Quentin Tarantino Could Turn ‘Django Unchained’ Into a Miniseries
Quentin Tarantino‘s nearly three-hour spaghetti western hit Django Unchained could get a little longer. The director has 90 minutes of never-before-seen footage from the film that he would like to incorporate into a four-hour cut that would unroll as a four-part cable miniseries, Vulture reports. “People love those,” he said at a Cannes press conference. “It’s funny. You present someone with a four-hour movie, and they roll their eyes. They go, ‘I don’t want to watch that!’ But you show them a four-part miniseries that they like and they’re dying to watch all four episodes in a row.”
It’s an idea – not a definite plan – that came up during the press conference, which was held to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the festival’s 1994 Palm d’Or winner, Pulp Fiction. He insisted on showing that film at the event on 35 millimeter film, as opposed to digital, because, in his words, “digital projection. . . is the death of cinema as I know it.” In his opinion, the now favored form of projection is like “television in public – and apparently the whole world is OK with television in public, but what I knew as cinema is dead.”
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But whether cinema is dead or not, Tarantino has continued work on the script for another western: The Hateful Eight, which he had abandoned, following a leak, and resumed work on. Referencing the leak, he said, “the knife-in-the-back wound is starting to scab.” Currently he’s working on the second draft of the script and will likely work on a third. Beyond that, it’s unclear how the end result will play out. “Maybe I’ll shoot it, maybe I’ll publish it, maybe I’ll do it on the stage, because I realized it could work really well onstage,” he said, referencing the staged script reading he oversaw recently in Los Angeles. “Maybe I’ll do all three.”