The Hateful Eight Conundrum

"Don't download my fucking script! Yes, I'm talking to you!"

Before I start, I must say that Quentin Tarantino NEEDS to make The Hateful Eight.

He just needs to.

If for no other reason than to reinvent the subgenre known as Contained Thriller.

There is so much I want to say about this, but I'm finding it difficult to get my thoughts in order.  I'm experiencing so many different emotions right now.  An odd combination of excitement, shock, sadness, and guilt.  So I'm going to attempt to take those emotions, and isolate them to figure out why I'm so impacted by Tarantino's latest opus.

EXCITEMENT

Last week, when I heard that the screenplay for The Hateful Eight had leaked.  I became a man on a mission.  I searched high and low, any place and every place I could potentially download the script, and immerse myself in it.  It took a couple days, but I inevitably found a source.  Once I obtained the script, I planned my entire weekend around reading it.  However, weekends are usually pretty hectic for me, so I was only able to read thirty pages on Saturday morning, and read another sixty pages on Sunday night.  I had planned to read the remainder on Monday morning, but due to circumstances beyond my control, I had to put it off until today.  And now having read The Hateful Eight in its entirety, I'm having a bitch of time picking my jaw up off the floor.

This screenplay is just fantastic!  Almost heartbreakingly so.  The story is a pure Tarantino suspense festival.  I won't go into details about the story, or the characters.  Because all I can focus on is the effect the screenplay had on me.  Though being a first draft of a Tarantino script, it is infamously riddled with spelling and grammatical errors.  But the story is SO confidently delivered, I almost suspect that QT put the errors in there intentionally as if to dare the reader to stop by saying, "Yeah, I know I spelled 'coffy' wrong.  But you still can't put it down, can you?"

And I couldn't, even when I HAD to put it down, I was driven by an overwhelming desire to find out what was going to happen.  This is an effect very few screenplays have on me.

Now my feelings on The Hateful Eight caused me to wonder, "Do I REALLY love this script?  Or am I biased because I'm a lifelong Tarantino fan?"

Yes and no, I suppose.  Yes, for obvious reasons.  No, because there were a couple points in the first half of The Hateful Eight where I checked out a little bit because it's very much a slow burn thriller, which means not much is happening at the beginning.  Would I have kept up with it if it wasn't a Tarantino script?  Or would I have dismissed it like many other scripts I've attempted to read in the past?... Good question.

The answer is probably not, and that reason is the dialogue.  That richly textured dialogue that no one can do justice to quite like Tarantino.  Because I don't normally get into the characters of a story until they're knee deep in the muck of the tale.  So as a reader, great dialogue is what I always look for when perusing a script.  And The Hateful Eight has it in bundles.

SHOCK

Now that I've isolated my excitement, my initial feeling of shock is wearing off.  I think a lot of that feeling had to do with how Tarantino ended the script.  Without listing spoilers, I'll just say that the final moments of The Hateful Eight build to an operatic level of intensity.  It feels like a bomb is about to go off, and when it does, the violence hits like a punch to the chest.  Then it's over before I could even register what happened.

I read those final pages with my sleeping four month old daughter in my arms.  As my eyes absorbed the brutal crescendo of The Hateful Eight, I inevitably reached the final two words of the script:

THE END

THE... END...?  THAT'S the end!?  No!  NO!!!  I want more.  Tell me more!  That can't be it!  It can't!

Without context, one could assume that this was a negative reaction, but that would be wrong.  It's the best possible reaction I could possibly have, and the exact reaction I believe Tarantino was going for.

At the same time, I was amazed that Tarantino had the audacity to end his story SO abruptly, and leave the audience SO deflated, and still make it work SO amazingly well.

This is a master at work!

SADNESS

Of course, I'm saddened that Tarantino has chosen that this will not be his next film because of the whole script leak controversy.  When this story broke, I made the argument (as did many others) that, "So what?  The scripts for Kill Bill, Inglourious Basterds, and Django Unchained leaked online years before the actual movies were released.  What's Tarantino so mad about?"

It didn't occur to me that it was a trust issue.  Someone CLOSE to Tarantino leaked the script to an agency, and some joker that works there posted the script on the web for everyone to see before ANY casting or budgetary decisions were made.  At least with those previous scripts, most of the actors were in place, and the budget was set.  So I feel for Tarantino.  How can you work with someone you can't trust?  It could destroy the whole collaborative dynamic, and hurt the film as a result.

So I agree that Tarantino should shelve The Hateful Eight for a little bit until the heat dies down.

But to abandon the project entirely!?  I just can't accept that reality.  This is just too great a script to be lingering on a shelf for the rest of time.  It's so vividly imagined, and wholly inspiring.

When Tarantino describes a Wyoming backdrop in 70mm CinemaScope, I not only could SEE it, I felt like I was there.

That's the key to great storytelling.  Make the audience FEEL like they are there.  And it takes true talent to pull that off.

GUILT

This is where my inner conflict comes into play.

On one hand, I'm happy that I got the chance to read The Hateful Eight.  It was as influential as anything Tarantino has ever written, and it's a story that's going to stay with me forever.  So thank you, Quentin Tarantino, for this screenwriting master stroke.

On the other hand, I feel guilt because Tarantino didn't write this for people to experience on the page.  He wrote it for people to experience it on the screen-- and not just any screen, a 70mm CinemaScope screen.  And by reading the script before the movie was even financed, I took Tarantino's gift, and spoiled the surprise for myself.

So I must apologize for that.

However, as a screenwriter, The Hateful Eight is required reading BECAUSE the movie isn't being made.  Without a movie to compare it to, the screenplay can exist on its own merits.  It can teach writers how to craft a Tarantino level of suspense, because there's no higher level out there.  There's a distinct sense of timing within the pages of The Hateful Eight that Tarantino has been toying with since he jumped on the scene twenty-two years ago, and he's been perfecting it little by little with every flick he does.

CONCLUSION

It is an enduring hope that QT will reconsider his decision to not make The Hateful Eight.  However, if he doesn't, the screenplay will remain the most popular unproduced script in the history of movies, a title held previously by Stanley Kubrick's Napoleon (which I've never read, and I'm sure most of you have never heard of).

It is another hope that this story spreads screenwriting awareness.  Because most people don't think about where movies come from.  They're just there, and people just accept them as that.  The Hateful Eight controversy could quite possibly reinforce one of my original intentions with this blog, which is to get people to read screenplays who don't normally read them.

If someone REALLY wants to see Tarantino's new movie, but they've never read a screenplay before, then they're going to read the screenplay because the movie doesn't exist.  And it's a sad thought...

But it's also beautiful.