Django Unchained set visit, April 2012

Terrible things are happening at the Evergreen Plantation, just an hour or so's drive from Louis Armstrong airport, New Orleans. It's a beautiful April afternoon – there's a slight breeze with some occasional cloud cover – and a huge, stately colonial home has been built in a sprawling green field. It has colonnades, a vast porch and there's an impressive dusty ride-up that stretches right back through the crops. But what it doesn't have is a rear view; from behind, the house is a haphazard collage of hardboard swatches, with thick bundles of cables that lead to vans and generators.

This is Candie Land, the estate owned by rich playboy Calvin Candie, who is being played by sadistic relish by a bearded Leonardo DiCaprio. Out front, a small shipment of slaves are getting a taste of life at their new home. Not that they'll ever see the inside of it: these shabbily-dressed African-Americans have been bought to fight, and to the far right of them is the wooden ring where they'll slug it out, most likely to the death. Inspecting them is their new owner's right-hand man, Billy Crash (the excellent Walt Goggins), who treats them with a shocking disrespect that goes way beyond racism. He doesn't treat them like dogs; in this world, slaves are beneath dogs, and the language coming out of his mouth is a jarring reminder of America's not so distant past.

Welcome to the set of, well, let's say it's the eighth film from Quentin Tarantino – and quite possibly the one with the potential to be his true masterpiece. Starring Jamie Foxx, Django Unchained allows Tarantino to make the epic western that's been lurking inside him for the last 20 years, although, true to perverse form, this is better described as a southern, dealing as it does with a slave (Foxx) who is befriended by liberal German bounty hunter Dr King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) and trained in the job of tracking fugitive criminals. But although he gets his freedom, the only thing Django really wants is his wife, Broomhilda (Kerry Russell). And nothing will stand in his way.

Tarantino is friendly but pensive when we meet him, in the thick of a 15-page scene that will take a week to shoot. The script is a doorstop – last count, 178 pages – but what's surprising is that this isn't, like 2009's Inglourious Basterds, a long-gestating project that he's been working on, in dribs and drabs, for years. “When I started writing Basterds again, it took about six months or so,” he notes. “But when I started writing Django Unchained, it was coming out even quicker than that, so I actually kinda slowed myself down a little bit.” He laughs. “I was like, 'This is coming out almost a little too quickly. Let me marinate in it a little bit more.' It was about six months in all from start to finish, but what was really, really quick was just me getting back to work so soon.”

The story came to him in Japan, on the very last leg of Basterds' worldwide promotional tour, where he wrote the very first scene, in which Schultz meets Django. “I did know,” says Tarantino, “that I wanted to do a movie where a slave became a bounty hunter, and I had the title for a long time, maybe about ten years. And doing a spaghetti western with that kind of vibe – I had that too. But then I just started writing, and Django presented himself to me. At the beginning he just was who he was – the sixth slave from the seventh on a chain gang line. He doesn't stand out. He's sixth from the seventh, that's all. But he just kept revealing himself to me more and more as I wrote.”

The impetus to start work so soon after Basterds, however, was not his own. We have the director of Donnie Darko to thank for that. “During all the Oscar stuff, I was going to a lot of Oscar parties,” he says, “and one night I was at a dinner party. Richard Kelly was there. I knew him a little bit, and it turns out he's a big fan of mine. And he cornered me in the kitchen, and he said, 'Look, Basterds was really terrific, but I gotta tell you something. I don't want you to do what I think you're gonna wanna do. Which is, now that you've done this, you're gonna wanna hibernate. Which you normally do. But I don't think you should. I think you're in a place right now. And now's not the time to hibernate. Now's the time to be in that place. Get working right away. You're in a special place, don't piss it away.'” He laughs. “And I believed him! I thought he was right.”

Though the film was originally intended as a Will Smith vehicle – unsurprisingly, the Fresh Prince decided not to get jiggy with it – the role went to Oscar winner and Ray star Jamie Foxx. Despite the harsh subject matter, the Texas-born actor jumped. “There's a difference when you do a movie that parallels your life,” he muses during a long pause between takes. “Doing Ray paralleled me – I went to college for a classical piano scholarship, so that movie was like a parallel of my life. For this, well, I own my own horse, and I grew up spinning guns, watching Bonanza and [C&W TV show] Hee Haw and westerns – because in Texas everybody did the same thing, whether you were black, white or Hispanic.” He pauses. “Y'know, when this movie's done, there's gonna be some hot-button issues raised, but, given my background, I think I'll be able to get certain points across.”

For him, the film isn't simply a political platform. “The one thing that stuck out to me in the script was that Django got married,” he explains. “Back at that time, to be married was taboo. You could be killed. They forced marriages back then – or they forced copulation – so the strongest buck would mate with the strongest black woman and they could get stronger slaves. They didn't want black people to be married. So Django being married was a big thing for me. This is a love story. And that's what fuels him. He's not trying to stop slavery. He's not trying to do anything but find the love of his life – which is like trying to find a needle in a world of haystacks.”

Not just haystacks – this is a world of foul, cruel, demeaning racism that greets Django at every turn. And that may once more get a rise from QT's former nemesis Spike Lee, who so objected to his use of the n-word in Pulp Fiction. Has Tarantino bitten off more than he can chew? As ever, he's in bullish mood; after all, in his corner he has a good deal of heavyweight African-America support, both from his old friend Samuel L Jackson and his Harvard-educated producer Reginald Hudlin.

“That's what I wanted to deal with, and that's the reason to do it,” he grins. “It's not to avoid it, it's absolutely to deal with that. Show how America was back then and how fucked up we were.”

He sounds determined now. “If I'm gonna do it,” he says, “I'm gonna do it.”


* This article appeared in the July issue of Empire magazine, US and UK edition. Both are still available on iPad via iTunes.