Quentin Tarantino interview: ‘I don’t want to be the guy doing this forever’

It’s early December, and Quentin Tarantino is holding court in a Beverly Hills hotel. Tarantino – if you didn’t already know – is a talker. He’s as quick as machine-gun fire on the subject of his new film ‘The Hateful Eight’. It’s a western set in post-Civil War Wyoming where a snowstorm traps a group of people together under one roof, including bounty hunters played by Kurt Russell and Samuel L Jackson, and challenges their prejudices.

When a draft script of the film leaked early in 2014, Tarantino furiously threatened to pull the plug. Nearly two years later, his layered take on race in America is, if anything, more timely than ever following the killing of Michael Brown in the city of Ferguson. Tarantino has been directing movies for more than 20 years, and he’s always said he’d call it a day after his tenth film. ‘The Hateful Eight’ is number eight. The big question is, when a man loves cinema this much – how can he stop?

So is ‘The Hateful Eight’ your most political film?
‘Yes. But when I first started writing it, I didn’t know it. I’ve dealt with race, in terms of black and white, in a lot of my movies, in all my movies, to some degree or other. But I do think that dealing with black and white in America and with racial conflicts is something that I have to contribute to the western genre. That has not been done by anyone else – at least not in a meaningful way.’

Why use the western genre to explore race in America? You started that with ‘Django Unchained’.
‘The western has always been pretty precise when dealing with the decades in which the films were made. Vietnam or Watergate hang over all the westerns that came out during the late 1960s and the 1970s. I am a big fan of those. When you’re making a western, you can’t help dealing with the American zeitgeist. Ten or 20 years from now, hopefully you’ll be able to look at “The Hateful Eight” and get a good picture of the concerns of America at this time.’

You’re billing ‘The Hateful Eight’ as ‘The Eighth Film From Quentin Tarantino’. Are you sticking to the idea that you’ll make only ten?
‘That is the idea. It usually takes me about three years to make a movie anyway, so you’re talking about almost a decade left.’