Quentin Tarantino, 'Unchained' And Unruly

Quentin Tarantino's film Django Unchained is a spaghetti western-inspired revenge film set in the antebellum South; it's about a former slave who teams up with a bounty hunter to target the plantation owner who owns his wife.

The cinematic violence that has come to characterize Tarantino's work as a screenwriter and director — from Reservoir Dogs at the start of his career in 1992 to 2009's Inglourious Basterds -- is front and center again in Django. And he's making no apologies.

"What happened during slavery times is a thousand times worse than [what] I show," he says. "So if I were to show it a thousand times worse, to me, that wouldn't be exploitative, that would just be how it is. If you can't take it, you can't take it.

"Now, I wasn't trying to do a Schindler's List you-are-there-under-the-barbed-wire-of-Auschwitz. I wanted the film to be more entertaining than that. ... But there's two types of violence in this film: There's the brutal reality that slaves lived under for ... 245 years, and then there's the violence of Django's retribution. And that's movie violence, and that's fun and that's cool, and that's really enjoyable and kind of what you're waiting for."

That said, Tarantino is clear about what — for him — is acceptable violence in a movie and what crosses a line.

"The only thing that I've ever watched in a movie that I wished I'd never seen is real-life animal death or real-life insect death in a movie. That's absolutely, positively where I draw the line. And a lot of European and Asian movies do that, and we even did that in America for a little bit of time. ... I don't like seeing animals murdered on screen. Movies are about make-believe. ... I don't think there's any place in a movie for real death."

In the case of Django, Tarantino tells Fresh Air host Terry Gross that he was much more uncomfortable with the prospect of writing the language of white supremacists and directing African-Americans in scenes depicting slavery on American soil than he was about any physical violence being portrayed. His anxiety about directing the slavery scenes was so great, in fact, that he considered shooting abroad.

"I actually went out after I finished the script ... with Sidney Poitier for dinner," he says. "And was telling him about my story, and then telling him about my trepidation and my little plan of how I was going to get past it, and he said, ... 'Quentin, I don't think you should do that. ... What you're just telling me is you're a little afraid of your own movie, and you just need to get over that. If you're going to tell this story, you need to not be afraid of it. You need to do it. Everyone gets it. Everyone knows what's going on. We're making a movie. They get it.'"

Interview Highlights

On the catchphrase 'The D is silent'

"I thought everyone would know how to say the name 'Django.' Even if it wasn't from the spaghetti westerns, at least from Django Reinhardt you would know how to say it. And people would read the script [and say], 'Oh! D-jango Unchained. OK!" And people would say it all the time. Frankly, I considered it an intelligence test. If you say D-jango you're definitely going down in my book."

On conventional slave narratives on screen

"There haven't been that many slave narratives in the last 40 years of cinema, and usually when there are, they're usually done on television, and for the most part ... they're historical movies, like history with a capital H. Basically, 'This happened, then this happened, then that happened, then this happened.' And that can be fine, well enough, but for the most part they keep you at arm's length dramatically. Because also there is this kind of level of good taste that they're trying to deal with ... and frankly oftentimes they just feel like dusty textbooks just barely dramatized."

On giving an enslaved character a heroic journey

"I like the idea of telling these stories and taking stories that oftentimes — if played out in the way that they're normally played out — just end up becoming soul-deadening, because you're just watching victimization all the time. And now you get a chance to put a spin on it and actually take a slave character and give him a heroic journey, make him heroic, make him give his payback, and actually show this epic journey and give it the kind of folkloric tale that it deserves — the kind of grand-opera stage it deserves."

On how Westerns from different decades reflect the concerns of their times

"One of the things that's interesting about Westerns in particular is [that] there's no other genre that reflects the decade that they were made or the morals and the feelings of Americans during that decade [more] than Westerns. Westerns are always a magnifying glass as far as that's concerned.

"The Westerns of the '50s definitely have an Eisenhower, birth of suburbia and plentiful times aspect to them. America started little by little catching up with its racist past by the '50s, at the very, very beginning of [that decade], and that started being reflected in Westerns. Consequently, the late '60s have a very Vietnam vibe to the Westerns, leading into the '70s. And by the mid-'70s, you know, most of the Westerns literally could be called 'Watergate Westerns,' because it was about disillusionment and tearing down the myths that we have spent so much time building up."

