Effects-heavy 2015 tentpoles such as Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Ant-Man (as well as even 2016 arrivals such as Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice) have wrapped production over the past couple months. Those movies will be entering into their demanding post-production stages even as the cameras only start rolling on other anticipated projects that are scheduled to arrive (later) next year.
This week, for example, director Sam Mendes began shooting Spectre, the followup to his 2012 James Bond adventure, Skyfall; and thanks to Samuel L. Jackson, we can now confirm that Quentin Tarantino has likewise gone into principal photography mode on his next film, The Hateful Eight. Tarantino’s western, in case you didn’t hear, will be the first major cinematic project shot entirely in Colorado since the John Wayne-starring version of True Grit filmed there, back in the late 1960s.
Jackson, who has been involved (in some capacity) with almost every Tarantino movie to date, will be sharing the screen alongside Kurt Russell and several other veterans of the Tarantino film-verse, in Hateful Eight. Tarantino’s original script (according to its official synopsis) takes place “six or eight or twelve years” following the American Civil War, as eight travelers wind up trapped by a blizzard at a mountainside stop-over called Minnie’s Haberdashery… a place that not all (any?) of them will leave alive.
… The weather doesn’t look too bad as far as the first day of shooting on Hateful Eight goes, though, judging by the below photo that Jackson posted to his Twitter account (there might be fake snowstorms hitting the region in the weeks ahead, though).
And it begins! https://t.co/prBpD0ri9Y— Samuel L. Jackson (@SamuelLJackson) December 10, 2014
Tarantino, unsurprisingly, has revealed that he looked to vintage western movies and TV shows for inspiration while he crafted the script and story for Hateful Eight. The project reads as being a character and dialoge-heavy blend of spaghetti western and Agatha Christie-style murder-mystery elements, recalling more his works in the 1990s (see: Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, etc.) in the way they mixed different genres to tell their various stories.
Of late, the filmmaker has moved away from that approach (and not necessarily for the better); features such as Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained have (arguably) felt more like Tarantino’s versions of old-fashioned genre movies, instead of being clever re-configurations of cinema past. It would be nice to see him get back to (literally) mixing things up more hereon out, so here is to hoping that proves to be the case with The Hateful Eight.
NEXT: Quentin Tarantino on Hateful Eight & Retirement Plans
–
The Hateful Eight is written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, and stars Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Walton Goggins, Demian Bichir, Tim Roth, Michael Madsen, Bruce Dern, and Channing Tatum. It will arrive in theaters sometime in late 2015.
