Quentin Tarantino has given his 2015 film The Hateful Eight the miniseries treatment for Netflix.
Tarantino’s Western epic, which has a nearly three-hour runtime, hit the streaming service last month (April 2019), and was made available to subscribers in two formats; the theatrical cut and an extended version divided into four episodes.
Explaining why he chose an alternative format, which included 25 minutes of additional footage, the famed filmmaker revealed Netflix bosses actually came up with the idea, and he was instantly intrigued.
“So Netflix came to us and said, ‘Hey, look, if you’d be interested… If there’s even more footage if you’d be interested in putting it together and 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,” he recalled to Slash Film.
“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, give that a try.”
Working with his longtime editor Fred Raskin, the pair set about turning the 168-minute Oscar-winning film, which stars Kurt Russell and Jennifer Jason Leigh, as well as Tarantino regulars Samuel L. Jackson, Tim Roth, and Michael Madsen, into four 50-minute chapters.
“We didn’t re-edit the whole thing from scratch, but we did a whole lot of re-editing, and it plays differently,” Tarantino explained. “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 a literary aspect to the film anyway, so it definitely has this ‘chapters unfolding’ quality.”