On his early introductions to African-American culture

"[My mother's] boyfriends would come over, and they'd ... take me to blaxploitation movies, trying to, you know, get me to like them and buy me footballs and stuff, and ... my mom and her friends would take me to cool bars and stuff, where they'd be playing cool, live rhythm-and-blues music ... and I'd be drinking ... Shirley Temples — I think I called them James Bond because I didn't like the name Shirley Temples — and eat Mexican food ... while Jimmy Soul and a cool band would be, you know, playing in some lava lounge-y kind of '70s cocktail lounge. It was really cool. It made me grow up in a real big way. When I would hang around with kids I'd think they were really childish. I used to hang around with really groovy adults."

Copyright 2013 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Transcript

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. My guest is Quentin Tarantino, whose new film "Django Unchained" opened Christmas Day. Tarantino is famous for writing and directing films that borrow from genres that he loves - crime, martial arts, Westerns, war films - and turning them into what has almost become a genre you can call Tarantino.

He wrote and directed "Reservoir Dogs," "Pulp Fiction," "Jackie Brown" and "Inglourious Basterds." "Django Unchained" pays tribute to spaghetti Westerns. It's set in the South, just a couple of years before the Civil War. Christoph Waltz, who played the Nazi known as The Jew Hunter in "Inglourious Basterds," plays King Schultz, a dentist turned bounty hunter who frees a slave who can help him identify two white men he's tracking down. That slave, Django, is played by Jamie Foxx.

Schultz and Django eventually go in search of Django's wife, who was sold to another plantation after she and Django had tried to escape. They soon figure out that she's now a slave on the plantation owned by Calvin Candie, played by Leonardo DiCaprio. To get access to the plantation, Django and Schultz pretend they want to purchase Candie's top Mandingo fighters. Mandingos are slaves who battle each other to the death for the entertainment of white people. This is the scene where Schultz and Django first meet Candie. Candie speaks first.

(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "DJANGO UNCHAINED")

LEONARDO DICAPRIO: (As Calvin Candie) What's your name, boy?

CHRISTOPH WALTZ: (As Dr. King Schultz) His name is Django Freeman.

DICAPRIO: (As Candie) Where'd you dig him up?

WALTZ: (As Schultz) A fortuitous turn of events brought Django and myself together.

DICAPRIO: (As Candie) I've heard tell about you. I heard you been telling everybody that Mandingos ain't no damn good, ain't nothing nobody is selling is worth buying. I'm curious. What makes you such a Mandingo expert?

WALTZ: (As Schultz) I'm curious what makes you so curious.

JAMES REMAR: (As Butch) What did you say, boy?

DICAPRIO: (As Candie) Calm down, Butch. No offense given, none taken.

WALTZ: (As Schultz) Monsieur Candie, I'd appreciate if you could direct your line of inquiry toward me.

DICAPRIO: (As Candie) You do not have anything to drink. Can I get you a tasty refreshment?

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (As character) Yes, I'll have a beer.

DICAPRIO: (As Candie) Wunderbar. Roscoe, a beer for the man with a beard, and I will have a Polynesian Pearl Diver, do not spare the rum.

GROSS: Quentin Tarantino, welcome back to FRESH AIR. So...

QUENTIN TARANTINO: Good to be here.

GROSS: It's great to have you. So the film is called "Django Unchained," and Jamie Foxx plays Django, and the name Django comes from a series of spaghetti Westerns in which the main character I suppose is called Django.

(LAUGHTER)

TARANTINO: Well, kind of an interesting history about those movies is after the Dollars Trilogies came out and kind of created this entire new genre in Italy...

GROSS: This is for "A Fistful of Dollars," "For a Few Dollars More," the Clint Eastwood, Sergio Leone...

TARANTINO: And "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly."

GROSS: "Good, Bad and the Ugly," the Sergio Leone, Clint Eastwood movies.

