How he’s shattering a genre with ‘Django Unchained’.
by Allison Samuels
Good friends can talk about anything, and for director Quentin Tarantino and producer/director Reginald Hudlin, anything usually included long, good-natured chats about the mechanics of the African-American slave trade.
“The dynamics of the country are changing and people are talking about that,” says Tarantino… "I may take flak but I always do on some level with my work. Wouldn’t be a Tarantino film without some flak and criticism. I bet anyone who sees the film won’t be able to forget it—and that’s the point.” (Photograph by Jeff Minton for Newsweek)
The lack of a respectable film detailing the impact of slavery on this country fascinated both die-hard film buffs. Eventually both men—who met on the set of Jackie Brown in 1997—became obsessed with the idea of crafting a no-nonsense, somewhat entertaining film detailing the lesser known aspects of slavery. After one conversation with Hudlin stuck in his mind, Tarantino went to work on an all-or-nothing script. Six months later, Django Unchained was born.
Set in the South just two years before the Civil War, Django Unchained (in theaters Dec. 25) somehow masterfully manages to present the haunting brutality of slavery while also infusing an outlandish humor only Tarantino could bring to the big screen. Moviegoers will be treated to the often controversial director’s deep love for the spaghetti western genre along with a blazing narrative of one man’s desire for vengeance and love. After being freed by a German bounty hunter, Django (Jamie Foxx) helps him track down a few bad guys for profit and then goes on a mission to find and free his enslaved wife (Kerry Washington).
“I was always amazed so many Western films could get away with not dealing with slavery at all,” says Tarantino, sitting in Todd-AO studios in Los Angeles where he was attempting to whittle the film to under three hours just after Thanksgiving. “Hollywood didn’t want to deal with it because it was too ugly and too messy. But how can you ignore such a huge part of American history when telling a story in that time period? It made no sense.”
It didn’t make much sense to Hudlin either. The director of the popular ’90s films House Party and Boomerang says he was baffled by the sugarcoated and abbreviated tales. “I hated all those films about slavery over the years. Any time Hollywood did deem it OK to talk about slavery, they were not worth watching,” says Hudlin, who is Django Unchained’s executive producer. “My idea of a great slave movie was Spartacus. Until African-American slavery was treated in that same manner, I had no interest in hearing what Hollywood had to say about the issue.”
With only two years of age separating Tarantino and Hudlin, they watched the same slavery-themed films as young kids—and then grew to hate them as adults. Titles such as Mandingo and Uncle Tom’s Cabin roll off their tongues with joint eye rolls and audible sighs. The not able period film Glory, starring Denzel Washington and Morgan Freeman as freed slaves serving in the U.S. Army, gets an honorable mention nod from Hudlin.
“I liked the black characters in Glory,” says Hudlin, whose great-grandfather was a conductor on the Underground Railroad. “Didn’t see the point of the white ones. The true story was the slaves in the film. They should have been the main focal point of the entire plot. But somehow no one figured that out.”
The faults of Glory aside, not much compares to the anger both men harbor toward the landmark television miniseries Roots. Written by Alex Haley and hailed in 1977 for telling the “complete” story of slavery, Roots remains the third most-watched miniseries of all time. It is also still considered the definitive mainstream portrait of slavery in the U.S.
“When you look at Roots, nothing about it rings true in the storytelling, and none of the performances ring true for me either,” says Tarantino. “I didn’t see it when it first came on, but when I did I couldn’t get over how oversimplified they made everything about that time. It didn’t move me because it claimed to be something it wasn’t.”
While many white directors might shy away from criticizing such an iconic symbol of African-American culture, Tarantino doesn’t hold back. He’s confident in his knowledge of a time and subject most people know little about and would rather forget. He was also savvy enough to bring Hudlin on board. “There were times when I’d be filming a scene and really getting into it and Reg would just say, ‘Hey is this the story you wanted to tell?’ He’d bring the focus back if I got too carried away.”
One thing both men agreed on was a scene in Roots that served as an example of what not to do in Django Unchained. The last act of the final episode features the character Chicken George being given the opportunity to beat his slave master and owner in much the same way he’d been punished and tormented. In the end the character chooses not to so he can be “the bigger man.”
With only two years of age separating Tarantino and Hudlin (left), they watched the same slavery-themed films as young kids—and then grew to hate them as adults.
“Bulls–t,” exclaim both Tarantino and Hudlin in unison as they discuss the absurdity of the scene. “No way he becomes the bigger man at that moment,” says Tarantino.
