If you wanted an even longer version of Quentin Tarantino’s 2015 film The Hateful Eight, you’re in luck. Earlier this month, The Hateful Eight was made available to watch on Netflix in two versions: the theatrical cut, and an extended version that’s presented as a four-episode “miniseries.” Initially, many thought Netflix had just decided to chop up the longer “roadshow” version of The Hateful Eight that played in a handful of theaters back in 2015 into episodes to entice more viewers, but as it turns out, this “miniseries” cut of The Hateful Eight was created by Tarantino himself.

The good folks at /Film did some digging and landed an exclusive interview with Tarantino in which he revealed why he decided to recut The Hateful Eight as a miniseries:

“So Netflix came to us and said, ‘Hey, look, if you’d be interested…If there’s even more footage, if you’d be interested in putting it together and in a way that we could show it as three or four episodes, depending on how much extra footage you have, we’d be willing to do that.’ And I thought, wow, that’s really intriguing. I mean, the movie exists as a movie, but if I were to use all the footage we shot, and see if I could put it together in episode form, I was game to give that a shot, give that a try.”

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Image via The Weinstein Company

So Tarantino got together with his editor Fred Raskin, pulled in an additional 25 minutes or so of footage not included in the theatrical cut, and crafted four chapters for this extended version:

“And so about a year after it’s released, maybe a little less, me and my editor, Fred Raskin, we got together and then we worked real hard. We edited the film down into 50-minute bits, and we very easily got four episodes out of it. We didn’t re-edit the whole thing from scratch, but we did a whole lot of re-editing, and it plays differently. Some sequences are more similar than others compared to the film, but it has a different feeling. It has a different feeling that I actually really like a lot. And there was a literary aspect to the film anyway, so it definitely has this ‘chapters unfolding’ quality.”

Would Tarantino consider doing this for any of his other films? As it turns out, he already has. While he says Django Unchained wouldn’t work as a miniseries, he’s already edited a longer director’s cut of the Oscar-winning film, which he says will be released:

“I’ve actually cut a director’s cut of Django. That’s about like three hours and 15 minutes, or three hours and 20 minutes, something like that. That’s one I wouldn’t do as a miniseries, because it would just be better [as a movie]. I thought about that idea, but that would just work better as one movie. Just a longer one as far as I was concerned. So I’ve actually done that. We’re just kind of waiting some time after Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, and we’ll release that eventually”

Tarantino famously takes his time with each and every movie, which is why the quality is always so consistently high. But I love the fact that in his downtime, it sounds like he’s been tinkering with some of his recent, longer films and experimenting with different ways of presenting them. It doesn’t negate the earlier version—Tarantino contends the theatrical cut of The Hateful Eight is still the version he chose to put in theaters. But it does offer fans of the movie an alternate way of experiencing it.

Read more of what Tarantino had to say in /Film’s full, insightful interview.

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Image via The Weinstein Company
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Image via The Weinstein Company
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Image via The Weinstein Company