Quentin Tarantino began his Comic-Con panel on The Hateful Eight with a long video tutorial about the bygone 70mm format his new western will be projected in, and as the director made clear over the hour that followed, he’s as serious as a heart attack about preserving traditional film projection. “I’m not a fan of digital projection,” he said. “We’ve ceded too much ground to barbarians.”
Certainly, the super-wide Panavision format Tarantino is using for Hateful Eight, with lenses borrowed from Ben-Hur, looks mighty and beautiful (even if most of the film appears to take place in a single interior location). He’d have it no other way, even as the rest of the industry begins its inexorable march to all-digital shooting and projection; to Tarantino, that’s like watching “HBO in public,” and if it continues, he threatened, “Maybe I should just move to TV.”
To most of the fans in Hall H, though, that threat didn’t sound so bad: After Tarantino suggested that he might amend his much-discussed “ten movies and done” retirement plan to include “ten movies and three miniseries,” many in Hall H shouted “Do it!” Replied the director, “If I can’t shoot on film, we’ll see what happens. My scripts get cut down anyway. If I wrote a script and it’s eight hours, then we’ll be all good.”
First, though, he plans to make a third western to follow Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight, out this Christmas. “You have to make at least three westerns to call yourself a western director,” he cracked. “Anything else, you’re just dabbling.” (Still, what a dabbler: Tarantino managed to entice the iconic Ennio Morricone into scoring Hateful Eight, in what will be the composer’s first western score in 40 years.) And what of Kill Bill 3, which Tarantino has periodically teased? Might that be one of the films that he might squeeze in before a possible move to television? “Never say never when it comes to Kill Bill 3,” grinned Tarantino. “Uma would like to do it.”
