Quentin Tarantino’s next film will have a touch of real Wyoming in it. Bounty hunter John “the Hangman” Ruth, played by Kurt Russell, will be wearing a buffalo hide coat created by tanning company Merlin’s Hide Out in Thermopolis. The coat is based on an original that can be seen in the Gene Autry Museum in Los Angeles.
“It's designed from the 1800s. It has different lengths of hair throughout—it needs to be a big, burly looking coat,” said Barb Heinze, co-owner of Merlin’s Hideout.
Although the business was commissioned to make a coat for just one character, eight nearly-identical copies were used in the film. “And the challenge was, it takes two buffalo hides to make one coat. And those two have to match close to make the coat look uniform, and we needed to have at least 16 hides to make eight coats as close as possible that looked alike” Heinze said.
Tarantino’s new film The Hateful Eight is set in post-Civil War Wyoming but was shot in Colorado. The plot is based around a bounty hunter, his captive, and the strangers who join them. The film opens in theaters in December.