TARANTINO: Exactly. After that, it made a cottage industry out of Rome and Almeria, Spain. Sergio Corbucci did his film "Django" starring Franco Nero in 1966, and it became a smash all throughout Europe and in particular Asia and Latin America and not - it didn't play that well, it didn't play that much in America and was actually banned until the '90s in England because it's so violent.

In fact it's actually kind of an interesting story. You couldn't see "Django" ever in England. The closest you could ever come to see "Django" in England was in the movie "The Harder They Come" with Jimmy Cliff. When Jimmy Cliff's on the run, he actually goes to a theater and watches "Django."

GROSS: Really? I saw that film so long ago, I never would have remembered that, wow.

TARANTINO: Yeah, the couple of scenes that you see of "Django" in "The Harder They Come" is the closest that "Django" ever got to playing in England. But the thing is, the movie, you know, it kicked up the violence and the surrealism and the brutality of the spaghetti Westerns to a new level. And it became so popular that there really only was one kind of genuine official sequel that had Terence Hill playing the character. And Franco Rossetti, one of the screenwriters, wrote that script. And you could tell it's obviously supposed to be the same guy except maybe a little earlier. But all the other Django, which is there's about 40 of them, it's not the same character. They just called him Django just because the name became so popular.

And sometimes there's not even a character named Django in the movie, they just threw Django in the title because the word Django meant so much. So I'm proud to say that we are part - we are in the long line of healthy tradition of unrelated "Django" ripoffs.

(LAUGHTER)

GROSS: Well, you know, in my attempt to understand more about Django, I watched the beginning of two Django knockoffs because Shout Factory Records has just reissued four Django films, none of them the original Corbucci one. So I watched the first few minutes of "Django Kills Silently" and "Django's Cut-price Corpses." And I'll tell you, the first few minutes of each of those are really bad.

One of them is kind of like Hercules meets the Three Stooges.

(LAUGHTER)

GROSS: And, like, you can see, like, none of the punches are connecting, and the sound effects are really awful, and the dialogue's really - there's like fight after fight after fight before you know who any of the characters are.

(LAUGHTER)

TARANTINO: Well, you know, one thing that was actually funny is Franco Nero, from that point in time after "Django" through the '60s and all through the '70s, him and Alain Delon were like the two most popular leading men in Europe at that time. But the thing that was so funny was in particular in Germany, the "Django" movie was so popular that any movie that Franco Nero did was retitled Django something in Germany.

(LAUGHTER)

TARANTINO: He did a whole series of cop movies directed by Enzo G. Castellari, the guy who directed the original "Inglourious Basterds," including one called "High Crime," which was sort of their "French Connection" and started a whole line of what they call policia(ph) movies in Italy. Well, but in Germany it was called "Django the Cop."

GROSS: So in your Django movie, "Django Unchained," Jamie Foxx is a slave who is freed during the course of the movie, and his name is Django. And the kind of catchphrase, the trademark phrase from the movie is somebody asks him his name, and he says Django: the D is silent.

TARANTINO: Right.

GROSS: That's great. So can you talk a little bit about coming up with that line? I doubt that line is in the original "Django."

TARANTINO: No, it's not. It was actually simply the fact that it seems like I thought everyone would know how to say the name Django, even if it wasn't from the spaghetti Westerns, at least from Django Reinhardt you would know how to say it. And people would read the script: Oh, "D-jango Unchained," OK.

(LAUGHTER)

TARANTINO: And people would say it all the time. Frankly, I considered it an intelligence test. If you say D-jango you're definitely going down in my book. Where that actually came from was I came up with a cool bit because actually Franco Nero is in the movie, and it's a sequence where we actually had the two Djangos in the same frame, both Jamie Foxx and Franco Nero.

And so I have Franco look at him, look him up and down, ask him his name. Jamie says Django. Can you spell it? And then he spells the whole thing, and then after he gets through spelling it, I go - I had him say the D is silent. And then Nero looks at him and says: I know.

(LAUGHTER)

TARANTINO: A little meta movie moment.

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Quentin Tarantino, and we're talking about his new movie "Django Unchained." "Django Unchained" is a revenge fantasy from the point of view of a freed slave. And so you're taking on slavery as an issue while paying homage to the spaghetti Westerns, the Django spaghetti Western.

