Pilar Savone, one of the three
producers of Django Unchained (review here), looks round at what used to be an
empty field round the back of the Evergreen Plantation, Louisiana. A
red sandy trail has been carved into ground once crossed 180 years
ago by slave workers in their multitudes as they reaped the
sugar-cane crop, leading up to the front porch of a huge, white
19th-century mansion house – the work of Oscar-nominated production
designer J Michael Riva, who, tragically, won't live to see the movie
he's been so instrumental in creating.
To one side, with a cluster of crew and
actors and a single 35mm camera, Quentin Tarantino is hard at work.
It's a sunny spring day; slightly cloudy, with a cool but gentle
breeze – a moment of calm in a film that has been on the road since
November 2011, plagued by rain, snow, not enough snow, rain, more
rain and, just when they thought it had stopped, even more rain.
A thought hits Savone like a lightning
bolt. “Empire magazine should be here,” she decides.
Two days later, after a lot of
last-minute flight arrangements, Empire is indeed there, joining
Savone on the porch of what turns out to be Candie Land, the estate
owned by Calvin Candie, a Southern cotton farmer, played by Leonardo
DiCaprio, who buys and sells African slaves – Mandingos – to
watch them fight. The scene being shot is an intense one, and will
take seven days in all, just one of many in a film that promises to
dwarf even the director's last film, Inglourious Basterds, for scale.
“It's big,” says Savone, “and
when you see the footage you'll know that it is.”
That footage, shown in Cannes and Comic
Con, is the eight minutes of action, violence and juicy black comedy
that was boiled down for the film's explosive trailer. It is also
Tarantino's most ambitious work to date, with sweeping vistas and
dozens of extras, many on horseback. No wonder this film took seven
months of pre-production after the director signed off on the script
last April.
“The funny thing,” she says, “is
that Quentin hates prepping. He hates it. We can't get him in the
office for anything. So the fact that we were doing all this prepping
– and we also had to wait for our DoP Bob Richardson, who was on
World War Z – drove him crazy. He was like, 'I just wanna shoot...'
Because he's ready, y'know? He's worked with the same crew so
many times they can kind of read his mind, but this movie needed
prep. I mean, it's a period piece, it's a lot of locations, it's a
lot of art department, so it needed his time and attention. Which was
hard for him.”
Before you start feeling too sorry for
the director, most of this hardship he brought upon himself. For the
film's opening sequence – seen in the trailer – in which the
title character Django (Jamie Foxx) is freed by bounty hunter Dr King
Schultz (Christoph Waltz), Tarantino wanted to see “real breath”,
stressing, “None of that CGI bullshit”. “We had to go to Lone
Pine,” recalls Savone, “about three hours north of LA.” Then
Tarantino wanted snow, which he uses in the film's opening third as
an homage to Sergio Corbucci's brilliant, bleak, Utah-set Western The
Great Silence. This took them to Jackson, Wyoming, where, says
Savone, “It was minus eight.”
And now we're here, in NOLA, and the
production has taken on a near zen-like calm. David Bowie's soulful
version of All The Young Dudes fills the air during a momentary lull,
courtesy of soundman and DJ Mark Ulano.
“While we need to finish,” says
Savone, “and we need to get going, it's a sensitive subject, and
Quentin's taking his time, as are the actors. Nothing has been
rushed. This is his epic western.”
We meet Tarantino over lunch, where he
sits at a long table, eating with the others. He's recounting how he
almost – almost – asked his camera operator to “go down”
on one of his actors. Had he finished the sentence, he would have
made Quote Of The Day on the next day's call sheet to the cast and
crew. “Sexual subtext usually makes it,” he grins. “but
homosexual subtext always makes it.”
The scene being shot today is
complicated and requires a lot of coverage. Django and Schultz, on
the trail of Django's missing wife Broomhilde (Kerry Washington) have
arrived at Candie Land just as a convoy of Mandingos has arrived, to
be inspected by Candie's right-hand man, Billy Crash (Walton
Goggins). The scene is tense but made surreal by the constant
removal, at regular intervals, of the horses, to be replaced by
bright orange step-ladders. Sometimes the scene requires Waltz and
Foxx, sometimes it simply requires their stand-ins. But even this is
strange, since Foxx's stand-in – Clay Fontenot, who's also the
stunt guy in the Iron Man suit when RDJ isn't – is a dead ringer.
Billy Crash is taking sadistic pleasure
in his work, shooting defenceless men in the stomach. Django,
meanwhile, is watching and waiting. “Y'see,” Foxx explains
between takes, “Django's at a point here where he's acting like
he's in the Mandingo business. So he's acting as if these Mandingos
being killed doesn't affect him – but it affects him deeply. The
one thing he really wants to do is get to his wife. But what he's
doing right now is putting marks by people's names, cos he's coming
back to get 'em. So Django's clocking... At the same time keeping, as
King's partner, calm.”
“'Are we good?'” he asks himself.
“'Yeah, we good.'”
