Why Quentin Tarantino Almost Canceled The Hateful Eight
Quentin Tarantino is no stranger to leaked screenplays. "Kill Bill," "Death Proof," "Inglourious Basterds" and "Django Unchained" were all widely available on the internet before they went into production. And Tarantino didn't mind because they were basically finished drafts. He was proud of them. Why not let fans take a look under the hood? There was no way they were going to finish those scripts and opt out of seeing the final product.
The leak of "The Hateful Eight" screenplay was a completely different matter. When the script began circulating online in January 2014, Tarantino, to put it mildly, flipped the hell out. He'd been caught off-guard and betrayed, and was aggrieved enough over the whole incident to threaten legal action. He gave interviews where he all but put a bounty out on the culprit. It was a Hollywood whodunnit, one that entertainment websites gleefully played into. But make no mistake: Tarantino wasn't joking around. He was well and truly pissed, and nearly canceled the project as a result.
Eight years later, let's revisit this crime and its myriad of players.
The leaky six
Again, the actual appearance of "The Hateful Eight" screenplay on the internet wasn't just unsurprising, it was wholly expected. This was the fifth Tarantino script in a row to get out early, and was predictably riddled with spelling and grammatical errors. So why was this time different enough to compel the filmmaker to call up Deadline's Mike Fleming Jr. and announce that he was postponing production for perhaps as long as five years?
Unlike the previous scripts, this one was a first draft. It wasn't finished.
"I'm very, very depressed," Tarantino told Fleming. "I finished a script, a first draft, and I didn't mean to shoot it until next winter, a year from now. I gave it to six people, and apparently it's gotten out today." According to Tarantino, he'd given the screenplay to six people, all former collaborators. He named four suspects: Tim Roth, Bruce Dern, Michael Madsen, and Reginald Hudlin.
Tarantino immediately absolved Hudlin of this particular offense, though he wasn't thrilled that the "Django Unchained" producer had let an agent read the script at his house. "That's a betrayal," said Tarantino, "But not crippling because the agent didn't end up with the script. There is an ugly maliciousness to the rest of it."
And then there was (probably) one
So what about those three actors? Per Tarantino:
"I gave it to three actors: Michael Madsen, Bruce Dern, Tim Roth. The one I know didn't do this is Tim Roth. One of the others let their agent read it, and that agent has now passed it on to everyone in Hollywood. I don't know how these f***ing agents work, but I'm not making this next. I'm going to publish it, and that's it for now. I give it out to six people, and if I can't trust them to that degree, then I have no desire to make it. I'll publish it. I'm done. I'll move on to the next thing. I've got 10 more where that came from."
It only took a few months for Tarantino to cool down. On April 19, 2014, he directed a live read of the screenplay at the Ace Hotel in Los Angeles with a cast that included Samuel L. Jackson, Amber Tamblyn, Kurt Russell and the three suspected actors. He told the audience he was scrapping this first draft's ending, and coming up with two new finales. Still, the crime remained unsolved.
No one ever came forward and copped to leaking the first draft, but Tarantino was fairly certain Dern's agent was the responsible party. Dern was not supposed to share the script with his agent, but, to be fair, Dern was in his late 70s at the time, and probably isn't the most internet-savvy guy out there. Also, he's a Hollywood legend. Let the poor guy off the hook.
Tarantino's leak-proof solution
Nevertheless, Tarantino filed a lawsuit against Gawker, which he ultimately admitted was a bad idea. As he told Entertainment Weekly in 2015, "I almost regret the whole suing Gawker because it actually took the light off of what was important. My whole thing wasn't against Gawker, it was against Hollywood practices that have just been considered okay."
In any event, Tarantino learned his lesson. When he began casting his next movie, "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood," he only made one copy of the screenplay which he kept at his house. When he'd settled on Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio and Margot Robbie as his three leads, each actor had to read the script at the director's kitchen table with him present. It worked. The script never leaked, and, unless you hunted down spoilers after the film's premiere at the May 2019 Cannes Film Festival, you were likely knocked sideways by its shocking conclusion when you saw it theatrically that summer.
So, if you're hoping to get your mitts on Tarantino's script for "The Movie Critic," you'll just have to break into his house.