While making 'Django Unchained,' his new movie about Southern slavery, Quentin Tarantino worried he was going too far

by Marshall Fine, nydailynews.com
December 23rd 2012 6:00 AM

Even Quentin Tarantino thought he might have gone too far as he prepared to make "Django Unchained," opening Tuesday.

He had written scenes of a chain gang of slaves en route to auction, slogging through the mud of Greenville, Miss. ("Like a black Auschwitz," Tarantino termed it), and of more slaves picking cotton in a field under scorching sun with armed overseers guarding them on horseback.

But the idea of shooting those scenes in Louisiana, where most of "Django" was filmed, with black actors being asked to portray slaves, unnerved the usually self-confident director.

The prospect made him so edgy that he considered shooting those scenes in the West Indies or even Brazil, just so he wouldn't be reenacting slave-related atrocities upon the landscape where such events actually happened.

So Tarantino turned to actor-director Sidney Poitier, the first African-American to win a Best Actor Oscar, for advice.

"Sidney basically told me to man up," Tarantino says. "He said, 'Quentin, for whatever reason, you've been inspired to make this film. You can't be afraid of your own movie. You must treat them like actors, not property. If you do that, you'll be fine.' "

By choosing to set his blend of spaghetti Western, 1970s revisionist action movie and blaxploitation film in pre-Civil War Mississippi, Tarantino wanted to confront the reality of slavery in a way Hollywood has avoided for virtually its entire history.

While there have been films — from "Gone With the Wind" to "Glory" — that have dealt with slaves and slavery, few of them have shown its brutality and inhumanity the way Tarantino does.

"It's touchy, painful and uncomfortable," the 49-year-old filmmaker says. "It makes people afraid — both black and white.

"Most countries have been forced to deal with the atrocities in their history — the world has made them. They've gotten through it." But in the United States, he adds, the nation "didn't even deal with our genocidal past with the American Indians until the 1960s.

"My goal with 'Django' was not to dramatize a history book or take it into a 'Schindler's List' direction, though I think 'Schindler's List' is a great film," he says. "I wanted to tell an exciting adventure story with a 21st-century view."

Having audaciously killed Adolf Hitler in the 2009 "Inglourious Basterds," Tarantino goes completely hot-button with "Django Unchained." He doesn't just grab the live-wire issue of America's shameful history of slavery. He does it in a movie that blends wildly violent action, adventure, romance, light comedy and more than 100 uses of the most verboten of racial epithets.

The film stars Jamie Foxx as a freed slave named Django, who sets off to free his wife (Kerry Washington) with the help of a courtly German bounty hunter (Oscar winner Christoph Waltz). But the wife is the property of a despicable plantation owner, Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), who trains male slaves — "mandingos" — for to-the-death, bare-knuckle boxing matches.

Notes Waltz, whose bounty hunter becomes Django's partner and ally: "In a way, slavery is an unresolved issue, a topic that hasn't been universally addressed. You would think that the victory of the North over the South would have ended the discussion, but it's never been properly dealt with."

With its frequent spurts of blood, depictions of slaves being whipped and worse, the film has aroused controversy, as much for its nonstop use of the N-word as for the violence.

That misses the point, Washington says.

"I'm fascinated that, in this epic adventure love story, we'd spend so much time just talking about one word," she tells the Daily News.

"To tell the story and be true to the culture, you have to use it. It was used as a weapon, to make people feel less-than. I think it's important that today's young people, who use it and don't know the history, see it in that context — that it was evil."

Focusing on the sensational aspects of the film misses a larger point, Washington says.

"So many films about slavery are about powerlessness. This is about a black man who finds his freedom and rescues his wife. Django is a liberator, a hero — there's nothing shameful about that," she says.

Indeed, says Jamie Foxx, the romance is what drew him to the script.

"What I gravitated to was the love story," Foxx says. "When you see stories about slavery, you never get a chance to see slaves fighting back. That's a first. We kept saying that during shooting — that there were a lot of firsts. And it's just a fantastic ride."

Still, DiCaprio squirmed when he sat down for the first reading. As the villain of the piece, Calvin Candie had to be not just on the wrong side of history — but thoroughly rotten, someone who was reared by black slaves but still viewed them as subhuman and thought nothing of dropping the N-bomb frequently.

"I hated him," DiCaprio says of his character. "I was incredibly uncomfortable with the language, with the degree to which he treated other people as badly as he did. It was very disturbing. I even said to Quentin, 'Do I need to be this atrocious?'

"And Jamie and [co-star] Samuel L. Jackson both said, 'If you sugarcoat it, if you hold back, people will feel we're not telling the truth.' That ignited me to go as far as I did."

Jackson recalls the moment: "I took him aside and said, 'This is just another Tuesday, motherf—. Let's do this.' "

Since his 1992 breakthrough, "Reservoir Dogs," Tarantino has always been a provocative filmmaker, from his use of fractured time lines to his gleefully vulgar dialogue to his lavish way with gore. Still, "Django Unchained" is the work of a more mature director, one who made sure that the cast and crew were comfortable every step of the way, even as they dealt with material that was alternately dark, incendiary and outrageously funny.

"Could I have made this film 20 years ago? Maybe, but it probably would have been so different you wouldn't recognize it," says the outsized personality known to friends as Quentin and to fans as QT.

"I doubt I would have tried to make it a love story. It would have been more about retribution.

"I think I'm the same artist I was, going on the same journey. I've grown into my profession, into my talent. I know more what I'm doing, instead of working on instinct. I want to try bigger, bolder, broader things."

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