Django Unchained Official Poster

Here’s the poster!  There’s been a lot of cool ones made by fans, and we’ve had the teaser, but here’s the official one:

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Tarantino Untamed

With his controversial slavery-themed action flick coming out this holiday season, the eccentric Oscar winning scribe proves that no subject is off limits.

By Amy Elisa Keith From Ebony Magazine

Quentin Tarantino isn’t afraid to start some ish. The director who scalped Nazis in Inglourious Basterds and destroyed Japanese mob bosses in Kill Bill is tackling American slavery by unleashing his brand of wildly imaginative storytelling on audiences once again with his new film, Django Unchained.

Set in the pre-Civil War South, Django, starring Jamie Foxx, Samuel L. Jackson, Leonardo DiCaprio and Kerry Washington, is part dramedy, part love story, part spaghetti Western and a whole lot of badass.

And as is the case in many of his previous films, it is not without controversy. After all, despite Django’s gritty and James Brown-squealing trailer, portraying slavery on the big screen is no laughing matter. On the other hand, if you think this a Roots remake, think again.

Tarantino sat down with EBONY to discuss popular misconceptions about the film and teaming back up with Jackson.

EBONY: What was your vision for Django Unchained?

TARANTINO: I set out to write a really heart-wrenching story of slavery in the antebellum South combined with an operatic, mythical spaghetti Western story of a Black man who is a slave. Then [we] see his mythical rise to not only become a man, but to also become a professional bounty hunter whoe would literally go into the mouth of hell to extract his princess.

EBONY: A lot skeptics are critical of your taking on slavery.

TARANTINO: I haven’t liked any of the representations of slavery that I’ve seen on film. So being touchy about what you’ve seen in the past and what could come out based on that past, [the skepticism] is totally understandable. I get that.

EBONY: Are you more confident about Django after doing Inglourious Basterds?

TARANTINO: One of the characteristics of my work is that I make you laugh at f—ed-up shit. I show things that aren’t funny and are f—ed up, then all of a sudden, against your will, I get you to laugh. The moment I get you to laugh, you’re a co-conspirator. [Laughs]

EBONY: How do you make slavery humorous?

TARANTINO: To me, there is no humor in slavery. There is no humor in the Holocaust; however, there can be humor in the course of the situation of the story you’re telling.

EBONY: On a scale of 1 to 10, how many n-bombs are viewers in for?

TARANTINO: Since the n-bomb is just the parlance of the day, there’s no limit.

EBONY: Is the mojo still there with Sam Jackson?

TARANTINO: Completely. Sam is such a theatrical beast. He really is. He just devours everything in his path. He’s the bull in the china shop, and everybody else is the china.

EBONY: Any reservations about making this film?

TARANTINO: Asking a lot of Black folks to do something very painful. I thought about getting non-Americans to do it. What stopped me was [going] out to dinner with Sidney Portier. I was telling him my thoughts, and he said, "For whatever reason, I believe that you were meant to tell this story. You just need to not be afraid of your own movie. You need to get over being afraid."

EBONY:  Favorite scene?

TARANTINO: It’s the sequence at Don Johnson’s plantation when Django tracks down the overseers who f—ed over him and his wife. To actually see a slave wipe out overseers is crazy catharthic.

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Django Unchained New Trailer

Talk about it on HEF – the Hudlin Entertainment Forum

Quentin Tarantino and producer Reginald Hudlin talk Django Unchained

Of the many plantations along the River Road that leads out of New Orleans, following the path of the Mississippi, Evergreen Plantation might be the most beautiful. Its long paths are lined by grand oak trees, with Spanish moss delicately clinging on. Still a working sugar cane plantation, it features 37 buildings on the National Register of Historic Places, including 22 antebellum slave cabins that speak of the true horror witnessed in the South in years past.

Today, amidst the frequent storms that shake this part of the United States, Quentin Tarantino has resurrected a small part of that history. Marching in single file, their arms and legs in chains, is a group of slaves being led into "Candie Land", the fictional plantation that lies at the centre of his new film DJANGO UNCHAINED. Leading them in, dressed in full cowboy outfit atop a horse, is Jamie Foxx as the titular Django, passing for a freed slave-turned-slaver to gain access to Candie’s protected fortress.

