Quentin Tarantino has 90 minutes worth of unseen material from his 2012 Django Unchained, and he'd like to use it to cut a four-hour miniseries version for television.
The filmmaker told press of his hopes for the project on Friday at the Cannes Film Festival, where he'd come to host a special 50th anniversary screening of Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars as the closing night film. He'll also be walking the red carpet for a 20th anniversary screening of his Palme d'Or-winning Pulp Fiction, with star Uma Thurman and producers Lawrence Bender and Harvey Weinstein.
Though Tarantino said he isn't a big fan of reworked special editions of films, noting how the original version of Close Encounters of the Third Kind became unavailable after the special edition was released. Still, for Django, he said he'd like to add the extra footage in and then "cut it up into hour chapters, like a four-part miniseries, show it on cable television." He noted that while audiences see a four-hour movie as an "endurance test," these days, they're much more willing to binge-watch longer hours of television in a single sitting.
As for Tarantino's most recent screenplay The Hateful Eight, which was leaked in January, the filmmaker said he remains undecided. He'd initially claimed to have shelved the Western, but said at Cannes, following a live reading in L.A. in April featuring Walton Goggins, Samuel L. Jackson, Michael Madsen, Tim Roth, Amber Tamblyn, Kurt Russell, Bruce Dern, and others, that's not necessarily the case.
"We'll see — I'm still writing the script right now," he told journalists. "I have calmed down a bit. The knife-in-the-back wound is starting to scab." He's still in the process of finishing a second draft and after that intends to do a third. "Maybe I'll shoot it, publish it, do it on the stage — maybe I'll do all three," he added.
Update: Cannes has posted the full 48-minute press conference online — check it out below for more from Tarantino on how he feels about digital projection and the importance of A Fistful of Dollars.
