I shot the way I wanted to shoot [in The Hateful Eight]. The only real disadvantage I felt at the time, but I don't feel now, was that we weren't able to get a zoom lens, and I had really gotten used to using a zoom lens for that little zoom creep. But it was also a nice thing to be forced to not use all the tools that you've gotten used to, from time to time, and to be able to work in a different way.

If the film isn't suspenseful, i.e. the pressure cooker situation of what's going on in the movie, if that's not part of it, if the threat of violence and the temperature isn't always going up a notch every scene or so, then the movie is going to be boring. It's not going to work.

My only obligation is to my characters. And they came from where I have been.

I am a genre lover - everything from spaghetti western to samurai movie.

As the acting class was going on, I just realized I just knew more about cinema than the other people in the class. I cared about cinema and they cared about themselves. But two, was actually at a certain point I just realized that I love movies too much to simply appear in them. I wanted the movies to be my movies.

I don't judge my characters, and that's my job not to judge them.

There is no other genre that deals with America better, in a subtextual way, than the Westerns being made in the different decades. The '50s Westerns very much put forth an Eisenhower idea of America, whereas the Westerns of the '70s were very cynical about America.