How does someone “accidentally” smash a priceless guitar? According to Guitar World, the mistake occurred during the scene where Jennifer Jason Leigh’s antagonistic prisoner “Crazy” Daisy Domergue begins to strum a tune at the blizzard-bound Minnie’s Haberdashery. She’s been gleefully stomping all over the ragged last nerve of Kurt Russell’s bounty hunter John “The Hangman” Ruth, so we’re waiting for this utterly humorless man to explode. He does so by grabbing the guitar from Daisy and busting it up into unplayable shape.

Leigh’s stunned reaction to Russell’s outburst? That ain’t acting. She knew in the moment that he was destroying the 1870s Martin. As for Russell, he swears he was oblivious.

Precautions had obviously been taken to spare the Martin this grisly fate. “There were six doubles made,” said Academy Award-winning sound mixer Mark Ulano. “The guitar was from the 1870s and was priceless. What was supposed to happen was we were supposed to go up to that point, cut, and trade guitars and smash the double.”

Per Russell, here’s what happened next:

“On that day, I said, ‘How far do you want me to go?’ [Tarantino] said, ‘Just go until I say stop,’ I said, ‘So if you don’t say stop I smash the guitar?’ He said, ‘Yep, great, just keep going.’ I just kept going and going and going, and I took the thing and I said the line – music time’s over, or whatever it was – and I said, yeah, he wants me to smash it, so I smashed the guitar.

Then we cut and [Leigh] was… ‘I can’t believe that just happened.’ I was like, ‘What?’ She said, ‘You just smashed the real guitar.’”

Everyone felt horrible, but the damage had literally been done. And once Martin caught wind of the accident, they were devastated. They also voiced a subtle degree of skepticism over the production’s explanation.