As one of the few major awards contenders yet to be previewed, a great deal of anticipation surrounds Quentin Tarantino’s latest film, The Hateful Eight.
The film has also been the target of a great deal of bile over the last few weeks after the director’s appearance at a demonstration in New York against police brutality sparked anger among US cops, many of whom will be boycotting the film. As the story rages on, the full trailer for the darkly comic western has now been released.
The film stars Samuel L Jackson, Kurt Russell, Tim Roth and Jennifer Jason Leigh, and tells the story of a random group of people brought together by a snowstorm that not all of them will survive.
“I’m not trying to make Hateful Eight contemporary in any way, shape, or form,” Tarantino told New York magazine. “I’m just trying to tell my story. It gets to be a little too much when you try to do that, when you try to make a hippie western or try to make a counterculture western. We’re not trying to make it timely. It is timely.”
Tarantino has also spoken about the issue of white supremacy being important in the film, a phrase he has recently used when discussing the use of violence against unarmed black victims of police brutality.
“The Good, the Bad and the Ugly doesn’t get into the racial conflicts of the civil war; it’s just a thing that’s happening,” Tarantino said. “My movie is about the country being torn apart by it, and the racial aftermath, six, seven, eight, 10 years later.”
The Hateful Eight is released in US cinemas on 25 December and opens in the UK on 8 January.
