Tarantino's Fascination with Bounty Hunters(SPOILERS FOR DJANGO, HATEFUL EIGHT, ONCE UPON A TIME)

From 2012 to today, over the course of three movies in a row, Quentin Tarantino revealed a certain fascination with a certain type of character: the bounty hunter in the Old West. He managed to use those three movies to ruminate over the nature of bounty work and the men who perform it.

In doing so, QT abandoned the modern day worlds of his LA crime trilogy(Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown) and the worlds of Kill Bill , Death Proof, and Inglorious Basterds, and immersed himself into the Western genre. It was an interesting detour and it has lasted a long time.

We get Old West bounty hunters in Django Unchained(Chris Waltz AND Jaime Foxx), The Hateful Eight(Samuel L. Jackson AND Kurt Russell) ,and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood(Leo's TV bounty hunter character, Rick Dalton.)

And its interesting, QT eventually put a fictional character into Leo's "Bounty Law" series(Michael Madsen as an antagonistic sheriff), who calls the bounty hunter a "bounty KILLER" ...seeing the bounty hunter trade as disreputable and kind of evil, hunting and killing people for money, carrying their bodies around slung over the backs of their horses like human pelts...

Leo's fictional bounty hunger Rick Dalton also calls bounty hunters who don't KILL their prey "stupid" -- why risk escape of the prisoner, or the prisoner turning the tables and killing you? Or having confederates coming to facilitate the escape or killing?

Thus, Rick Dalton is "calling out" a character from the QT film one film earlier -- Kurt Russell's John "The Hangman" Ruth -- who DOES keep his prisoners alive for the hangman and thus seals both his death and that of some other people when he doesn't flat out kill Daisy Domergue(Jennifer Jason Leigh.)

Russell's fellow bounty hunter Sam Jackson indeed piles up the bodies of THREE killed outlaws like pelts and chides Russell when he says "nobody says that bounty hunting should be that easy" with "nobody says it should be that HARD" -- and hard is what it is when you've got to keep those dangerous prisoners alive and yourself at risk.

Back up all the way to Django Unchained and the pay-off with sheriff Madsen and Rick Dalton in Once Upon a Time...has its first scrutiny. Overarticluate dandy Chris Waltz kills the town sheriff(Don Stroud) and draws both a crowd and the district Marshall(Tom Wopat) with an immediate interest in arresting and hanging Waltz -- but he calms the crowd and the marshal down to announce his status as a bounty hunter "duly appointed by the law' to murder other men(as long as they have a bounty on their head) and, indeed, to demand payment for said murder.

Jamie Foxx's Django needs some training from Waltz, but gets the picture immediately: "they pay you money to kill white men?" And thus do Waltz and Foxx add an element of social justice to their killings for money -- they hunt down some white slavers with bounties on THEIR heads and kill two birds with one stone.

That's a LOT of bounty hunters in QT's films, played by a lot of good actors: Waltz(who won an Oscar for HIS bounty hunter) , Foxx(already an Oscar winner), SLJ, Russell, Leo(already an Oscar winner, too.)

You have to figure that QT -- who has a lot of power to make whatever stories he WANTS to make -- is really, really fascinated by the concept of the bounty hunter.

And there is one more "sort of" bounty hunter in the QT canon: Robert Forster's laid back modern-day bail bondsman Max Cherry in Jackie Brown. He doesn't hunt and kill his human prey -- but he DOES seek out bail jumpers with a stun gun to capture and return them to custody.

Max is a modern day bounty hunter without killing privileges...