Quentin Tarantino Talks Slavery, Violence And Possibly 'More Spaghetti Westerns'
Some early viewers noted that Django Unchained - perhaps not surprisingly - is packed full of violence and other possible offendables that may put off the sensitive. But Quentin Tarantino said the slavery-themed pic only partly reflected slavery's violent truth saying that research he did turned up a reality that was "incredibly shocking" and that it was, in fact, "far worse." Speaking to a recent audience overseas, the director also teased possibly making more self-described "big-budget, big-screen, quasi-epic...spaghetti western" pics down the line.
Tarantino spoke in the U.K. to an audience of BAFTA (British Academy) members after a screening of the film starring Jamie Foxx who is a former slave that teams up with a German bounty hunter played by Christoph Waltz, to find and rescue his enslaved wife.
"We all intellectually 'know' the brutality and inhumanity of slavery," Tarantino said, according to The Guardian. "But after you do the research it's no longer intellectual any more, no longer just historical record – you feel it in your bones. It makes you angry, and want to do something … I'm here to tell you, that however bad things get in the movie, a lot worse shit actually happened."
Tarantino said that salvery pics tend to focus on the historical aspect, while depicting the human tragedy at a distance and said he wanted to stay away from that with Django Unchained.
"When slave narratives are done on film, they tend to be historical with a capital H, with an arms-length quality to them. I wanted to break that history-under-glass aspect, I wanted to throw a rock through that glass and shatter it for all times, and take you into it."
Leonardo DiCaprio's Calvin Candie character represented the Southern plantation-owning aristocracy that Tarantino said he wanted to target in the feature. He described the landed slave-owning upper echelon of Southern society an absurd, grotesque parody of European aristocracy."
"I did a lot of research particularly in how the business of slavery worked, and what exactly was the social breakdown inside a plantation: the white families that owned the houses, the black servants who worked inside the house, the black servants that were in the fields, and the white overseers and workers that were hired to work there."
And while he's teased lately that he's possibly in his sunset years as a filmmaker, he said he'd like to make more films in the same vein as Django. "I'd like to do a couple more, dealing with the same issue: but different story, different characters."
[Source: The Guardian]