The darkness of the scene is alleviated
by something that's become a tradition now on Tarantino's films. The
countdown starts at 598, then 599. And then, just as soon as the
600th roll of film is used, there is, of all things, a party. Wearing
curly moustaches and sombreros, half a dozen members of the crew
shake up seriously strong margaritas and hand out nachos and
guacamole. We chink glasses with slaves, maids, Tarantino himself,
and note that everyone seems to be saying the very British “Cheers!”.
DiCaprio takes a glass and watches with amusement from the sidelines.
Foxx admits that this has taken some
getting used to, “When Quentin did the shots for the first time, I
was like, 'What are you doing?' He said, 'We're doing shots.' I
said, 'Shots?! What kind of set is this?' And he came over to me and
he was like, Y'know what kind of set it is? It's this kind of set
– take a drink, motherfucker!”
He laughs. “Y'know, working on
something like this, you need that release.”
Indeed, everyone on the production is
aware that the film is treading a fine line. “It's not just a
history lesson,” says producer Stacy Sher, who met Tarantino just
after Reservoir Dogs and produced the follow-up, Pulp Fiction. “It's
a western. It's a spaghetti western, it's a revenge movie, it's a
love story, and it's a rescuing-the-princess movie. It's got the feel
of an old-fashioned epic, mashed up in an entertaining way, so it's
not an eat-your-mushy peas issue movie.
“But,” she adds soberly, “it's
definitely making people look at things they don't wanna look at.
When you shoot in the slave quarters here, it is no different than
what it's like to make a Holocaust movie if you're shooting in a
concentration camp. You can feel it.”
At this point, we are taken to meet
Kerry Washington, who is being made up for the “Martini shot”,
the last set-up of the day. She's beautiful, but, as we speak, a
series of scars – the cruel reminders of a brutal lashing – are
being applied to her back. Made somewhat woozy by the sun, jetlag and
the margaritas, Empire absent-mindedly shoves aside a rocking chair
to get closer. It is Calvin Candie's rocking chair, crucial to the
scene, but if anyone notices, they stay quiet.
Washington tells us that getting this
role literally reduced her to tears. “When Quentin called me to
offer me the role,” she says, “I cried. “Which I've never done
with a director before.”
Why? “I don't know. I'm still
figuring it out. But I'm really honoured. I think that was part of
it.”
She turns to the make-up artists
talking quietly as they work behind her. “You guys don't have to
whisper!”
“Quentin's amazing,” she sighs.
“He's awesome. He's the real deal. To have his level of talent, and
to also be so respectful and compassionate… It's fantastic. It's
such a difficult experience in some levels, but he makes it so
fulfilling, artistically and creatively. Even just by writing this
script.”
What does she mean by that? “Because
there are so many actors and actresses who have come before us who
have gone into this place and this time – but they went into it to
portray victims, or people who who were disempowered, or
dejected and rejected. But we get to go into this world to
portray heroism and winning and liberation. So, just to give us the
opportunity not just to go into this period but to be the heroes of
our own story – it's not unlike Inglourious Basterds in that way,
to go into a difficult period and KILL the bad guys! It's the same
story, in some ways.”
Washington seems surprisingly chipper,
under the circumstances, but appearances are deceptive,
“There's nothing easy about this
character at all,” she says. “It's not an easy thing to come to
work and exist in a world where you're not considered fully human.
The constitution at this time says you're three-fifths of a human
being, so to constantly put yourself in that reality is straining.”
So how is Tarantino getting a decent
performance out of his cast without bringing them down? “Well, we
have margaritas and nachos!” She laughs. “No, that's our job as
actors. You have to take care of yourself. You have to go to the
edge, but also surround yourself with support. But I've been teasing
him that I'm going to be sending him my extra therapy bills. There
are several of those!”
The man who can claim most of the
credit for what we're seeing here is producer Reginald Hudlin, one of
the Hudlin brothers and director of 1990 rap film House Party. He and
Tarantino first met around Jackie Brown time, when his brother
Warrington was dating the film's star, Pam Grier, but it was a
conversation about Steven Spielberg's 1997 slave drama that got
things going.
“I was at an Oscar party the
Weinsteins were throwing at the Beverly Hills Hotel,” Hudlin
recalls, “and Quentin walked up to me and said, 'I heard you didn't
like Amistad.' I was quite shocked. I said, How did you know that?
And I felt awkward, because I'm a huge fan of Spielberg. Quentin
said, 'Why not?' I said, 'Well, because it was five minutes of slave
revolt and 85 minutes of trial – and I wanna see the reverse. So I
told Quentin I'd rather see Fred Williamson in the Legend Of Nigger
Charley. Now, I knew referencing a 70s blaxploitation movie would
end the argument, and sure enough, Quentin was like, 'I have no
response to that.'”
He laughs. “It's really tough to
win one with him, but that was pretty decisive. Little did I know
that a wheel was turning in his head.”
Tarantino, inevitably, had the final
say. Last April, at what's known as “Publishing Day”, at 2am in
the presence of The RZA from the Wu-Tang Clan and Warren Beatty,
Tarantino handed him his latest script: Django Unchained. “You
planted the seed,” he said. “This is the tree.”
