The following interview contains major spoilers for Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight. Please steer clear if you haven’t yet seen the director’s bloody (and bloody good) Western mystery thriller.
By the end of Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight, all but two of the hateful characters have met their maker. The only two survivors are Samuel L. Jackson’s Major Marquis Warren and Sherriff Chris Mannix, played by the wily Walton Goggins. Though, how much longer the two men will survive is unclear. They’ve both been mortally wounded. Daisy Domergue has promised that her gang could be arriving at any moment to avenge her death. And there’s a brutal snowstorm pounding outside of Minnie’s Haberdashery. Things looks grim. But when the screen fades to black, both Warren and Mannix have survived. So when I had an opportunity to interview Goggins in the days following the release of The Hateful Eight, I asked him what he thought happened next.
His answer was personal, and probably to be expected. Goggins told me that he had definitive ideas, but they were private, and he didn’t want to share. Thankfully, though, he didn’t stop there. Goggins told me that on the set, the actors had a great conversation about the ending, and it went like this:
There is one thing we did talk about, and that was, you know, who is the motherfucker who walks through this door [next]? Who’s the first person to walk through this door and see everything that has happened in this room. And if you were to cast that actor, who would be the actor that could convey the entire experience that the audience just went through with just one look. These are conversations that us, the actors, the ‘Haters’ had, away from set. We were just laughing, tearing shit up, just talking about, and throwing names out.And my name was Bill Murray. If you had Bill Murray one week later, with decomposed bodies and he opened the door and saw everybody’s body on the ground in this configuration, who could do that in a way that nobody else could, and that would be Bill Murray.
Oh my God, Walton Goggins is giving me the chills. I need to see this happen. Tell me you wouldn’t want to see a mid-credits scene, directed by Quentin Tarantino, of Bill Murray entering Minnie’s Haberdashery and witnessing the aftermath of the crazy events depicted in The Hateful Eight? Of course, the ending of The Hateful Eight did change quite a bit after Tarantino’s script leaked. Goggins did partake in a live reading of Tarantino’s original script in 2014, and he tells me that this version, on screen, is nothing like that version.
The script was leaked, and it got out there and it was not a finished work, and Quentin was still in the process of finishing it, and so, he had to go through, as he has said, three drafts in order to really understand the story he was telling and how it was going to end, and so what we finished, what we filmed was the finished product, and what we read was an unfinished.
You can see The Hateful Eight in various versions – from the 70mm print in the Roadhshow exhibit, to a standard (shorter) version in regular theaters – as we speak. I highly recommend it. And then picture Bill Murray entering the movie at the very end… just as Walton Goggins imagined it.
