QUENTIN TARANTINO’S ‘ HATEFUL’ HISTORY OF PERSONAS
Quentin Tarantino prefers his characters to be more hateful than heroic.
So when you strand a blizzard-bound bunch of his ne’er- do- well creations into one cabin, as in the filmmaker’s new The Hateful Eight, things get very combustible very quickly. Just the way he likes it.
“I don’t know if you would call everybody in the piece a villain, but they’re all fairly hateful. That was a good word to use, better than Eight
Bad Guys,” Tarantino says with a laugh. “Some might be more likable than others.”
But the filmmaker has a history of those kinds of personas in all his movies, says Walton Goggins, who was in Tarantino’s Django Unchained and also stars in
Hateful Eight — “people on the fringes of society or who live these alternative lifestyles or who find themselves in situations based on their karmic actions.”
It’s an especially touchy crew Tarantino has in his new film: a couple of post- Civil War bounty hunters in Major Marquis Warren ( Samuel L. Jackson) and John “The Hangman” Ruth ( Kurt Russell); vicious fugitive Daisy Do--
mergue ( Jennifer Jason Leigh); soon- tobe sheriff Chris Mannix ( Goggins); the seemingly helpful Mexican Bob ( Demián Bichir); chatty executioner Oswaldo Mobray ( Tim Roth); elderly Southern general Sanford Smithers ( Bruce Dern); and a guy known for punching cows, Joe Gage ( Michael Madsen).
There is no moral center, and all of them have at the very least done some questionable things — which means you can’t really trust any of them.
“People tell you what they did and who they are, but you don’t know if that’s true or not,” Tarantino says. “I didn’t want you to have any sure- footed knowledge about any of the characters and let them hash it out and just deal with it that way.”
The Hateful Eight resembles the group setting of the filmmaker’s first movie, 1992’ s Reservoir Dogs, which is pretty much packed to the limit with criminals. In Pulp Fiction ( 1994), Jackson’s Jules Winnfield is a hit man who spouts Bible verses and wrestles with his place in the universe. And the American World War II soldiers of 2009’ s Inglourious Basterds scalp and kill captured Nazis and plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler in the coldest blood possible.
“They’re human beings. There’s 360 degrees to them. There’s bad sides, good sides,” Russell says. “The flow of the storytelling comes from his character behavior and getting to know these people and getting to care about them.”
What makes The Hateful Eight cool for Jackson is how the movie’s large cast of characters engage in an enclosed, increasingly volatile environment, which emphasizes Tarantino’s ability “to write for all kinds of people, create all these diverse characters and make all those things work for us.”
In fact, the paranoia and distrust among these characters is so strong that “it just bounced off the walls of the shelter until it had nowhere else to go but through the fourth wall into the audience,” Tarantino says. “And that’s what I was going for.”