It’s Tarantino’s first foray into the Western genre, here inspired by his beloved Spaghetti Westerns. With a title borrowed from Sergio Corbucci’s 1966 epic DJANGO, in which Italian actor Franco Nero played the mysterious gunslinger, Tarantino’s DJANGO UNCHAINED is his typically-fearless attempt to tell a Western led by a slave, and shine a light on one of the darkest periods in American history.

What’s especially surprising about DJANGO UNCHAINED, is how quickly the project came together. Tarantino remembers an Oscar party, in the year INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS had been on the awards circuit. It was there that he started discussing the state of the Western genre with producer Reginald Hudlin, himself a noted director of films like HOUSE PARTY and BOOMERANG.

"We started talking about movies set in this time period," recalls Hudlin. "I basically said I hated all of them. I hated the Hallmark greeting card movies. I wanted movies that told the truth about slavery, and that had clear-cut victories. My idea of a great slave movie was SPARTACUS. And until there was something like that about the American slave experience I wasn’t interested."

It set Tarantino’s mind racing, and immediately he started drafting what would become DJANGO UNCHAINED. "It just poured out of me," Tarantino says. "I was in Japan doing the last of my press tour and Spaghetti Westerns, they call them Macaroni Westerns there, are so very, very popular. I went and picked up a bunch of soundtracks and as I was listening to them the basic outline of the story came to me. I ended up writing the first scene while I was there. And it’s fairly similar to what exists today."

Adds Hudlin: "I thought the topic was over, but Quentin called me last April and said, ‘Hey, I’ve got this new script and you got me into this thing!’"

In the end it took Tarantino six months to write a finished draft, a speedy job for him. "In fact I even slowed it down," he laughs. "I got to the middle point and backed off for a couple of weeks or so, because I worried that perhaps I was going too fast. I had about three different spots where I got to a certain point and kind of marinated for a few weeks before I continued telling the story."

For Hudlin, producing DJANGO UNCHAINED meant connecting with the roots which bind most of the country’s African American population. "Even though this was a work of fiction, there were people like this in my family," he says. "My great-great-grandfather was a conductor on the Underground Railroad. So these are true-life historical characters that have long needed to be represented. And not in some sanitised, ‘Oh, isn’t this nice’ movie but a foot-to-ass balls-out Quentin Tarantino action film."

The challenge of finding an actor capable of bringing Tarantino’s iconic lead to life wasn’t easy. "I had no idea who was going to play it, so I met with six different actors," Tarantino says. "Jamie Foxx came to my house and I was going to put him through the ringer and really test him out. He was the last one I saw. You just know when you meet the guy and I met the guy. He understood and he was the cowboy."

As it turns out, the dream of playing a cowboy had long been in Foxx’s mind. "Everyone wants to be a cowboy, man," he says. "As a kid I grew up in Texas and I had toy guns. I got a horse for my birthday four or five years ago, so I’m riding my own horse in the movie."

Foxx, in fact, grew up little more than eight hours drive away from the Evergreen Plantation location of the DJANGO shoot. "It was almost like, that’s what we were used to," he says. "That’s the way it is. Even now, how certain things are happening with that racial component, it’s because of this. It’s because of some of that mentality not being washed out yet."

Agrees Hudlin: "It affects all of us in the cast and crew. When we’re doing a scene in which one of the characters is getting tied to a tree, and is about to be whipped, it’s a whole thing to realise that really happened here. It happened with a horrifying regularity. It’s no different from shooting a film about the holocaust in Auschwitz. The disturbing thing is that Auschwitz at least looks like a prison; this is beautiful. It can lull you into a false sense of security. It’s a beauty that’s been paid for in blood."

Foxx is impressed by Tarantino’s courage. "He’s hip-hop, man," he laughs. "This is going to be a tough film to do, but the way he’s shooting and the pleasant and great things he’s finding are amazing. That’s why he’s Quentin Tarantino."

For Tarantino himself, tackling such sensitive subject matter comes with no hesitation. "I always know that a couple of people will say some things about it," he admits. "But then that goes away and the movie is the movie. And I don’t let anything anybody might possibly say ever stop me from doing anything anyway!"

DJANGO UNCHAINED, then, seems certain to represent everything Tarantino: courageous, energetic and above all entertaining.

Talk about it on HEF – the Hudlin Entertainment Forum