From filmmaker Quentin Tarantino, The Hateful Eight finds bounty hunter John Ruth (Kurt Russell) on his way to taking fugitive Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to justice in Red Rock. Along the way, he picks up Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson), a black former union soldier turned bounty hunter, and Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins), a southern renegade who claims to be the town’s new Sheriff, and the group stop off at Minnie’s Haberdashery to seek refuge from an oncoming blizzard. When they arrive, Minnie is nowhere to be found, as they are greeted by a caretaker named Bob (Demian Bichir), hangman Oswaldo Mobray (Tim Roth), cow-puncher Joe Gage (Michael Madsen) and Confederate General Sanford Smithers (Bruce Dern), and they all quickly realize that the blizzard may be the least of their problems.

During a conference at the film’s press day, Tarantino, Russell, Leigh, Jackson, Goggins, Bichir, Roth, Madsen, Dern and Channing Tatum shared funny stories from the set and talked about what’s unique about making a Tarantino film. We’ve compiled a list of 12 stand-out things that were discussed, but be aware that there are SPOILERS.

• 

  Shooting in 65mm is not just for travelogues, mountain scenery and nature. It provides an intimacy, in close-up, for the actors, so that you really feel like you’re there with the characters.

• There are always two things at play, at all times, once the film moves into Minnie’s Haberdashery. There are the characters that are in the foreground of any given scene, and then there are the characters in the background, so you always have to keep track of where everybody is. They’re like pieces on a chess board.

• When you work on a Quentin Tarantino movie, you say the lines that he’s written, unless you’re Samuel L. Jackson. Said Jackson, “There’s not a lot that you need to change. Quentin and I have conversations about what I say. I don’t just willy nilly change things. If I want to say something else, I’ll go to him and discuss it with him, and we’ll talk about it. He’ll say, ‘Let me hear what I wrote,’ and I’ll say what he wrote. And then, he’ll say, ‘Tell me what you want to say,’ and I’ll say what I want to say, which is very close to what he wrote. I just want to say it another way because I think it comes out of that character’s mouth a different way. And he’ll say, ‘Okay,’ or he’ll say, ‘Nah, leave it the way I wrote it.’ That’s generally what happens.”

• Once the rehearsal period is over and they get on set ready to go, nothing changes with the script. The cold was the only wild card that they were not prepared for. That changed the urgency of everything they did.

• 

  Michael Madsen was happy to be on the opposite side of the room from Tim Roth for their The Hateful Eight scenes because they were literally stuck together when they worked on Reservoir Dogs. “We both had so much blood on our bodies that we were stuck together more than we wanted to be. It was like a hug that lasts a little too long. They had to separate us. I enjoyed, so much, watching Tim find this character. In the Dogs days, I was a young man, I was very naive and I didn’t know what the hell that I was doing, not that I do now. What’s changed for me is that I’ve grown to appreciate watching how wonderful Tim is.”

• Channing Tatum was a first-timer on a Tarantino set. Said Tatum, “It’s an actual alumni on a Quentin film. All of those guys have worked together a lot. It’s a unique experience to be on a Quentin movie. You’re really intimidated. My very first shot was this crazy 360 thing, and I was trying not to screw it up. Tim [Roth] went, ‘Yep, you’re about to be in a Quentin Tarantino movie.’ But it was amazing. Every single person is someone I admire greatly, and I was learning in every single moment.”

• Tatum worked with Jackson on his first movie (Coach Carter), ever, and has come full circle by working with him again on The Hateful Eight.

• For the entire time that his character was laying on the floor, it was actually Kurt Russell, instead of the dummy that they made. Said Russell, “I spent four and a half months changed to Jennifer. It felt very strange, the concept that I wasn’t going to be there for the actor that had been there for me. That just felt really weird. Aside from that fact, I had a really good ticket. I had a front row seat to watch [this cast], and not have to worry about my lines. I could just listen to it and watch it play out. And I wanted to be there for [Jennifer Jason Leigh] to do what she needed to do. If she felt like she needed to paw John Ruth, that would have been different with a dummy, so I wanted to be there. It just was something that had to happen.”

• Bruce Dern just felt privileged to lend a hand, in making the movie what it is. “That’s what you do for [Quentin]. Casting is 80% of a movie. He expects the people that he brings to do what he hired them to do, and not be somebody else. I felt that he asked me to come on and lend a hand, and so that’s basically what it is. When you go to work for him, everybody on the set, division by division, knows they have a chance to go to the play-offs. It was my first time in an opera because the guy made an opera. I couldn’t sit through a fucking opera, but I wanted to be a part of that.”

When asked if Billy Crash, his character in Django Unchained, could be related to Chris Mannix, his character in The Hateful Eight, Walton Goggins said, “What a shitty family! What a shitty group of people! That would be the worst family in America!”

• Goggins’ most challenging day on set was when Tarantino gave him a page-long monologue. “I’ve spent 14 years on television. Learning ten pages in an hour is no problem. But, this was Quentin Tarantino dialogue. It started off in the morning. I got it first thing, right after I got there and got my coffee. We had a coffee club in the morning. I knew 150 pages of the script. I knew everybody’s shit. But then, I got this thing that Quentin wanted me to say, later on that day, and it just freaked me out. It brought me down. It was like, ‘Oh, fuck, really?!’ People saw that I was freaking out a little bit. Tim said, ‘What’s wrong with you?’ I said, ‘I just got this today.’ He said, ‘You’ve got that man.’ And I said, ‘No, I don’t! I don’t fucking have it!’ And then, an hour later, I was pacing back and forth and Kurt said, ‘What’s wrong with you?’ I said, ‘This!’ And he said, ‘You’ve got this.’ I said, ‘No, I fucking don’t!’ And Sam said something, too. And then, that night, it was the last scene that we shot, and it was with me and Bruce. We were sitting there and I was fucking freaking out. Quentin looked at me and said, ‘You’ve got this, man.’ And then, it came out.”

• Tarantino and Jackson had a conversation about the Lincoln letter and the consequences of learning the truth about it. Said Jackson, “We had a really interesting conversation about it. [John Ruth] is trying to be a liberal, at a time when there weren’t any. He’s faced with, ‘Oh, so it’s true, what they say about you people.’ I could have fixed that, but there was no need to fix that. The only time [my character] feels safe is when he disarms [other people]. In the real world, that’s a very real thing about what happens right now. We have to be these nice negroes, so that we feel safe walking around. Otherwise, people will call people on you. I feel sorry for everybody who even looks Middle Eastern right now ‘cause that’s going to happen. And for a minute, it was us. So, when we had that conversation around the table, it was one of those things like, if you really feel like you want to be part of the solution, then I actually broke that for [John Ruth]. A lie is a lie is a lie. It’s the lie of who you are and how you presented yourself.”

The Hateful Eight opens in limited release on December 25^th, and nationwide on December 31^st.