The Hateful Eight originated as a Django Unchained novel

Last Updated on August 5, 2021

With the release date of THE HATEFUL EIGHT being pushed forward by a full week (which we exclusively broke yesterday, no matter what some other sites would have you believe), we'll be seeing Quentin Tarantino's latest film a little sooner than we thought, but it's still not too late to learn something new about its origins. Tarantino spoke with DP/30 recently and revealed that THE HATEFUL EIGHT had actually begun life as a continuation of DJANGO UNCHAINED. However, the further adventures of Django wouldn't have continued in cinematic form, but as a paperback novel instead.

After Django Unchained was over I knew I didn't want to do any Django movie sequels, but I liked the idea of there being a series of paperbacks that could be the further adventures of Django or maybe go back in time for a couple more Django/Schultz adventures.

After connecting with a paperback publisher and receiving a few synopsis' for potential books, Quentin Tarantino then realized that he didn't want to give it away for someone else to do. Although he had never written a novel before, Tarantino decided to take on the project himself.

I thought I would just try my hand at writing this Django paperback, and at the time it was called Django in White Hell. It was basically just the stagecoach stuff, you know, all the stuff that we have in the story of the stagecoach, instead of Major Warren it was Django. And I was working on that and I hadn’t got to Minnie’s Haberdashery yet, hadn’t figured out who the other people would be there, just kind of setting this mystery into place.

But it didn't take Quentin Tarantino long to realize that what was holding the story back was Django himself.

I realized that I was introducing such rough characters in this piece, and there would be even more rough disreputable characters waiting for them at Minnie's. At a certain point I realized, well you know what's wrong with this piece, is Django. He needs to go, because you shouldn't have a moral center when it comes to these eight characters. There shouldn't be a hero, everybody should be questionable, everybody should have some disrepute as far as their reputation is concerned to some degree or another, and everyone should be untrustworthy, and as important as that is, equally important was you shouldn't be able to trust anything anybody says. So if Django says who he is, you're going to trust that, because you've already seen another movie and you liked the guy anyway, and I didn't want to have that kind of moral center in the piece.

THE HATEFUL EIGHT hits theaters nationwide on January 1, 2016.