium 70mm format then goes wide January 8.
In THE HATEFUL EIGHT, set six or eight or twelve years after the Civil War, a stagecoach hurtles through the wintry Wyoming landscape. The passengers, bounty hunter John Ruth (Russell) and his fugitive Daisy Domergue (Leigh), race towards the town of Red Rock where Ruth, known in these parts as “The Hangman,” will bring Domergue to justice. Along the road, they encounter two strangers: Major Marquis Warren (Jackson), a black former union soldier turned infamous bounty hunter, and Chris Mannix (Goggins), a southern renegade who claims to be the town’s new Sheriff.
Losing their lead on the blizzard, Ruth, Domergue, Warren and Mannix seek refuge at Minnie’s Haberdashery, a stagecoach stopover on a mountain pass. When they arrive at Minnie’s, they are greeted not by the proprietor but by four unfamiliar faces. Bob (Bichir), who’s taking care of Minnie’s while she’s visiting her mother, is holed up with Oswaldo Mobray (Roth), the hangman of Red Rock, cow-puncher Joe Gage (Madsen), and Confederate General Sanford Smithers (Dern). As the storm overtakes the mountainside stopover, our eight travelers come to learn they may not make it to Red Rock after all…
