For those that have seen The Hateful Eight, you'll know that it's a pretty violent film in every sense of the word.
If the various characters are trying to straight up murder one another in increasingly violent ways, they're being complete a-holes to one another in different ways. A key scene in the film sees Kurt Russell's moustached bounty fighter smash up Jennifer Jason Leigh's guitar after she sings a haunting ballad about an imprisoned woman.
It's a pretty devastating moment and, when you look back, there's a sense of real horror in Jennifer Jason Leigh's eyes. It might just be because the guitar that Russell destroys was, in fact, an 145-year old guitar on loan from the Martin Museum. Dick Boak, the museum's director, said that they "were informed that it was an accident on set."
"We assumed that a scaffolding or something fell on it. We understand that things happen, but at the same time we can’t take this lightly. All this about the guitar being smashed being written into the script and that somebody just didn’t tell the actor, this is all new information to us. We didn’t know anything about the script or Kurt Russell not being told that it was a priceless, irreplaceable artifact from the Martin Museum."
As you can expect, the Martin Museum are not happy at all. The whole incident is now refusing to allow their guitars be used for films because of this. The museum was paid back its insurance money, however the guitar itself was essentially "We’ve been remunerated for the insurance value, but it’s not about the money. It’s about the preservation of American musical history and heritage."
Via Reverb.com
