As has now become a tradition at Cannes, The Weinstein Co. screened footage from several of their upcoming films for press in attendance, but it’s a two-minute trailer for Quentin Tarantino‘s The Hateful Eight that garners our immediate attention and at the same time Entertainment Weekly has released more pictures from the upcoming movie expected to hit theaters Christmas 2015.
First, here’s the official synopsis:
In The Hateful Eight, set six or eight or twelve years after the Civil War, a stagecoach hurtles through the wintry Wyoming landscape. The passengers, bounty hunter John Ruth (Kurt Russell) and his fugitive Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh), race towards the town of Red Rock where Ruth, known in these parts as “The Hangman,” will bring Domergue to justice. Along the road, they encounter two strangers: Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson), a black former union soldier turned infamous bounty hunter, and Chris Mannix (Walt Goggins), a southern renegade who claims to be the town’s new Sheriff. Losing their lead on the blizzard, Ruth, Domergue, Warren and Mannix seek refuge at Minnie’s Haberdashery, a stagecoach stopover on a mountain pass. When they arrive at Minnie’s, they are greeted not by the proprietor but by four unfamiliar faces. Bob (Demián Bichir), who’s taking care of Minnie’s while she’s visiting her mother, is holed up with Oswaldo Mobray (Tim Roth), the hangman of Red Rock, cow-puncher Joe Gage (Michael Madsen), and Confederate General Sanford Smithers (Bruce Dern). As the storm overtakes the mountainside stopover, our eight travelers come to learn they may not make it to Red Rock after all…
There’s no word when the first trailer will actually arrive online, but I would expect it to be relatively soon unless the Weinsteins want to wait until their next film hits theaters in an attempt to help bolster its opening weekend audience. That would be Southpaw in July, but I have a feeling they won’t want to wait that long. Given we don’t know, The Playlist has a rundown of what was shown in Cannes and it goes like this:
Moving briskly, the clip opens on some snowy landscapes, until Samuel L. Jackson’s Major Marcus Warren stops a coach, which contains a gun-toting Hangman, John Ruth (Kurt Russell), and his black-eyed captive, Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh). They hole up from a snowstorm in a way station, only to find a number of other figures there, including Tim Roth’s Oswaldo Mobray, Michael Madsen’s Joe Gage and Walton Goggins’ Sheriff Chris Mannix. “I have never seen a woman in this white hell,” comments one of the men when Russell drags his charge in.
But they’re clearly not going to be sitting things out. “One of these fellas is not who he says he is,” Russell exclaims, and then begins a montage that suggests for all the relatively constrained nature of the location, we’ll be seeing plenty of gunfire and action along the way.
The site says the cinematography from Robert Richardson “looks gorgeous” and the movie would appear to be something of a “greatest hits” for Tarantino adding that Tarantino haters are unlikely to be converted by what they see while fans will be champing at the bit for more.
EW also has a few quotes from the cast discussing their characters with Russell referring to his character saying, “My guy is just so bombastic and so big. He’s like a bull and the whole movie is the china shop.” And when it comes to him opposte Jennifer Jason Leigh she says, “Kurt and I are essentially the most dysfunctional couple since Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”
In the pictures below you’ll see one shot of the stable at Minnie’s, one of the few other interiors in the film’s story, which is said to be much more contained than the Tarantino’s other recent films. Of course, Tarantino is going big with this one still, shooting on Ultra Panavision 70 cameras, cameras that haven’t been used since epics like Ben-Hur and It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. “It’s a modest project done unmodestly,” Tarantino tells EW.
This really should be interesting considering Goggins speaks to the intimate nature of the feature adding, “The film really is presented as a play. It’s filmed mainly in one room and it’s as if every time he says, ‘Action,’ the curtain goes up.” A play shot on 70mm? There’s a Cinerama screen here in Seattle I want to see this thing on and with Tarantino previously saying there were plans to roadshow this one I can’t wait to see what that means.
For more from the Entertainment Weekly photo gallery click here and you can check out all the pictures below.
