James R | On 01, May 2019

Last week, Tarantino fans were sent into a whirl at the news that the director had released a new cut of The Hateful Eight on Netflix – not just a longer version of the movie, but an entire, four-part miniseries. Clocking in at 187 minutes, compared to the 167 minutes of the original theatrical version, the release was a surprise for lovers of the original, even after the movie first premiered in an extended Roadshow Cut in select 70mm screenings. With fans poring over the elongated cut and suggesting not much new material has been added, though, perhaps the bigger surprise is that Netflix has only released the series in the USA so far and not in the UK.

With speculation still ongoing, Tarantino has now spoken out about the series, both in terms of why it was made and what was added or changed.

“We finished the whole run of the movie. And I had no reason at this time to put the Roadshow version out; because that was [its own thing]…it was about that 70 millimeter screening. So as far as [releasing] the whole prologue and the intermission, that didn’t seem to really make much sense, unless it was playing on TCM Roadshow week or something,” Tarantino told /Film in an interview.

“Netflix came to us and said, ‘Hey, look, if you’d be interested–if there’s even more footage, [and] if you’d be interested in putting it together in a way that we could show it as three or four episodes, depending on how much extra footage you have, we’d be willing to do that.’

“And I thought, wow, that’s really intriguing. I mean, the movie exists as a movie, but if I were to use all the footage we shot, and see if I could put it together in episode form, I was game to give that a shot.”

Around a year after the film was released, Tarantino and his editor, Fred Raskin, got together cut the film down into 50-minute bits to make a four-part series.

“We didn’t re-edit the whole thing from scratch, but we did a whole lot of re-editing, and it plays differently,” explained Tarantino. “Some sequences are more similar than others compared to the film, but it has a different feeling. It has a different feeling that I actually really like a lot. And there was [already] a literary aspect to the film anyway, so it definitely has this ‘chapters unfolding! quality.”

“I don’t know [an exact] timeline as far as how much new footage is in it, but it’s something like about, like, 25 minutes if not more,” he added.

One major difference is seeing the arrival of the stagecoach at the central inn where the action unfolds, rather than relying on Tarantino’s narration.

“What we’re able to do in this version, is John Ruth and Daisy now enter the place, and you see the entire sequence again. John Ruth and Daisy enter Minnie’s Haberdashery, except now it’s not told from John Ruth and Daisy’s perspective. It’s told from the killers’ perspective… We know what they’ve done, and we know how they set up, and we know Daisy knows who they are… So we see how Tim Roth and how Michael Madsen and how Daisy are reacting to each other, while John Ruth is oblivious.”

The only question Tarantino didn’t get asked is why The Hateful Eight series isn’t available on Netflix in the UK. The good news is that the theatrical cut is available to stream. You can read our review of it here.

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