And it's - I don't know, it's two types of movies that may or may not work very easily together. So what were the parts of those two genres, you know, like bounty hunter meets slavery, that you had trouble fitting together? And what worked that was easy to fit together?

TARANTINO: I don't think I had - you know, for me, at least as far as I was concerned, I didn't have any trouble fitting them together. I mean, there's kind of two points in that, I think. One, I wanted to tell a Western story, and then two, I wanted to deal with America in the antebellum South during slavery times and show you America at that time and give a kind of unblinking look at it.

But, you know, when - there hasn't been that many slave narratives in the last, you know, 40 years of cinema, and usually when there are they're usually done on television, and for the most part, most of these TV movies or specials that come out are kind of what I call - they're historical movies, like history with a capital H, basically this happened, then this happened, then that happened, then this happened.

And that can be fine, well enough, but for the most part they hold - they keep you at arm's length dramatically because also there is this kind of level of good taste that they're trying to deal with about the history of the subject, and frankly oftentimes they just feel like dusty textbooks just barely dramatized.

Then there's other kinds of movies that have dealt with slavery in America, something like "Goodbye Uncle Tom" or "Mandingo" or "Drum." Now actually, I actually think those movies get far, far closer to the truth. Having said that, the sensationalistic aspect and the almost exploitationistic aspect of the films can't be ignored, even though like I said I think they actually cut closer to the truth and cut closer to the bone.

So what I wanted to do is I didn't want to go in either one of those directions. I wanted to tell the story as a genre movie, as an exciting adventure. And in this case, I wanted to do an exciting Western tale, an almost odyssey voyage that Django goes on, a journey to free his wife from the clutches of an evil empire but use antebellum South slavery as a backdrop for that adventure.

And the whole idea of bringing up the bounty hunting thing, actually, I thought ended up working kind of brilliantly for what I was trying to tell because I can't believe no one ever brought it up before. But Schultz brings it up. You know, in slavery you have people selling human lives for cash. In the bounty hunting laws of the day, you have people selling corpses for cash.

GROSS: My guest is Quentin Tarantino. We're talking about his new film "Django Unchained." More after a break; this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Quentin Tarantino, and his new movie is "Django Unchained." Is it a coincidence, is it any coincidence that after taking on World War II and the Nazis in "Inglourious Basterds," you set your new movie in the time of American slavery, so you've taken two absolutely horrible chapters in history, whereas, you know, your other films are contemporary, you know, set it contemporary times?

So what made you want to take on just like, two just abhorrent chapters of history?

TARANTINO: Because I actually thought they would be really good stories. I've had both stories in my head for a while. It just took them a while to sit in the incubator until they were ready. And "Inglourious Basterds" popped out first, and then it really set the stage for "Django."

But I like the idea of telling these stories and taking stories that oftentimes, if played out in the way that they're normally played out, just end up becoming soul-deadening because you're just watching victimization all the time, and now you get a chance to put a spin on it and actually take a slave character, give him an heroic journey, make him heroic, make him give his payback and actually show this epic journey and give it the kind of folkloric tale that it deserves, the kind of, you know, grand opera stage it deserves.

GROSS: So there's a lot of violence in your movie. Slaves are being whipped and tortured, slaves forced to fight to the death like gladiators, lots of shooting and splatter. So what are your - how do I put this exactly? What are your limits for, like - what's your sensibility for how much splatter, how much violence, how much sadism feels like right, like it's part of the genre, like there's a certain, like, style to it that you're trying to express? And what's going to the point of, like, past where you want to go, to the point of, like, revulsion and exploitation to, you know, to a degree that's just - I don't want to use the word immoral but just, you know, bad?

TARANTINO: Well frankly, I mean, you know, what happened during slavery times is a thousand times worse than I show. So if I were to show it a thousand times worse, to me that wouldn't be exploitative; that would just be how it is. If you can't take it, you can't take it.

Now I didn't want - I wasn't trying to do a "Schindler's List" you-are-there-under-the-barbed-wire-of-Auschwitz kind of movie. I wanted the film to be more entertaining than that. Like I said, I wanted it to be an exciting adventure movie.

