As many of you know by now, Quentin Tarantino has a new flick coming on Christmas Day, Django Unchained, about a slave trying to reunite with his wife, with the help of Inglorious Basterds’s Christoph Waltz.
Having read the script and seen the trailers, I see no reason why the film shouldn’t turn out well, it’s pretty much what I read on the page, and the right performances should really help bring it to life.
Still, as he usually does for his upcoming films, Tarantino and his merry gang of men came down to San Diego to thump the tub at Comic-Con, where he feels that Django’s bride is an ancestor of Shaft, and as Deadline reports, it won’t take as many historical liberties as Basterds did because the way the African-Americans were treated back then was horrible, and you can’t make it worse on screen.
Having read the script, the violence in it is relatively restrained compared to what what I originally anticipated, and it’s nowhere near as gratuitous as I expected either. Eight minutes of footage from a “sizzle reel” were shown, which Tarantino said is only the first half of the movie, and he said, “If this is good enough for the industry, it’s good enough for the fans.”
Reportedly the fans loved what they saw, almost getting a standing ovation from fans according to the Hollywood Reporter. Jamie Foxx also addressed the racism of the story, saying he had to deal with the N word a lot growing up in Texas, where Waltz said growing up in Austria reflected his character’s experience where he views racism as an outside. “When the project becomes magical, that means certain parts in your life parallel the story,” Foxx said. “I used it to my advantage.”
Of course the fact that the N word is used freely throughout the movie should get people riled up, I didn’t count it in the script but reportedly the N bomb is dropped 150 times, Leonardo DiCaprio may say it the most, but if you keep in mind the context of the story, again, it doesn’t feel gratuitous or race baiting, at least not in my opinion.
According to the Washington Post, DC Comics will also be doing a graphic novel adaptation of Django, which should be pretty cool to check out depending on who’s illustrating it. ”I’m always stuck with adapting my own script everyday,” Tarantino said. “So what is great about the comic is that it will include the entire first draft of the script. All the material that didn’t make the movie,” which will include Sacha Baron Cohen and Kurt Russell’s roles. (Both actors left the film during the shoot.
