This is a movie that almost never happened, as Tarantino once scrapped the entire project when the script was leaked online. Then when he gathered a group of actors to read it publicly, be decided to make the film after all.

Quentin at The Hateful Eight PremiereQuentin at The Hateful Eight Premiere

"The starting point was the idea of taking eight characters that you cannot trust at all - you cannot take anything they say at face value," Tarantino explains. "Whatever they say they are, you can't trust that. Who they even think they are, or present themselves to be, you can't trust that. Then during the course of the movie, everyone, to one degree or another, has something about their past revealed, but you can't even trust that!"

He enjoyed making a movie that has no proper moral centre. "There's no one you can gravitate towards," he says. "All these characters are trapped together in a chamber-room situation because of the storm." Part of the fun for Tarantino was watching these characters come to life as he wrote the script and then found actors who could add their own details. And two of the actors managed to surprise him. "In the case of Samuel L. Jackson, Walton Goggins, Kurt Russell, Tim Roth and Michael Madsen, I was writing for those guys, and they fit the characters and the rhythms of the dialogue like a glove. They took it to higher heights than it was on the page, but that was more or less what I expected," he says. "But the way Demian [Bichir] played Bob the Mexican, is so different from how I conceived it. And the thing about Daisy is that the character had to be discovered and fleshed out by the actress. She's such a weird hot potato of a character. And Jennifer Jason Leigh bloomed into this truly amazing character, one of my favourite female characters I've ever written. She is a force to be reckoned with! But I don't think she would have been able to conceive it, and I wouldn't either. It was one of those things where you had to commit and see where it went."

Watch the trailer for The Hateful Eight here:

After winning two Oscars and making exactly the films he has wanted to make over the past 23 years, Tarantino is relaxed about what he'll do next. "I just make one thing at a time," he says. "There are a few movies I'd like to do, but once I'm done with Hateful Eight and I've had a little time to myself, anything I think I'm going to do now, I know it's what I won't do later. I've got to leave myself open for the right story that talks to me."