Why Quentin Tarantino Decided To Center The Hateful Eight Around Jennifer Jason Leigh
Casting is a subtle art, and though casting directors are the backbone of the industry in a lot of ways, directors are more deeply involved in the process than even most people realize. So much of making Quentin Tarantino's stories work hinges on casting, and for his ninth film, "The Hateful Eight," it was a crucial element. In a 2015 interview with Entertainment Weekly, Tarantino explained that he couldn't cast the role of Daisy Domergue, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, as he normally would with any other project.
"It was almost an impossible role to cast in a conventional way," he explained. "I.E., an actress coming in the room and knocking our socks off, and us saying, 'Oh wow, that's Daisy.' Because if you've seen the movie, you know that the way she is in the last chapter is not necessarily the way she is in the chapters building up to it. So, with that in mind, I wasn't necessarily looking for someone to nail her speech in that final chapter."
The filmmaker revealed at the time that he looked at several different actresses for the role who had prominent careers in their youth in the 1990s. That yellow brick road of sorts led him to Leigh.
The Jennifer Jason Leigh film festival
"That's the era that most of my actors made their bones, and that's the era when I made my bones," Tarantino added. "There was a throwback to 'Reservoir Dogs' quality to this whole [movie] so there was this kind of full circle quality going on. So I was like, the actress should be from that same boat as the [other] actors, and there were about three actresses from that period that really kind of made an indelible mark on me. I started going on little film festivals of the three, and frankly, it was the Jennifer Jason Leigh film festival that I enjoyed the most."
He went on to explain that he watched films of hers like "Single White Female," "Heart of Midnight," "The Men's Club," and "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" while sussing out if he wanted her for the "The Hateful Eight" role. "But it was more kind of the combination of 'Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle' and 'Georgia' and 'Miami Blues' and 'The Hitcher,'" the director said of what struck him in Leigh's career highlights. "Another big one that helped was a Paul Verhoeven movie she did, 'Flesh+Blood,' with Rutger Hauer. She's terrific in it."
An exploration of these titles and what kind of opportunities they afforded Leigh as a performer enticed Tarantino and got him thinking about her in the Daisy Domergue part. Plus, he knew she was the kind of actress he wanted in the role.
Gratuitous gender violence in The Hateful Eight
Tarantino added:
"I literally was just having a ball with this Jennifer Jason Leigh film festival. It was a nice little reminder that in the '90s, she was like a female Sean Penn. You didn't just cast her in girlfriend roles; you cast her in movies where the whole movie was about her performance. So it got me very, very excited about seeing a performance-dominated Jennifer Jason-Leigh movie."
Leigh is undoubtedly on point in Tarantino's weakest feature — yeah, that might just be my take, but I stand by it — but even her great casting can't save the torturously misogynistic chore the film is as a whole. That entire perspective stems from how her character is treated from the very beginning of the film onward, and yes, it is evident that the director is putting that treatment on display to prove a point. That doesn't make the treatment any easier to sit through or give us grounds to forgive the actions, as outlandishly used as they are, in service of the story. Usually, when gratuitous violence attached to a bias is used, there are ways to get the same tonal or emotional effect that doesn't subject the audience to the harsh realities of that bias (you know, unless the central thesis of the film hinges on that experience in a way that is actively exploring bias).
I grew up on Tarantino and am a major fan of his work. Still, he's known for pushing the envelope in this way — he's long since garnered criticism over his use of racially-motivated language in his films as well as the way he treats female characters despite a track record of power and agency within their stories. For all the good Leigh does in her performance, especially in the film's opening which introduces her character, he arguably does her a disservice straight from the start.