It’s December 2015, in a hotel suite in the West End of London, and you could chip the tension in the room with an ice pick. Quentin Tarantino is in town – and with him, a small squadron of flacks from the Weinstein Company, the independent studio founded by Bob and Harvey Weinstein, the movie-mogul brothers who have nurtured the 52-year-old filmmaker’s career since the rough, ready Reservoir Dogs days.

Three Weinsteinians are waiting to see how Tarantino’s latest film, a scabrous chamber western called The Hateful Eight, has fared in this year’s nominations. When the list is announced, the film receives three nominations: best supporting actress (Jennifer Jason Leigh), best original score (by Ennio Morricone) and best screenplay. The Weinsteinians look relieved.

When I meet the director a few minutes later in a suite down the corridor, he’s happy with how things turned out. “I was hoping my script would squeak by,” he says. I stifle a smile. If there’s one thing Tarantino scripts don’t do, it’s squeak. Thundering, riffing and ricocheting are more his tempo, both onscreen and in person. He sits on the edge of the sofa, his body jutting forwards like a ship’s figurehead, and his words come cartwheeling out in fits.

Samuel L Jackson and Walton Goggins star in The Hateful Eight Credit: The Weinstein Company/Andrew Cooper

He explains that The Hateful Eight has split Globes voters, which isn’t entirely surprising. After Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained, two history-bending romps that proved to be his most popular films to date, Tarantino has come back with something bitter, pessimistic and bone-gnawingly tough, yet rapturously beautiful (it was shot in Ultra Panavision 70, an extinct visual format that allows for extraordinary, screen-stretching compositions).

It owes equal debts to The Iceman Cometh, an Agatha Christie parlour game and John Carpenter’s claustrophobic alien horror The Thing. For newcomers to his fanbase it’s a serious test of nerve, but for the black-hearted faithful, it’s nirvana.

For one thing, it’s almost three hours long - or, if you see the Road Show cut, with overture, intermission and extended scenes, seven minutes over. For another, as the title suggests, there’s nobody to root for. Instead, the film serves up an all-you-can-eat buffet of villainy, as a blizzard strands eight horny-hided ne’er-do-wells in a mountain way station where some kind of murky business is already afoot.

What’s more, the American Civil War was only a matter of years ago, and the party seethes with racial and national malice. One of the eight, Samuel L Jackson’s Major Marquis Warren, fought for the Union and carries a letter from Abraham Lincoln in the breast pocket of his greatcoat – while two more, Walton Goggins’s slack-jawed South Carolinian sheriff, and Bruce Dern’s ornery General, are Confederate good ol’ boys still smarting from defeat.

Strained race relations are nothing new in Tarantino’s work – or life, come to that. The director grew up around the South Bay region of Los Angeles in the Sixties and Seventies, moving there from Tennessee with his mother Connie when he was three and she 20. They arrived in the aftermath of the 1965 Watts riots, six days of violence sparked by segregation and white-on-black police brutality. (His father Tony, a law student and wannabe actor, left home before he was born.)

Tarantino describes the westerns of his childhood – among the thousands of films he pored over as a kid and, later, as a clerk at the Video Archives rental store in Manhattan Beach – as “cynical” and “bitter”; even “anti-American, in their own way”. Soldier Blue and Little Big Man transposed the horrors of the Vietnam War to the wild frontier, while McCabe and Mrs. Miller was as paranoid about the governing machinery of modern America as The Parallax View, or All the President’s Men.

Westerns, he says, have a special status: they say more “about the decade in America in which they were made” than “almost any other genre that doesn’t deal with modern times.”

As such, Tarantino deliberately shaped The Hateful Eight to reflect the racial strife of recent years. He was determined to “tap into” the growing turmoil – with “bounty hunters representing the law”, the symbolic splitting of the cabin into ‘northern’ and ‘southern’ sides, and a speech, delivered by Tim Roth’s debonair hangman, about the pitfalls of “frontier justice”.

“But then as we were making it, as the events of the last year and a half just kept happening, the movie became more relevant than we ever could have imagined,” he says: not least of all the sustained unrest following the shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014.

The incident that hit him hardest was the mass shooting at Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in which three men and five women attending a prayer meeting, along with their senior pastor, were shot by a 21-year-old “white supremacist asshole,” as Tarantino puts it, “who wraps himself up in the Rebel flag” of the Confederate states.

For the first time in his career, Tarantino says he found himself editing out a line from his script because news events had made it retroactively too on-the-nose. It came at the end of Walton Goggins’ sheriff’s tirade, near the start of the film, which now ends with the line: “When n______ are scared, that’s when white folks are safe.” (It’s elegantly answered later by a line from Jackson’s Colonel: “The only time black folks is safe is when white folks is disarmed.”)

Quentin Tarantino took part in a Rise Up demonstration against police brutality in New York earlier this year Credit: Getty Images/Eduardo Munoz Alvarez

Originally, referencing his own killing of blacks during the Civil War, Goggins’s character concluded: “You ask the white folks in South Carolina if they feel safe.” But the line now carried an extra, unintended sting. So Tarantino took it out.

