It appears that Quentin Tarantino’s long-gestating project, The Hateful Eight, is finally starting to achieve some movement. It is being reported that the film has added an entire slew of new cast members to what was already an impressive dais, including repertory Tarantino cast member and stuntwoman Zoe Bell. Additionally, the film has finally begun to shoot on location in Telluride, Colorado.
According to The Wrap, the film can now add the names of James Parks (an alum from the Kill Bill series), Dana Gourrier, Keith Jefferson, Lee Horsley, Craig Stark and Belinda Owino (who all appeared in Django Unchained), Gene Jones of (No Country for Old Men, The Odd Life of Timothy Green), and of course, the aforementioned Zoe Bell, who, besides appearing in a number of Tarantino films and working as a stuntwoman, would memorably play herself in Tarantino’s 2007 Grindhouse effort, Deathproof as a pipe-wielding badass.
The array of newcomers will join an insanely-deep cast consisting of many returning Tarantino favorites like Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Channing Tatum, Tim Roth, Walton Goggins, Demian Bichir, Michael Madsen and Bruce Dern. This continually-growing embarrassment of riches that the film calls a cast comes after a tumultuous period of controversy that surrounded the conception of the film, beginning with the leaking of the first draft of the script last January. The incident (seemingly foreshadowing what would happen to Sony later in the year,) had incensed Tarantino so much that he was on the verge of scrapping the entire project and publishing it as a novel. Eventually writing two new drafts of the script, which includes an altered ending, Tarantino decided to move forward with the project and would corral the impressive initial members of the cast. Now, the cameras have finally begun to roll.
The film will continue Tarantino’s thematic focus on quasi-history which he began with Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained. According to the film's official synopsis, the film takes place "six or eight or twelve years after the Civil War," but will not be a follow-up to Django, which was set in the late antebellum period. There will be a pioneer kind of approach as "John Ruth" (the bounty hunter played by Kurt Russell) and his caught quarry, "Daisy Domergue" (played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, in a casting move that plays to Tarantino’s proclivity for creating comebacks,) race across the wilderness of a winter-ridden Wyoming in a stagecoach. However, the grizzled Ruth’s desire to bring Daisy to justice leads them to the town of Red Rock, where they will experience several annoying complications in the form of encounters with strangers including a former Union soldier-turned-bounty-hunter played by an assuredly loquacious Samuel L. Jackson and a Southern renegade played by Walton Goggins, who fancies himself as the town sheriff in a likely unofficial "homemade badge" kind of capacity. The travelers take refuge in a mysterious haberdashery, as the elements force the group into what will surely be an hilariously violent conflict befitting of the Tarantino brand.
Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight is currently penciled in for a theatrical release on November 13, 2015.