“The powers that be during the ’70s didn’t want to send the message of revenge to African-Americans. They didn’t want to give black people any ideas. But anyone knows that would never happen in that situation. And in Django Unchained we make that clear.”
Tarantino recalls a memorable scene where Jamie Foxx’s character is also given the opportunity to beat his former owner after he becomes a free man. “It was an emotional day on set and everyone was talking about how brutal it was because he beats the white off of his captor,” says Tarantino unapologetically. “There was no way that wasn’t going to be a part of the movie.”
Foxx shines as a man driven to punish those who tortured him, while also yearning for his wife, who was sold to another plantation years before. “It’s really important that this story is also a love story about a black man and a black woman,” says Hudlin. “In the midst of all the horrible things going on during that time, this man was in love and wanted his wife back. You don’t see black men in love too much on the big screen in slavery days, or modern times either.”
In a film already full of twists (not to mention costars Samuel L. Jackson and Christoph Waltz), Leonardo DiCaprio throws the ultimate punch portraying the young, handsome, rich plantation owner Calvin Candie. He owns Candyland plantation, where Django’s wife is being held, and thrives on the suffering he causes. The role is a marked departure for DiCaprio, who has spoken about how difficult the subject matter was to read, act, and convey on the big screen.
“He really embodied that entitled young male character perfectly,” says Tarantino. “His grandfather owned and made the plantation successful and his father kept it going in the movie. But DiCaprio’s character is just this kid who’s done nothing for the life he’s living. He’s living it up all the way with his decadence and greed, with no concern for how he got it.”
But neither an A-list cast nor Tarantino’s past box office hits will be enough to save Django Unchained if moviegoers decide not to support a film that focuses so intensely on one of America’s darkest hours. Slavery is a subject both black and white audiences tend to avoid in theaters. Yet Tarantino and Hudlin say the timing for Django Unchained couldn’t be better.
“The dynamics of the country are changing and people are talking about that,” says Tarantino. “This time in history is a part of that conversation, and I love that we’re out there talking about it in the middle of the other films about Lincoln and whoever. I may take flak but I always do on some level with my work. Wouldn’t be a Tarantino film without some flak and criticism. I bet anyone who sees the film won’t be able to forget it—and that’s the point.”
Reginald Hudlin and Quentin Tarantino first spoke about making a movie together on the topic of slavery over a decade ago – 15 years to be exact.
Hudlin told him that until a movie with the impact of a “Spartacus” (the Stanley Kubric directed epic that starred Kirk Douglas as a rebellious Roman slave and won 4 Oscars) could be done, he wasn’t interested.
But when Tarantino came to him years later and handed him a large script (“Django Unchained”) saying, “You planted the seed, now here’s the tree,” he couldn’t resist.
“A week later we were on location in Louisiana,” Hudlin tells EURweb publisher, Lee Bailey. He and director Quentin Tarantino came together to scout locations for the film.
“It’s a Quentin Tarantino film through and through,” the producer tells Bailey, who knighted him as the “genesis” of the film. He continues, “…it’s his writing, it’s his ideas, his characters. I just found it very impressive, you know, that this guy would think, ‘you know, I’m gonna honor the fact that, that conversation put me on a road.’ That just said a lot to me about who he is as a person,” says Hudlin.
Although the film doesn’t open until Tuesday, Christmas Day, it has been a highly anticipated work in Hollywood for quite some time, and there has been a LOT of buzz from insiders who have already seen it. Bailey asks Hudlin to identify some of the challenges of doing a film about this highly sensitive topic.
“Because it’s a Quentin Tarantino film some of the biggest challenges, which was to get financing, were very easy…Because we had a fantastic script…[and] world-class actors who wanted to appear in the film. But now you have the challenge of recreating a world and doing it in a way that it had never been done before; and shooting it across multiple states and managing the time and the logistics of a bunch of people – each of whom are movie stars – and now they’re acting in the same film. [We also had to] make sure we’re historically accurate and…the actual logistics of making sure the horses are safe. It’s an endless list of challenges you have to produce.”
In expressing to Tarantino in those early talks everything he didn’t like [about slave movies], Hudlin laughs as he recalls the only example he could think of to describe what he did like: Fred Williamson in “The Legend of Nigger Charley,” (a 1972 blaxploitation western directed by Martin Goldman) a film Hudlin saw when he was roughly 8-years-old.
