Hollywood can be an unpredictable town, but no one in the movie business is harder to pin down than Quentin Tarantino. He’s the type of guy that might start out with a novel called Django In White Hell and end up with a movie called The Hateful Eight.
In fact, according to ScreenCrush, that’s exactly how his latest project came into being. Tarantino recently appeared on the DP/30 video podcast and revealed that he had wanted to continue the story of Django — the eponymous slave-turned-bounty-hunter from Tarantino’s last hit film — but had written him into a cast of characters that seemed a bit too unsavory to have a hero in their midst.
Said the director “[at] a certain point I realized, well, you know what’s wrong with this piece? It’s Django. He needs to go. Because you shouldn’t have a moral center when it comes to these eight characters.”
Eventually, Tarantino replaced the character with Samuel L. Jackson’s Major Marquis Warren and was left with The Hateful Eight. Just your typical, linear, non-abstract creative process.
While those who had hoped to see Django on the big screen again might be disappointed to hear that the character was cut from this film, the glass-half-full crowd would say that the door seems wide open for Foxx to reprise his role in the future.
Another interesting takeaway from this interview is that Tarantino was trying to write a novel. While his screenplays are the stuff of legend, the literary world represents untreaded territory for the director.
If you tuned in for his appearance on the YouTube series What The Flick!?, however, this news probably doesn’t come as a surprise. On the show, Tarantino told film critic Ben Mankiewicz that he sees himself transitioning to “writing novels and writing plays” possibly at the expense of screenplays.
“Since [Kill Bill], my work has taken a turn towards the literary,” he said. “It’s gotten denser and denser, with [The Hateful Eight] probably being the densest of the group. And that seems like where I’m going to be going too.”
It’s interesting to note, however, that the director’s most recent attempt to write a book ended in … well, a movie. That said, we wouldn’t waive goodbye to the Quentin Tarantino we’ve come to know just yet.
