A Casual Chat About Tarantino, Film And Politics With Samuel L. Motherfucking Jackson

If you want to see Samuel L. Jackson really laugh, tell him that his Hateful Eight co-star Tim Roth has been going around the press events calling him “Quentin Tarantino’s Cary Grant”.

“Oh my god!” Jackson exclaims, before issuing an unprompted version of the cackle that, in one particularly compelling scene, echoes across the snowy plains of Wyoming in Tarantino’s eighth film.

To expand on the context of that particular moment would constitute a spoiler, so I’ll leave it at that. Let’s just say that Tarantino and Jackson’s sixth collaboration is as surprising as it is profane, and as subtle as it is almost obscenely gory — and I mean that in a good way. The Hateful Eight, in what’s become a traditional global sport upon the release of any Tarantino film, has divided critics; but for my money, it’s up there with his finest film, Jackie Brown.

I spoke with Jackson, in town this Monday for a press event (and in between surprise appearances at screenings in Sydney and Melbourne), about his fruitful relationship with the divisive director.

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Tarantino, Jackson And The Celluloid Revival

“I think Quentin really writes characters for me that are smart and kinda brash and usually intriguing, for me — and the audience — to explore,” Jackson says when quizzed about what’s kept their creative relationship ticking over for 22 years. “And they’re usually inside of awesome stories. When you pick up the script that has that many words in it, and those words aren’t directions of where you’re going, what you’re doing and who you’re shooting, it’s kinda great.”

Crucially, The Hateful Eight is also the first time Jackson has taken centre stage in a Tarantino production. Though he played critical roles in Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown in particular, it’s through the eyes of his character (the Civil War hero-turned-bounty hunter Major Marquis Warren) that we begin to piece together the mystery of just what’s been going down at Minnie’s Haberdashery.

‘Centre stage’ is also an apt metaphor as The Hateful Eight is the director’s most theatrical film. Indeed, despite the various too-easy comparisons thrown about (“It’s Reservoir Dogs in the West!” “It’s Sam Peckinpah’s The Thing!”), the three-hour film is epic in length and aspect ratio, but it has the squirm-inducing intimacy of a Jacobean farce.

“Yeah, very much so,” Jackson says of the Renaissance theatre mood. “Especially the ensemble nature of what was going on there. When you have that many people in a room, expressing themselves — how they feel, how they feel about you, how they feel about the world — the give and take of emotion in a space like that, and in the midst of it all you’ve got a little ‘whodunnit’ going, it’s kinda great.”

It was the actors, as it turns out, not just Harvey Weinstein, who were on at Tarantino to let The Hateful Eight’s rogues’ gallery creep the boards. “We always told Quentin, ‘You know, we should do this in the West End for like six weeks, create a sensation, then jump to Broadway for a limited run and make a bunch of money and get out’.”

When asked if — were the film to make the jump to theatre — he would prefer to take a break and experience someone else’s interpretation of Warren, Jackson is horrified. “See, no. The whole time I was doing theatre, when I was a young actor in New York, I was always wanting to see the plays that I was in but I wanted to see them with me in them.”

Shot on 65mm in Ultra Panavision 70, last employed for Khartoum in 1966, part of The Hateful Eight’s theatricality is its “roadshow” presentation: projected in 70mm, with an overture and an intermission. Indeed, there’s a certain thrill in movie screenings being at the mercy of the projectionist once more; “It’s up to the projectionist,” an usher told me after enquiring about the start time at my first screening. “I’ll go ask him,” he said before dashing upstairs.

The celluloid revival is almost always discussed in directorial terms, though, and I’m curious to hear whether or not the production experience is altered for the actors when a film shoots on, well, film. Jackson is typically sanguine about it all.

“It doesn’t make the process different for me,” he says. “I act the same way anyway, it’s just that when you’re doing digital it’s a lot less time for setups and you do more takes because they got a chip as opposed to someone coming over, checking the gate, doing stuff, and putting another film canister on top of the camera.”

On that note, if you’re wondering whether editor Fred Raskin performed any slicing voodoo to bring the trademark Tarantino long takes to the screen, think again. “They made special magazines for [Tarantino] that ran 12-15 minutes, so we could do huge chunks of dialogue,” Jackson explains, before he breaks into a very satisfied grin. “It’s awesome.”

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America Writ Large: The Hateful Eight’s Political Bite

Beyond the obvious spectacle of 70mm, and the accompanying gore and nods to the conventions of the various genres it pays homage to, The Hateful Eight is Tarantino’s most political film to date.