What followed the Mother Emanuel shooting surprised him. “All of a sudden, people started talking about the Confederacy in America in a way they haven’t before,” he says. “I mean, I’ve always felt the Rebel flag was some American Swastika. And, well, now, all of a sudden, people are talking about it, and now they’re banning it, and now it’s not OK to have it on f______ licence plates, and coffee cups, and stuff.

“And people are starting to question about stuff like statues of Bedford Forrest [the Confederate general and Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard] in parks. Well, it’s about damn time, if you ask me.”

For Tarantino, present-day America “hasn’t been as divided with itself since the Civil War”. He was moved to take part in a Rise Up demonstration against police brutality in New York City last October (memorably saying he was “on the side of the murdered” in an impromptu speech). But he admits “if you ask black folks in America what’s been going on with unarmed black and brown males being shot by the cops, it’s not a new phenomenon.”

What makes it so urgent now, he believes, is the fact much of the violence is “being filmed, and people have seen it, and we’ve watched it on television in a way that we haven’t before. And it’s actually penetrated and pierced the national consciousness and the national news media. In a weird way, I think that will prove to be not too dissimilar to watching the Vietnam War on television.”

Tarantino’s appearance at that protest sparked a furious reaction from police union leaders, who threatened a protest of their own at The Hateful Eight’s world premiere. That didn’t materialise – but, at the film’s gala screening in New York, the red carpet was lined with supportive campaigners.

When I bring up his altercation on Channel 4 News during the Django Unchained press tour three years ago, in which he memorably shut down the butt of Krishna Guru-Murthy when the presenter suggested a link between the violence in his films and real-life shootings, he bristles. (And, I think, understandably so: no sane person watching The Hateful Eight could mistake it for a conflict resolution seminar.)

His new motto on that account – “I refuse to get on the defensive track” – is being rigorously adhered to. “Because I did that in the 90s, and I’m done. My opinion hasn’t changed.”

Besides, he continues, there’s an obvious, myth-torching counterexample. “I wasn’t going to give it to him,” he says, meaning Guru-Murthy. “But one of the things that backs up my point is that in the last 25 years, when it comes to industrial societies, hands down the most violent cinema that exists in any one country is Japan. Sometimes grotesquely so. And as we all know, they have the least violent society of all. It’s just right there.”

Nevertheless, the argument over violence and culture keeps rearing its head, particularly in relation to filmmaking. For a play to be upbraided on the same count, you have to be in eyeball-sucking, baby-eating Sarah Kane territory – and it would be fascinating to know, had Tarantino seen through his original plan to write The Hateful Eight as a play, if it would have drawn the same old hoary reproofs.

He’s still minded to direct a reworked version of the script for the theatre, providing, he says, “I still have the same juice for the material” after the press tour.

John Travolta and Samuel L Jackson in Pulp Fiction Credit: Getty

And the film was in fact first performed as live theatre. After the script was leaked online two years ago, Tarantino was furious, and publicly declared he was abandoning the project. But the film critic Elvis Mitchell persuaded him to stage a live reading at the Ace Hotel, Los Angeles, which rekindled his enthusiasm.

One thing is certain: though both are westerns, The Hateful Eight is in no sense Django Unchained 2: Armed and Fabulous, and Tarantino is under no illusions otherwise. He says he “really can’t imagine” it matching that film’s half-a-billion-dollar success – though notes that the received wisdom, pre-Django, was that westerns floundered outside of America, and you could “forget about a western starring a black guy.”

So why did it catch fire? Tarantino, as you might expect, has a theory. And it concerns “the idea that America is quick to make movies about shaming incidences in other countries’ histories, but not so quick to make movies about their own shame.”

Tarantino's film Django Unchained also addressed the issue of race Credit: Andrew Cooper

He describes two historical episodes as the USA’s “original sins”: the Trail of Tears, in which native Americans were forcibly relocated in the early 19th century onto so-called Indian Territory, and the slave trade; a movie setting that “America has avoided strenuously, except for a few examples”.

Django, of course, was one. Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave, which won the Best Picture Oscar in 2014, was another. That honour was entirely right, and, in its own way, revolutionary. But does Tarantino feel that his film might have softened the ground a bit?

He pauses – for longer, I think, than he has done during the entirety of our conversation – before saying, eventually: “Yeah, I think ‘softened the ground’ would be what I would give it. There were heavy, tall weeds in that forest, and we took a machete to them first. So there was a bit of a trail.”

He doesn’t mean for the benefit of McQueen, who “was going to make that movie whether I made my movie or not.” But he thinks his “more fantastical, genre-oriented” story helped limber the audience up a bit.

“So when he came along with a big historical-with-a-capital-H version, I think people saw it with a better understanding, and with better eyes, than they would have done if they were just thrust into it.”