“It wasn’t a fake phony fucking Hollywood haberdashery in the snow for a movie shoot.” - Michael Madsen, The Hateful Eight
It’s good to see Michael Madsen in another Quentin Tarantino movie. The last one was Kill Bill over 10 years ago. Of course Madsen was in Tarantino’s debut film, Reservoir Dogs, with the famous scene torturing a captured policeman while dancing to Stealer Wheel’s “Stuck in the Middle With You.”
There were plenty of roles in The Hateful Eight, more than eight in fact. The film begins with Major Warren (Samuel L. Jackson) hitching a ride with John Ruth (Kurt Russell), who is taking Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to hang for a $10,000 bounty. Along the way they pick up Sheriff Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins). By the time they arrive at Minnie’s Haberdashery, there are four others already ready to wait out the snowstorm for days.
Madsen plays Joe Gage, a cattle wrangler who tends to hang back quietly and watch as Ruth and Warren scope out possible threats to their bounty deal. Bruce Dern, Tim Roth and Demian Bichir make up the Hateful Eight with a few other actors showing up in surprise roles. The film almost didn’t happen when a script leak caused Tarantino to cancel production. After putting on a live script reading, Tarantino decided to make the film after all.
I was Madsen’s first interview of the day in what was sure to be a long whirlwind tour traveling with The Hateful Eight. Beginning in Los Angeles, the ensemble would end up in New York and will surely make the rounds of red carpets in early 2016 awards shows. In a 14th floor hotel sweet, Madsen was warm and inviting, welcoming a morning conversation to begin the day. The Hateful Eight opens in 70mm screens Christmas Day, and everywhere January 1.
Suicide Girls: This is your third movie with Quentin.
Michael Madsen: Actually, my fourth.
SG: Are you counting both Kill Bills?
MM: No, he produced Hell Ride. He edited Hell Ride, the motorcycle picture for David Carradine. That’s one of my favorite films. I really like that movie a lot and the only reason that it’s watchable is because he cut it. When they first edited that movie, it was unreleasable. I mean, it was so bad they couldn’t even release it. And then Quentin got mad. He’s producing it and he said, ‘My name’s on this thing and I’m going to fix it.’ And he took all the footage and he recut it and fixed it, so I consider it a Tarantino picture.
SG: You were happy with the material of yours he used.
MM: Yeah, he gave me a great cut. He really, really did. He put stuff in there of my character that wasn’t in the original cut from the other people, so he really looked after me big time and fixed that movie. I like that picture.
SG: By the fourth time now, did he still make you audition?
MM: Well, you know, he called me and asked me to do something in Django and I was leaving for Romania. I was doing this indie film in Romania so I couldn’t. I wanted to play Calvin in Django. I wanted to do the Leo DiCaprio role which obviously wasn’t going to happen because Leo was already in it by the time Quentin called me. But because I couldn’t do Django, I kind of thought he was not happy with me. Or at least it seemed like he was like, “Why is Michael going to Romania?” which is understandable. But he just called me out of the blue and I never answer my phone usually. I don’t know why but I just don’t. I was in my kitchen, I picked up the phone. He’s like, “Hey, Mike, it’s Quentin.” I was like, “Holy fuck.” I hadn’t heard from him in almost a year, since before Django. He goes, “I wrote a western. I wrote a part for you.” And I said, “Well, fuck, that’s great. Let me read it.” He goes, “Well, you’ve got to come over here to read it. You read it at my house.” So I went over there and I said, “Did your gate code change?” because I know his gate code. I went over there. He gave me the script. I opened it up to whatever page it was and I read a page and a half to him. He goes, “Okay, okay, okay. We’re going to got Wyoming and we’re going to probably start around Christmastime.” This was in like September and I said, “Wow, okay.” And he goes, “Look, I gotta go. I got shit I gotta do today.” I’m like, okay, so I left. It was that fast. It really went down that fast.
SG: This was before the live reading?
