Snowbound western The Hateful Eight marks Quentin Tarantino's quarter century as a director

Snowbound western The Hateful Eight marks Quentin Tarantino's quarter century as a director.we ask him star Tim Roth,Kurt Russell and Walton Goggins what makes the maestro tick.

Kurt Russell and Samuel L Jackson in The Hateful Eight. Photograph: Allstar

Seems like old times: eight people in a room – seven men, one woman – all of them suspicious of one another’s motives and deceits, all of them talkative and foul-mouthed, most of them with a propensity for brutal violence and, in consequence, only a short time left to live.

Old times here means 1992’s Reservoir Dogs, Quentin Tarantino’s directorial debut, that quintessential 90s independent movie, now edging towards its quarter-centenary. And new times means The Hateful Eight, Tarantino’s latest, in which that bare, white-walled warehouse in the aftermath of a botched jewellery heist is replaced by an isolated, snowbound stagecoach stopover named Minnie’s Haberdashery (here all the white is on the outside, an endless blanketing snowstorm), the richly and intricately production-designed setting for a night of paranoia, suspicion and accusation, leading to maximum bloodletting in Tarantino’s characteristically orgasmic fashion.

The colour-coded thieves in matching black suits, men in their 20s and 30s, have meanwhile given way to a grizzled, older, but no less archetypal crowd of classic western figures – dubbed by Tarantino thus: the bounty hunter (Samuel L Jackson), the prisoner (Jennifer Jason Leigh), the hangman (Kurt Russell), the sheriff (Walton Goggins), the little man (Tim Roth), the cow puncher (Michael Madsen) and the Confederate (Bruce Dern). They are clad in huge furs and hats, wearing impressive beards and moustaches, and in their 40s to 60s. Reservoir Dogs, very much a young film-maker’s calling-card movie, ran for a crisp 99 minutes; The Hateful Eight, from the hand of a seasoned master (some, of course, would disagree), runs for three hours and two minutes, with overture and intermission.

Quentin Tarantino, 52 years of age, erstwhile upstart, a onetime one-man revolution from below, has entered middle age along with his creations.

So how does an upstart age? “He hasn’t so much aged as matured,” says Tim Roth, back in the Tarantino fold for the first time since Pulp Fiction in 1994, and possessed of the longest QT memory of the three repeat offenders I talk to – the others being Goggins and Russell. As one of the original suits in Reservoir Dogs he can gauge the distance the director has travelled in two decades. “His ability as a film-maker was always very high anyway,” says Roth.

“He’d been making films in his head for a long time before 1992. The environment on Hateful Eight was very different from Dogs: everybody working hard, incredible focus, no cellphones on set. But it’s still like a circus: music playing, lots of games, laughter, tellling stories. The most obvious change in him is in that vast knowledge of film he has that just increases over time. On Reservoir Dogs there was no money, obviously, and one set was all he had. Now he has the budget and the wherewithal to actually tell stories the way he wants to. And as he has matured, his stuff has become more literary; it’s more novel-like than even Pulp Fiction, though that was novelistic primarily in its structure. And his writing is becoming denser and more layered, which is an interesting transformation.”
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