Mandy Griffiths
Quentin Tarantino’s “The Hateful Eight” is a character driven, gorgeously shot, humorous, violent addition to his film-making credits, managing to be both unlike anything else in the cinemas right now, and classic Tarantino.
While in Australia, Mandy Griffiths sat down with the iconic filmmaker to talk all things cold, character, and the importance of an explosive finish. Check out the full interview in the video and highlights below.
Quentin on Endings:
“I’m very organic about my endings. I don’t want to know how it’s going to end. There is ‘should’s’ or ‘can’t’s’ but I feel for me you should be closer to the way most novelists do a story. I have a pretty good idea how it’s going to start and maybe even right up until the middle. But hopefully by the time you get to the middle, the characters kind of take it over. And of course they should because by the time you get to the middle you know so much more about the characters than you ever could before you start putting pen to paper. And now you’re informed by that.
And it’s not quite as haphazard as maybe that sounds because I am dealing in genre cinema. So we have an idea where we’re going. In “Kill Bill”…I figured that she would probably kill Bill [laughs]. But how she would kill Bill and how it would happen and why it would happen and how she’d feel about it when it did happen – how we would feel about it when it did happen – that was very open for grabs. And that had to be discovered and that had to be explored. And frankly, to tell you the truth, I think this [“The Hateful Eight”] might be my best ending. And we had to get there, we found it.
With endings, to me, in the eighties – but not in Australia! The 80s [cinema] in Australia was effing awesome, it was [Australian accent] amazing – but in America, they were not so good. And one of the things about it was a very conservative time for films, and so even when films tried to break out of that eighties, conservative mold, they always had to conform at some point in the last 20 minutes. And it got to be so bad that you didn’t even hold a bad ending against a movie – that was just asking for too much [laughs]. If you held bad endings against movies in the eighties then you just wouldn’t like anything.”
“The Hateful Eight” is now in cinemas.