“I remember leaving the theater feeling great! And I said, there’s no reason why I shouldn’t leave the theater feeling great. I want a catharsis!! And that’s what Django delivers,” Hudlin confirms.Bailey laughs out loud upon hearing this; and feeling the need to explain the outburst adds that Django is ”hilarious,” and he can’t understand why because it is about such a horrendous time. Hudlin breaks it down to him in an almost prophetic fashion.
“A lot of people don’t understand the difference between serious and solemn,” Hudlin explains. “You can be serious without being solemn and that’s what Quentin does beautifully in all his work. And it was an incredible total balancing act that he pulls off because he knows how to tell a story well.”
The producer says that Tarantino’s focus is always on telling a great story; not so much on the time or history that the story is drenched in. He adds that telling a great story involves humor, which makes it a story you want to see, not one you feel obligated to see as some kind of cultural duty.
But even with good storytelling, bad timing is quite frankly, a bitch!
The reality of such an undeniably violent movie heading to theaters NOW, as the country remains shocked to its core over the horrific recent violence in Newtown; where families continue to bury the 20 children and 6 adults killed at the hands of a lone gunman only days ago can’t be shoved aside. In fact, due to the tragedy, Hollywood had the sensibility to cancel the premiers of two major movies – one being Django Unchained. Lest we forget the unfortunate timing that presented an opportunity to recall Jamie Foxx as host on SNL just one week prior where, in the context of his 3-minute-plus “How Black is That” opening monologue, tells the audience, “No worries, I get to kill all the white people in the movie. How black is that?” Though no doubt an “in bad taste” remark, irregardless of the fact that it is what he gets to do, these same words would probably have stopped at the nervous laughter it generated from a few audience members; had it not been spoken just one week prior to such a devastating and violent act.
Bailey asks Hudlin what effect he thinks the Newtown shooting incident will have on the film, and if he thinks Hollywood filmmaking will change as a result of it.
“I can’t speak for Hollywood,” Hudlin responds, “but I’ll just say in relation to our film, I think movies that deliver an exploration of who we are as a people and as a culture ultimately decrease violence, not increase it. And this film takes a really hard look at who we are as Americans; black and white, and the social and economic forces that shaped us. And I feel that if we understand who we are better, we will have better mental health as a people. Slavery is America’s original sin and we avoid it, blacks and whites alike. We’re all ashamed of our heritage of slavery, but if you avoid the past then you can’t heal, you can’t transcend. And that’s what we’ve got to do.”Hudlin, who is justifiably credited with being a pioneer of the modern black film movement, reveals an unmistakeable pride in working on Django Unchained, and a real admiration for Quentin Tarantino and the cast. He had the opportunity to go into theaters across the country and witness the response of audiences of diverse cultures watching Django. He thought it was great that everyone cheered at the same time, cried at the same time, was terrified at the same time, and laughed at the same time. And to those responses he concludes,
“It speaks to how far we have come together. That we can watch a movie as sensitive as this, and everyone literally be on the same page.”
Django Unchained sounds like a pretty hard sell. Django (Jamie Foxx), a black slave-turned-superhero, slays every racist dragon in his gun-smoked path? But veteran writer-producer Reginald Hudlin (House Party, The Bernie Mac Show, Boomerang) didn’t so much as blink when his good friend, writer-director Quentin Tarantino, asked him to help bring Django’s story to the big screen. In a conversation with The Root, Hudlin explains why he couldn’t pass up the opportunity.
The Root: How’d you get involved in Django Unchained?
Reginald Hudlin: Quentin and I’ve been friends for a long time. We met, actually, through Pam Grier when they were making Jackie Brown. We got into the conversation, maybe 15 years ago, about movies about slavery. I hated most of them because for the most part they’re about victimology. There’s only one great movie about slavery, Spartacus. Until someone made a movie like that about the American experience, I wasn’t interested. Quentin called me April of last year and reminded me of that conversation we’d had years ago: "Yeah, I’ve written a script. You planted the seed, this is the tree."
TR: So the obviously controversial subject matter, the backdrop of slavery, didn’t give you pause at all.
RH: No, because first of all, part of our problem as Americans — black and white — is that we don’t understand slavery. If you don’t have an understanding of America’s original sin, then we can’t move forward as a people. Jewish people have a saying about the Holocaust, "Never forget," and it serves them very well as a culture. It reminds them that they have to stay sharp so that something like that will never happen again, and it reminds the world of the kind of evil it’s capable of. We need to do the same thing. I’ve been trying to make a movie about the Middle Passage for 20 years and couldn’t get it done.
