Mere months after Quentin Tarantino announced his next project would be a Western, later identified as The Hateful Eight, the filmmaker has declared he's shelving the film because of a script leak.

"I’m very, very depressed," Tarantino told Deadline. "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 received word about the leak after his agent Mike Simpson alerted him that other agents had been calling to pitch their clients.

"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," the director told the website. "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. I’m going to publish it, and that’s it for now. I give it out to six people, and if I can’t trust them to that degree, then I have no desire to make it. I’ll publish it. I’m done. I’ll move on to the next thing. I’ve got 10 more where that came from."

Tarantino thinks someone at Dern's agency CAA might have distributed the script, but Deadline's sources "vehemently denied" the accusation. Apparently the director gave out non-watermarked copies, so anyone at an agency could have made a few extra copies and passed them along.

The filmmaker said he doesn't mind the inevitable Internet uploads and reviews; he just didn't want it to happen so soon in the process. Tarantino isn't completely burying the project, mentioning the possibility of publishing the script as is and revisiting it down the line.