If you’re ever feeling down about your own relative lack of creative accomplishments, take solace in the fact that even Quentin Tarantino has novels in his head he’ll likely never write. While speaking to David Poland, Tarantino revealed that the idea for the upcoming Hateful Eight originally came to him as the plot of a Django Unchained spinoff book. “I hadn’t written a novel before and I thought I would just try my hand at writing a Django paperback,” he said. “At the time it was called Django In White Hell. Instead of Major Warren [played by Samuel L. Jackson in the film], it was Django.” However, he soon discovered there was a problem: In order for the story to work, there couldn’t be a hero. “A certain point I realized, Well, you know what’s wrong with this piece? It’s Django. He needs to go,” he recalled. “Because you shouldn’t have a moral center when it comes to these eight characters.” And so, like many of us, Tarantino shelved his dream of becoming a popular genre novelist, returning to his soul-sucking day job of directing blood-soaked Westerns.