TR: What made Foxx such a perfect fit for the role?
RH: Jamie’s an incredible actor. He’s from the South. And the fact that Jamie really is a cowboy. When we cast Jamie, we didn’t just cast him; we cast his horse, Cheetah, too. You haven’t seen a combination actor-and-horse casting since Roy Rogers and Trigger. That level of authenticity makes all the difference in a film like this. I mean, he did two takes riding bareback. It was crazy.
His quick-draw skills? There’s no sped-up camera tricks. It’s all him. When you look at Jamie’s work in the movie, between the emotional range of the character from slave to superhero and the physical challenges of the movie, there’s never been a role for a black man as demanding as Django.
TR: According to the Hollywood Reporter, the film makes use of the n-word more than 100 times. Was there a conversation with Tarantino about that?
RH: We knew it was going to be an issue for folks. It was going to be one of many issues for people. But for me, it’s kind of a tempest in a teapot. I’ve yet to talk to anyone who’s seen the film who, after they saw the movie, that’s what they talked about. They talked about the movie. They’re caught up in much bigger issues. As much as the right wing tried to latch on to Jamie as racist because he talked about killing white people, I’ve seen hundreds of white people cheer as Django kills these slave owners, because they’re bad. In that same way, when people see the world of the antebellum South and slavery, "nigger" is the least of their concerns.
There’s every kind of violence in the film, and linguistic violence is the least of it. There’s really been no huge pop-culture event about this period until now. So if this leads to people taking another look at the word, then it’s good. But I hope that’s not the only thing they’re talking about.
TR: Speaking of the violence that far surpassed linguistic violence, there were scenes in the film that were almost impossible to watch. Were you concerned with how much audiences could handle?
RH: I always want to tell people, "Don’t close your eyes; it’s worse because the sound makes it insane." I was, for a short period of time, an African-American-studies major at Harvard, and I felt like a fairly educated person on the subject. I can tell you, whatever you see in the film, there are 10 examples that are 100 times worse.
The balancing act of the filmmaker is to make sure the audience understands slavery is an awful, evil institution, but balance that with how much the audience can take. We told a great story, and part of that was Quentin’s idea of making it a Western where there are clear moral boundaries. You know there’s going to be restitution, and there’s going to be payback. So audiences can engage and cheer in a way that other films on the topic did not allow them to.
TR:Django Unchained has already been nominated for four NAACP awards, including best picture, which was won last by The Help. Are you prepared for some of the same criticisms about black films only winning awards if they depict black actors and actresses as "the help"?
RH: As a people, right now we don’t agree on anything. There’s no consensus. Whether it’s by class, by gender, by region or educational background, black folks are in conflict. We don’t agree that Cosby is a good thing, that Tyler Perry’s a good thing or that Jay-Z’s a good thing. Are there going to be some people who are like, "Nah, I don’t like that"? Sure.
We can’t feel that way. Part of slavery’s history is that we always fought back, and we always stood up. The film is about celebrating the people who did. And hopefully that will make us as a people come to terms with that difficult part of our heritage.
TR: Do you think only certain people should be allowed to tell certain stories?
RH: The person who gets to tell it is the person who gets to tell it. There are no rules. I certainly don’t want to be restricted to only telling stories about black people. I don’t think race necessarily is an inherent advantage. It’s one of many factors that determine whether you’re the right person for the job. Almost no one could get a movie like this made — black, white or otherwise. Out of the five people who could have gotten this done, Quentin’s the only guy who wanted to do it.
TR: Is this a "message film" at all? Is there something you want people to take away from it?
RH: The movie is profound on a lot of levels. It hits on so many issues. There’s many a Ph.D. thesis on deconstructing the semiotics of Django, from class conflicts in the black community, our relationships with sports, white liberalism and black nationalism — the range of topics the film touched upon is extraordinary. People don’t always see all those things because it’s put in an entertainment context. How can it be profound if I’m entertained? I don’t buy in to that worldview.
Helena Andrews is a contributing editor at The Root and author of Bitch Is the New Black, a memoir in essays.
I love this story for many reasons. Somehow recognition in your hometown means more than the usual story, especially when they actually got the facts right. I love that they got a shot of the Tivoli theater, where I would go and see art films when I was a teenager. The fact that Django is now playing there feels like a victory. Best of all is the interview with Mayor Alvin Parks, who I’ve known all my life, talking about our days in church plays together. I actually forgot we did that together.
