After years of making movies about it, Quentin Tarantino is finally getting revenge in real life.
The director is suing Gawker Media after Gawker published his most recent script, which has been circulating among agents and actors since last week.
On Jan. 21, Tarantino did an interview with Deadline and said that he would no longer make “Hateful Eight,” the latest film he planned to make, after someone leaked the script.
“I’m very, very depressed,” Tarantino told the site. “I finished a script, a first draft, and I didn’t mean to shoot it until next winter, a year from now. I gave it to six people, and apparently it’s gotten out today.”
Tarantino said he had given the script to frequent collaborators Tim Roth and Christoph Waltz as well as Bruce Dern. Tarantino thinks that Dern gave it to his Creative Arts Agency agent, who then leaked the script to people outside the director’s circle.
“I gave it to one of the producers on “Django Unchained,” Reggie Hudlin, and he let an agent come to his house and read it,” Tarantino said. “That’s a betrayal, but not crippling because the agent didn’t end up with the script. There is an ugly maliciousness to the rest of it. I gave it to three actors: Michael Madsen, Bruce Dern, Tim Roth. The one I know didn’t do this is Tim Roth. One of the others let their agent read it, and that agent has now passed it on to everyone in Hollywood. I don’t know how these fucking agents work, but I’m not making this next.”
After Deadline published the interview, Gawker wrote a post asking for anyone who had the script to send it to them. Within a couple of days, the site linked to the entire script.
On Monday, Tarantino filed a lawsuit against Gawker Media for damages north of $1 million as well as an injunction for the site to no longer disseminate, Entertainment Weekly reports.
“Gawker Media has made a business of predatory journalism, violating people’s rights to make a buck. This time they went too far,” the lawsuit reads. “Rather than merely publishing a news story reporting that Plaintiff’s screenplay may have been circulating in Hollywood without his permission, Gawker Media crossed the journalistic line by promoting itself to the public as the first source to read the entire Screenplay illegally. Their headline boasts ‘Here Is the Leaked Quentin Tarantino Hateful Eight Script’ – ‘Here,’ not someplace else, but ‘Here’ on the Gawker website.”
The lawsuit also claims that Gawker “actively solicited its readers to provide it with an unauthorized infringing copy of the Screenplay, stating “if anyone would like to … leak the script to us, please do so at [redacted email address].”