Quentin Tarantino lives up in the Hollywood Hills, in the same house he’s had since 1996, with a movie theater built into one wing of the house and a terrace with a swimming pool and an orange tree and a Planet of the Apes statue out back. That’s where he’s sitting one night in October, glass of red wine in hand, watching the sun go down. He’s still got to ﬁnish the sound mix and work on the colors, but his newest ﬁlm, The Hateful Eight, is otherwise pretty much done. He shot it on 65-millimeter ﬁlm, like Paul Thomas Anderson did with The Master, and then he had his studio buy up pretty much every existing 70-millimeter projector in the country so he could personally equip 100 theaters with them and show the movie the way he thinks it should be shown.

He describes The Hateful Eight as “a claustrophobic snow Western”—a chamber piece, like Reservoir Dogs or The Iceman Cometh, but set in the wintry post–Civil War 1800s. It’s about a bounty hunter (Kurt Russell) escorting a prisoner (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to justice, only to be diverted into Tarantino-land—a.k.a. a tavern of sorts called Minnie’s Haberdashery, which doesn’t sell hats—where six other men are waiting out a snowstorm, and nobody’s who they say they are. It also stars Sam Jackson and Michael Madsen and Bruce Dern; everyone wears giant furs. “I think it could be my best movie,” Tarantino says. “If not, at least in my top four.” Which is a hilarious qualiﬁer, since he’s only made eight. People count Tarantino movies because he’s maintained for a while now that he’s only making ten. Maybe not even ten. “If ﬁlm projection goes the way of the dodo bird, well, then, maybe I might not even get to ten,” he says.

He sounds weirdly at peace saying that—anticipating the end of the work he’s given his life to. He seems, frankly, weirdly at peace in general, holed up with his costume-designer girlfriend, every memorabilia-crammed room here like some exhibit in a future Tarantino museum, with a Charro! poster on the bathroom wall and a couple of muscle cars out front and a glittery view of the Valley’s fading light. He’s still the antic, emphatic, maniacally gesticulating guy of ’90s popular imagination, but he also turned 52 recently. “I tend to always think of myself as perpetually 35 or so,” Tarantino says. “So, you know, it’s a bit of a drag, in certain regards. And in other regards, I’ve really enjoyed it. I mean…a lot of shit that used to really be on my mind is kind of gone now.”

He sits up in his chair, tries to explain. “I’m over a whole lot of stuff,” he says. He places his ﬁnger at the precise center of the table we’re sitting at. “If the universe was this table, I’m right here where I wanted to be at this point in time, at this point in my life, at this point in my ﬁlmography. I’m right where I wanted to be.”

How did you spend your time off between Django and The Hateful Eight?

Quentin Tarantino: Usually, when I’m done, I want to spend two months on my couch. I want to just pretty much nail the door shut, fuck the phone, and just go to sleep whenever. I have a completely erratic sleeping schedule. I fall asleep whenever I want. I get up whenever I want. Just two months of just watching movies and doing cinema writing and just vegging out that way. And I start emerging and just start, you know, getting back into the swing of things of life.

The people in your life must want to murder you during that sleep-whenever-you-want phase.

One of the privileges you have of living the life of an artist and creating your own world and everything is the fact that, in-between times, you can kind of spend them however you want. Because, you know, once you open up your candy store again, you’re open for business. And you have to be responsible. You have to be available. But, you know, that in-between time, I get to really live the fun life of a graduate student.

The legend is that you wrote Pulp Fiction in Amsterdam with no phone. Are those the conditions you need to write?

No, I don’t need to go anywhere to write. It can be fun. I have a cell phone, and the only person who has the number is my girlfriend. Because I don’t need anyone to call me as I’m walking down the street or driving from hill to dale. You know, my landline is my phone. And so I unplug it, or I don’t listen to it for a while. I’m good. I’ll play some of the messages. I’ll hear them when they come in. Okay, ﬁne.

And that doesn’t cause you anxiety?

No, no. My problem is the opposite. It causes me no anxiety whatsoever. A lot of people ﬁgure that’s my problem: I have no anxiety about shutting the world out at all.

How does something like The Hateful Eight emerge from that process?

I liked the idea of creating a new pop-culture, folkloric hero character that I created with Django, that I think’s gonna last for a long time. And I think as the generations go on and everything, you know, my hope is it can be a rite of passage for black fathers and their sons. Like, when are they old enough to watch Django Unchained? And when they get old enough—14 or 15 or something like that—then maybe it’s something that they do with their fathers, and it’s a cool thing. And then Django becomes their cowboy hero. And so I like the idea of maybe like a series of paperbacks coming out, Further Adventures of Django, and so I was really kind of into that idea. And then I started writing it as a book, as prose. And that’s what ended up turning into The Hateful Eight. The number one thing I had to do was get rid of Django. [laughs]