Quentin Tarantino: I think The Hateful Eight is the best directing of my career

A good chunk of the movie takes place solely in a habedashery

(EW)

Pulp Fiction...Jackie Brown...Reservoir Dogs...Quentin Tarantino's films often make it onto critics' and cinephiles' lists of their favourite movies of all time, but the man himself thinks his next film - The Hateful Eight - might be his best yet.

"I was really proud of this material, I think it’s the best material that I’ve ever written," he told Bret Easton Ellis on the latest episode of his podcast.

"I think it’s my best direction and it’s not because I’ve gotten particularly smarter it’s just because I’ve been doing this for longer.

"There was a kind of a seamlessness between the way me and [cinematographer] Bob Richardson and cast worked."

Set in Wyoming, a large section of the film takes place in Minnie's Haberdashery, a stagecoach pass-over where bounty hunter John "The Hangman" Ruth (Kurt Russell) is forced to take shelter from a blizzard while escorting fugitive Daisy "The Prisoner" Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to Red Rock where she will face trial for murder.

This single setting aspect apparently helped production go more smoothly.

"It didn’t hurt matters at all to have most of it take place inside of one big set that we got very comfortable in," Tarantino explained. "We weren’t having to wrap up our week because 'this is the last day we had on the location', so everything was just chewing the rag on this material."

On his satisfaction with the end result, he added that little things like how "there’s always two plays going on in any one shot, there’s the foreground actors dealing with what they’re dealing with and then there’s the play in the background," helped the overall feel. "And the fact that you can always know where everybody is in that room, the fact that I could take you and put you in Minnie's Haberdashery by Joe "The Cow Puncher" Gage’s [Tim Roth] table and ask you to walk to the pot belly stove and you’d know exactly where to go - that’s craftsmanship. That’s old school directing and Broadway-style staging. There’s a level of polish to this one that I don’t think existed in the other movies."

Tarantino edited two versions of the film, one which will be shown in 70mm format, runs for three hours and two minutes and includes an overture and intermission, and one for general release which is six minutes shorter and contains alternate takes of some scenes.