MM: After I did that, he said, “The only people who have this is Sam and you, and I’m going to give it to Bruce Dern.” Meanwhile, I went to Italy. When I was in Italy, I was on an elevator with my manager and he read on the internet on his phone that someone leaked Quentin’s script, that it was leaked out to some website somewhere. He was really pissed off and he wasn’t going to make the movie. Obviously, I was like, “Oh, damn.” It was bad news. I was sad actually. Then I guess for whatever reason he decided to do this live reading thing and we did it at the Mary Pickford theater. I’m no stage actor but he asked me if I would be Joe Gage in the live reading. So we performed it on a stage. It was like a big crowd and everybody was all dressed up. It was really like an occasion. It was really kind of impressive. A lot of ladies are all dressed up and guys in suits. We sat on a stage with music stands in front of us with the script and just read it without acting it out, and then he directed everybody in a big cowboy hat. It was really fun. I think that at the end he said that it went a lot better than he ever thought that it was ever going to go. About a week later I started hearing rumors that he was going to make the movie. He’s kind of hard to get in touch with but I finally managed to do that and he said, “Yeah, I’m going to do it but I’m going to rewrite it. I’ll rewrite the ending and rewrite a lot of the middle so the one that got leaked out to the media, no one’s going to actually really know what’s really going to happen.” I said, “Wow, are we still going to Wyoming?” He said, “No, no, we’re going to Colorado” where they did True Grit, the original True Grit. That was it, man. A couple months later, there I was in the fuckin’ snow in Telluride.
SG: When you finally saw the Haberdashery set, was it everything you imagined?
MM: It was constructed so well that it was a livable building. It was a livable structure. It wasn’t a fake phony fucking Hollywood haberdashery in the snow for a movie shoot. They built a house. They built a haberdashery. The damn thing was built out of lumber and stone. It was a pretty impressive construction, you know what I’m saying? It was way, way up in the mountains so I remember the first time I saw it. We were driving up there and I just couldn’t believe it. It was surrounded by some of the biggest cranes and some of the biggest equipment that I’ve ever seen on a film. Everybody had to go on these snow trackers with the big tank wheels on them. We had to get to the Haberdashery from where the cars were parked. We had to take snow mobiles to get to the cabin to shoot. It was pretty cool, man. There was a big fire in there. Joe Gage had his little bed and his table. It was pretty neat.
SG: Have you ever worked with 70mm film cameras before?
MM: No, but I sure have spent most of my career with 35 and I’m much more used to seeing the great big Panavision box than seeing these RED things. I like the big stuff. I know that they did Ben Hur and Once Upon a Time in the West. We had cameras that were used in Once Upon a Time in the West. We had actual lenses that they used in Ben Hur. Not a facsimile but the one, ones that they actually did use in those great films. It’s a lot shorter mag box. 70mm, in 12 minutes it’s over. You’ve got to take it off and put a new one on. So they’re a lot shorter than 35 and it’s a lot more technically, for Bob Richardson I think, a real challenge. But for him, he loves it. He truly, truly loves what he does. Watching him with the 70mm stuff was pretty cool.
SG: Word is there’s different takes used in the 70mm release and the digital release. Did you give different performances?
MM: That might be an interesting thing to find out. That’s the first I’ve heard of that. Quentin is kind of unpredictable when it comes to the way he cuts stuff. Even the version of the movie that I’ve seen, I don’t even know if that’s the one that’s going to come out. Maybe so, I don’t know. Far be it from me to figure out his process.
SG: Are you essentially doing full scenes in the background of other people’s foreground scenes, because it’s all in frame?
MM: Yeah. It was kind of claustrophobic. Everybody got to be pretty friendly. I’ve never been in a film with a bunch of actors who stayed in touch and are friends. It’s weird. Me and Kurt and Walt and Tim, we e-mail and text each other a couple times a week. I’ve never done that before. I’m not adversarial, but I’ve never stayed [in touch]. We all became pretty close, you know. We all went through this thing together and we all became friends. It was a strange and interesting experience. I got to watch everybody else’s scenes where normally you wouldn’t be able to do that because you would be in a different room or a different part of the world or something. But because the whole thing takes place in that one fucking building, you kind of had to be there. It’s not like you could leave. I needed to be back at my table in the background most of the time for certain things, even if I wasn’t in the scene. Which was great because I got to watch people like Sam, who I’d never actually been in a film with. Sam was in Kill Bill but he played the piano in the church and that was about it. I had never actually worked with Sam. Being able to be in the same room with him and watch him was like wow. I have to say that if I had to pick one thing out of the movie that was my favorite experience, besides being back with Quentin, it would be to watch Sam. He’s a really wonderful man and a great actor.