But there's two types of violences in this film: There's the brutal reality of the violence that slaves lived under, under the slavery laws, 245 years. And then there's the violence of Django's retribution. And that's movie violence, and that's fun, and that's cool, and that's really enjoyable. It's kind of what you're waiting for.

And you're - it's actually paying back the pain that you had to watch to get there. And so there are two different types of aesthetics going on. And I wanted the painful violence of the slavery sections to hurt and to be painful. Now here's the deal: I could handle a lot more than I put in this movie. I have a tolerance for viscera more than the average person. So I could have actually handled it a lot more.

And in - like as I was cutting the movie, earlier versions of it had more in there. But when I started watching it with - finally when I started showing it in front of audiences, I have a lot of different emotions I want you to kind of get to in the course of this movie. And one of the emotions I wanted you to get to at the end is cheering Django. I want you to cheer his triumphs at the end and, you know, be rooting for him and actually cheer.

And if you don't cheer at the end, I haven't done the job, I haven't pulled off the movie I was trying to pull off. I mean, it's very easy for me if I've failed or succeeded. If the audience cheers at the end, I've succeeded. If they don't cheer, or if it's a qualified cheer, maybe I haven't failed, but it was a qualified response, and this house didn't go with it as much as I thought they should have, as much as they were supposed to. So it's very clear choice of, you know, did I do it, did I not do it.

And when I watched with, you know, those rougher scenes, like the Mandingo scene or the dog scene or the castration scene, when they were rougher, I saw - I traumatized the audience too much. They were too traumatized, so their responses in all the other sections of the film were qualified by that trauma. So I pulled it back a little bit.

GROSS: Well, I think when you're watching the film, the audience isn't thinking like you're thinking because you're thinking, like, there's the reality violence, and then there's the fun genre violence.

TARANTINO: Oh, I think they are. I think they are. I totally think they are, yeah. Yeah, I totally think they are. One, there's the violence that's hard to watch, and there's the violence that's fun to watch. I think they're totally thinking that.

GROSS: So what was it like for you to be in the position of having people dress as slaves and then making them act like they were fighting to the death like a dog fight and dressing other people as slaves and having them get whipped? You know, it's - was that, say, a little awkward?

TARANTINO: Well, it wasn't awkward so much as it was, you know, it was painful. It was a little painful. I mean, when we actually started doing it, it was kind of - it was fine because we knew what we were doing, and everyone knew what we were doing. We're making a movie. Everyone knows what's going on.

You know, put a bunch of black folks dressed as slaves in a cotton field, they're picking cotton, then there's a break, OK cut, and then, you know, you give them coconut water or something, or they're eating power bars. You know, so it's like you're making a movie. You know what time it is.

But after I wrote the script, thinking about it, it was something that I was - frankly had trepidation about doing. You know, it's one thing to write on a piece of paper 100 slaves are marched through the mud wearing metal collars and in chains and with metal masks like mad dogs, being moved around by white people on horses and with shotguns.

And it's another thing to actually have 100 black folks get dressed in, you know, in these clothes and marched through the mud that way, in this slave auction town that you've built or putting them in the background, planting a cotton field and putting them in the field and having them work under a broiling sun. And I had a little trepidation about it and was actually trying to think of some way that maybe I could escape the pain of asking Americans to do that.

And, you know, I thought at one point of maybe I could shoot it in the West Indies, those sections, or maybe shoot it in Brazil or something because, you know, they have their own - they have their own history, but it wouldn't be an American history. So there would be this once-removed quality to it.

And then it was funny,, I actually went out, after I finished the script, I went out with Sidney Poitier for dinner and was telling him about my story and then telling him about my trepidation and my little plan of how I was going to get past it. And he said, he goes: Quentin, I don't think you should do that. I think basically - what you're just telling me is you're a little afraid of your own movie, and you just need to get over that.

If you're going to tell this story, you need to not be afraid of it. You need to do it. Everyone gets it. Everyone knows what's going on. We're making a movie. They get it. Just treat everybody with the right kind of compassion, as I know you will, and you have nothing to be worried about.

GROSS: Quentin Tarantino will be back in the second half of the show. His new film is "Django Unchained." Here's one of the songs from the soundtrack that actually comes from the original 1966 movie "Django." I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright National Public Radio.