Quentin Tarantino has said he does not make the kind of film that sweeps the board at the Oscars – but a best director award would be “wonderful”.
Speaking at the Leicester Square premiere of his new film, The Hateful Eight, the Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs director said: “It would be wonderful to be nominated for best director, but we’ll just see.
“Normally best director is tied up to a sweep. And I don’t know if I make sweepy movies.”
The film was almost never made after an early version of its script leaked online, leading him to consider scrapping it.
Tarantino said as he greeted fans: “I saw what looked like a bad situation and tried to turn it into a good situation – I saw a script that was leaked and did a script reading in Los Angeles and rehearsed it with the actors, and a lot of them are the actors in the movie.
“We rehearsed it and we had a really good time, and we put it on – I thought at that rehearsal I’ll probably end up making it.”
The film is reported to be one of Tarantino’s most violent.
He’s the most extraordinary screenwriter around
Kurt Russell, who plays John ‘The Hangman’ Ruth, said: “There’s a slight cartoonish quality to it, which I enjoy. It’s a little bit like being in the backyard of your house when you’re a kid, squirting ketchup around the room when you have gunshot fights.”
Tim Roth, another of the stars of the film, described the “circus” of working with Tarantino, and said: “Whenever he asks you to do something, you just do it. He’s the most extraordinary screenwriter around, I think.”
Roth plays Oswaldo Mobray in the film – one of eight grizzled strangers who find themselves taking shelter together in a blizzard just after the American Civil War.
Telling of the experience of working with the Django Unchained director, Roth said: “He’ll hit the ground running. You’d better know what you’re doing. It’s a bit of a circus – it’s really good fun.”
The film was recorded in heavy snow in Colorado, with Russell saying: “We kind of had a good winter last winter, we had the snow we wanted, but it wasn’t horribly cold.”
He said the bushy beard he had grown for the part had helped. “We wanted people to know who [this character] is the minute you see him, and he wears his personality literally as hair on his face.” The beard has gone now – Hawn, Russell said, “was not a fan.”
Walton Goggins secured his biggest role yet as The Hateful Eight’s lead, Chris ‘The Sheriff’ Mannix. The 44-year-old spoke animatedly about working with Tarantino.
“It’s incredible. It’s unbelievable. Just getting to recite his lines every single day in every country that has ever shown one of his films, and then getting to say those lines in front of an audience, in front of him, and then you get to say as many lines as I get to say in The Hateful Eight is stratospheric really.”
Asked if he had any input into those lines, he said: “Not one. There is nothing, there is not a comma missed, not a ‘but’ or an ‘and’. Everything as the man wrote it.”
The Hateful Eight will be in cinemas in January.