Quentin Tarantino plans Django Unchained TV series

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/may/23/quentin-tarantino-django-unchained-tv-series-cannes

Version 0 of 1.

Quentin Tarantino hopes to release an extended version of his blood-splattered western Django Unchained as a four-part TV series.

The director, on buoyant form in his press conference at the Cannes film festival, said he has 90 minutes of unused footage from the film, which he plans to edit into a mini-series of four one-hour chapters. Django Unchained, which won Tarantino the best original screenplay Oscar last year, stars Jamie Foxx as an antebellum slave who goes on a bloody revenge quest in pursuit of the slave owner who's bought his wife.

"It wouldn't be an endurance test," said Tarantino of the re-edit's mammoth run time. "It would be a mini-series and people love those. You show people a four-hour movie and they roll their eyes. Show people a four-part mini-series and they'll sit and watch it all in one sitting".

Tarantino is in Cannes to introduce a 20th anniversary screening of Pulp Fiction and host the closing night screening of Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars, a film he described as "the birth of genre cinema".

Pulp Fiction, the director's 1994 Palme d'Or winner, will screen in its original 35 mm format. The director used the press conference to rail against the rise of digital technology in film-making, saying that the industry has developed into "cinema v digital".

"Why would an established film-maker shoot on digital? I have no fucking idea at all," he said. "Digital projection is death of cinema as I know it. It's television in public. The fact that most films aren't presented in 35mm means the war is already lost.

"I'm hopeful that we're going through a woozy, romantic period for the ease of digital. I'm hoping the next generation will have more sense and realise what they've lost."

Tarantino said he had "calmed down a bit" after the leaking of his latest script, for another western called The Hateful Eight. The script appeared online in January and was linked to by the gossip site, Gawker. The director sued the site in January saying they "crossed the journalistic line". He has since held a public liveread of the script and retracted the lawsuit after his case was thrown out of court.

"The knife in the back wound is starting to scab," he said of the spat. "I'm in no hurry [to release the film]. Maybe I'll shoot it, maybe I'll publish it, maybe I'll do it on stage. Maybe all three."