SG: He always has the best lines, especially in Tarantino’s movies.
MM: He’s one of those people, you see him play these parts and I know what it’s like because I’ve played a lot of villainous people. So a lot of people when they meet me or they see me, they think, “Oh fuck, it’s Madsen. Holy shit.” And they mistake me for characters I play. And you can do that with Sam because of the kind of people he’s played, but in reality he’s the most gentle gentleman I think I’ve ever met.
SG: You’ve done a lot of movies with guns. Are western guns different than modern guns?
MM: The one funny thing I found out about western guns is guns from that era, you see all these guys going like this [pulling the hammer with your hand], bang, bang, bang with the fin. Those fucking guns don’t do that. You can’t actually do that with one of those guns, man. They weren’t built for that and you can’t do it. What you do it you’re going like this but you’re pulling the trigger, so it looks like you’re fan shooting but you’re actually pulling the trigger. Unless the gun is rigged to be a fan with a fan triller which they can put on there. But the actual guns from that era, the way they were built, they don’t shoot like that. That’s all movie bullshit. And they’re heavy. They’re really top heavy.
SG: There was always talk about doing a Vega Brothers movie and that never happened, but when you first saw Pulp Fiction and Travolta’s name was Vega, was that the first time you knew your characters were related?
MM: Well, Vincent Vega is Vic Vega’s brother. So The Vega Brothers was a picture Quentin was going to make and it may still happen, but it’ll have to be a prequel. He even said to me once that he had this idea where John and I had twin brothers and they were both in state penitentiaries in different states. We both get released around the same time and we decide to open a nightclub in Amsterdam. I was like, “Yeah, okay.” Oddly enough, I just met John in Cannes. You’d think that I would’ve met John way before then but I just recently met him last year in Cannes. He sent me an e-mail, “How are we going to get Quentin to make The Vega Brothers?” I thought it was funny because he’s thinking the same thing I’m thinking. I’d love to do it.
SG: But was seeing Pulp Fiction the first time you knew there was a bigger Vega family?
MM: Oh sure. I knew the whole scenario. I was going to do Pulp Fiction but I was doing Wyatt Earp.
SG: Which role in Pulp Fiction?
MM: I was going to be him. I was going to play John’s part. Quentin asked me to do it before he went to John.
SG: So Vince and Vic would’ve been twins.
MM: But I would’ve been playing my own brother which is weird. But I had already signed with Larry Kasdan to do Wyatt Earp and I couldn’t get out of it. I couldn’t get out of the contract. Believe me, looking back, if I could’ve killed that one, I would’ve. There’s a long walk down to the O.K. Corral. I would’ve skipped that one but then again, John was wonderful. That was a great think for him because it brought his career back so God bless him. It’s a great film.
SG: Kurt Russell played Wyatt Earp in a movie too. Did you ever talk to him about that?
MM: See, he did Tombstone and I did Wyatt Earp with Kevin. They both came out around the same time but Tombstone came out first so it stole all the thunder. Everybody went to see Tombstone and nobody gave a damn about the one I did. But to be honest, the one that I’m in, I thought it was really boring. I thought it was really too fucking long and boring. It really was, man. There was all this historical stuff about Wyatt that nobody really gives a shit about that didn’t need to be in the movie. It was too long and it was just like oh my God.
SG: It’s funny, The Hateful Eight is just as long but you don’t feel it.
MM: It’s funny you say that because it’s true. I heard, “Oh, it’s three hours” but when I went to see it, it didn’t seem like that.