Though the action unfolds a decade or so after the Civil War, the characters’ interactions –especially those between Jackson’s Warren, Kurt Russell’s moral mountain man John ‘The Hangman’ Ruth, and Walton Goggins’ Confederate ideologue-turned-sheriff, Chris Mannix — feel acutely current. When Ruth, at one point insulted by Warren, sniffs “I guess it’s true what they say about you people,” Warren replies, “the only time black folks is safe is when white folks is disarmed”.

Warren’s legendary “Lincoln letter” — from his “pen pal” Honest Abe — and its ability to disarm racist white folks seems, though set in the uneasy era that followed the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the Civil War, to speak to the 21st century myth of “post-racial America”; the theoretical state governed by the principle of ‘can’t we all just get along?’ That state remains a myth, as the treatment of Warren (and a number of other key characters) illustrates, demonstrating just how quickly good intentions and good manners dissolve when those with the upper hand feel their privilege is crumbling.

Jackson thinks the film’s release is auspicious timing in this way. “It’s interesting in a lot of ways because it’s an election year in our country, and the divide is great,” he says, holding his hands far apart to illustrate. “People are either on this side or on the other, and people trying to make transitions or trying to make a difference are caught in this no-man’s land.”

It’s hard not to hear echoes of current political commentary in Warren’s slow-boiling rage in the film; a reaction to the spurious notion — espoused not just by right wing shock jocks but often very moderate liberals — that people shouldn’t be outwardly ‘angry’ about a sociopolitical climate that is, in fact, infuriating. “Totally,” Jackson says while nodding. “Black lives matter, Muslim lives matter; everybody who’s a Muslim’s not a terrorist.”

So where does he feel the film sits, politically, on the same spectrum that contains Django Unchained, Tarantino’s wilfully revisionist revenge movie? “People want to believe that it’s something else, or they diminish it because, they say, the violence is one thing, but the violence is part of the nature of that particular time. The attitudes expressed inside that, that lead up to that, are very contemporary. People will diminish it because it’s Quentin, or they’ll just say, ‘Yeah, well, he always says ‘n—-r’ too much, so I can’t pay attention to it.’”

Tarantino still claims “historical accuracy” as the reason his characters continually spew the racial slur, even as its overuse seems to goad audiences into a reaction. At one point in the film, Warren tells Bruce Dern’s Confederate general a blood-curdling story to see if, or more correctly, when he’ll snap. As critic Sam Adams put it in his Indiewire essay on the film, “Watching The Hateful Eight is a little like being [this character], knowing that Tarantino wants you to jump, and feeling like a sucker when you do.”

Jackson calmly acknowledges the divisive nature of Tarantino’s work even as he refuses to be frustrated by the debate, either way.

“I know it’s coming, so I don’t particularly care about it,” Jackson says with a shrug. “I always think that people who get caught up in that aren’t facing the reality of what the world is, or what the world was. Everybody’s got a name for everybody else: every ethnic group has a ‘specific’ name, and when you use that specific name — whether you are a part of the problem or a part of the solution — you know who they’re talking about.”

Long having enjoyed sitting with ‘ordinary’ audiences to watch his movies, Jackson has made a point of experiencing the film along with some of the roadshow audiences in Sydney and Melbourne.

“These audiences [in Australia] seem to react immediately, which is kinda great, or they laugh in some… interesting places that American audiences don’t laugh,” Jackson says, as that trademark grin spreads pointedly across his face. “Sometimes people are nervous, laughing at certain things, and you kinda go, ‘Ohhh, you’re a little sensitive to that, are you?’”

As for the violence, a hallmark of Tarantino’s work that reaches an almost self-parodic level of spectacle here, Jackson says it’s okay to let rip. “It’s not a problem. That’s what Quentin makes you do. And some people are embarrassed by that; you know, ‘Oh my gaaad, he shot him in the head, and I’m laughin’, I’m a horrible person!’”

I tell him that, at one Greater Union screening of Inglourious Basterds, I laughed so hard at one particularly violent moment that an entire row of ticket-holders got up and moved, and he exclaims “Good!”

As our time together draws to a close, I ask Jackson whether he feels there’s anything he and Tarantino haven’t mined, creatively, that he’d like to sink his teeth into before his friend and collaborator’s rumoured retirement after his tenth picture. “I don’t think he’s going to make a science fiction movie, or something in outer space. I would like for him to do a really cool slasher movie that’s got a great story,” he says with glee. “I’d like to be there for that.”

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The Hateful Eight is screening in 70mm in select cinemas now. It’ll have a general release across Australia from January 21.

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Clem Bastow is an award-winning writer and critic with a focus on popular culture, gender politics, mental health, and weird internet humour. She’s on Twitter at @clembastow.