5 Things Quentin Tarantino Reveals About 'The Hateful Eight'

Always quotable, Quentin Tarantino had a lot to say about a little bit of everything in his latest interview, from "True Detective" ("I thought it was really boring") to Barack Obama ("He's fantastic").

But perhaps the most revelatory comments in the sit-down with New York magazine were his updates and musings about his Christmas release, "The Hateful Eight," the Western whose trailer was just released:

1. It's About Half Ready

"We’ve got a little bit more than an hour finished right now."

2. He's (sort of) Happy with What He's Got

"I’m not committing suicide yet. It is what it is. We’re rushing and trying to get to the end. Then you go through it and try to make it even better. But first, you just get to the end."

3. He Learned a Big Lesson in Storytelling from His Flop "Grindhouse"

"Robert Rodriguez and I had gotten used to going our own way, on these weird roads, and having the audience come along. We’d started thinking they’d go wherever we wanted. With 'Grindhouse,' that proved not to be the case. It was still worth doing, but it would have been better if we weren’t caught so unaware by how uninterested people were."

4. All Westerns Reflect a Decade's "Values and Problems" -- Except His Western

"I’m not trying to make 'Hateful Eight' contemporary in any way, shape, or form. I’m just trying to tell my story. It gets to be a little too much when you try to do that, when you try to make a hippie Western or try to make a counterculture Western."

5. Though His Western IS Contemporary with Scenes Echoing Racial Events in Baltimore and Ferguson

"It was already in the script. It was already in the footage we shot. It just happens to be timely right now. We’re not trying to make it timely. It is timely. I love the fact that people are talking and dealing with the institutional racism that has existed in this country and been ignored. I feel like it’s another ’60s moment, where the people themselves had to expose how ugly they were before things could change. I’m hopeful that that’s happening now."