Meanwhile, in the months prior to
finishing his epic slave revenge drama, Tarantino had also been
drip-feeding pages of Dr King Schultz to his Basterds star Waltz, in
batches of ten or 20. “As I got it in portions,” says Waltz,
“only much later did I read the script in one go, once it was
finished and proof-read and sanctioned, so to say. So I grew into the
story as the story grew.”
What can he say about it? “You know,
it's grand opera, really,” he decides. “It's not a realistic,
naturalistic cinema. It is grand opera on the screen. And of course
you need more blood there. But Quentin's blood is redder than real
blood. That's part of the fun, part of the exhilaration and part of
the trip you go on, either working with him or watching his movies.
Suspension of disbelief is on a higher level in his movies. It's
really true: Quentin's blood is redder. So the brutality and
language is all part of the piece. There's nothing tame about
Quentin's movies. Nothing. It's full force. Once the rocket takes off
from Cape Canaveral, there is no calling it back.”
When we finally get to speak, Tarantino
is somewhat distracted, and, unusually, his answers come in a clipped
but friendly staccato flow. Most of all, it seems strange, after all
these, years to see him working flat-out in the genre he's always
loved but never tried. “Yeah, exactly,” he grins. “Walter Hill
said that when he was doing an interview for The Long Riders. He
said, 'Now I can stop disguising it. Now I'm actually, officially,
making a western.'”
Django Unchained will, he assures us,
is a “rough, violent action movie”. He laughs – as if it would
be anything else. “It has the Sergio Corbucci feeling, to me. He
made pretty much the most violent westerns ever made before Peckinpah
did The Wild Bunch. I think ours is probably the most violent western
since The Wild Bunch. Well, The Wild Bunch and Soldier Blue.”
Despite the scope and scale of the
film, he claims he did next to no research for it. “Very little,”
he says. “I wanted it to be a complete work of imagination. I mean,
I already knew a lot – if I'm interested enough to write a story
about something, then…”
He shrugs. “I've been very
knowledgeable about this subject my whole life, because it's
something that's always been a fascination to me – that this ever
happened, the whole situation of it and how it's affected our lives
to this day. So it's a subject I'm short of an expert on any ol' way,
but when it came time to writing the story I did no research.
Whatsoever. I wanted it to be a complete work of imagination. I asked
myself the questions and found the answers inside.”
Today's scene is a transitional point
in the movie. Having been taken under the wing of bounty hunter
Schultz, Django is about to break his silence. Tarantino bristles at
the suggestion that so far, the former slave has been a little
passive.
“I don't see him as passive,” he
says, “he just has to go through his mentorship. It's like Nevada
Smith being taught by Brian Keith, Luke Skywalker being taught by
Yoda, every kung fu movie you ever see where, y'know, Jackie Chan
meets the old Tsai Min Yuen master who teaches him, then he goes
though his training and he's ready to go. The first 40 minutes is the
origin part.”
Even so, he's pretty taciturn...
“Oh yeah,” says Tarantino, “but
spaghetti western heroes are not talkative. He becomes talkative at
the end, when you realise how much he's learned from Schultz. But
that's just the western hero, it's the man of few words. Where
Schultz is a man of many words.”
Tarantino confirms that Schultz was
tailored for Waltz, adding that,“he delivers my dialogue so well
that it's actually hard not to write for him now. Sam Jackson's
the same way – for a long time, it was hard not to write in
Sam's voice.”
Jackson isn't on set today but he's
around in New Orleans, and the coming Sunday will see him put on a
special pre-release screening of The Avengers for the cast and crew.
It's a generous gesture, but nothing at all to do with the fact that
his character, Stephen – Calvin Candie's right-hand man – is the
most repulsive villain Tarantino has ever created. A limping,
Dickensian grotesque, Stephen is the power behind the throne, a
position that's especially threatened when Django arrives. Jackson's
reaction when he read the often incendiary script was simple. “Wow!”
he says. “That's pretty much it. I was kinda looking forward to
being the most despicable negro in cinematic history.”
Really? “Stephen may not be likeable
to some people, but, like I told Quentin and everybody else around
the set. he will have a lot of fans. You can't approach a character
as being likeable, you gotta approach him as who he is, what he does,
how he lives his life. Stephen grew up on this plantation and he's
privileged, pretty much, to be on the inside and not outside working.
His father did the same job before him, being the eyes and ears of
the master, so Stephen learned the job from him. I mean, there are a
lot of things he does. He pretty much feels like he runs and owns
that plantation whenever Calvin Candie's not there. He's the head
guy. He knows where all the skeletons are buried. And he rules
through intimidation.
“Stephen,” he smiles, “has a lot
of secrets.”
Later that day, the scene resumes, but
this time it goes a little differently. Walton Goggins bounds down
the steps to cast his eye over the new batch of Mandingos but this
time something new comes out of his mouth, something not in the
script. He looks up and sees Tarantino and Robert Richardson behind
the camera, looks to his left and there's Foxx and Waltz, turns 180
degrees and there's DiCaprio. “I'm in a fucking Tarantino movie,”
he yells, “and I'm buggin' out…!”
Though it takes him a while to
decompress, it doesn't take him long to see the funny side. “Y'know,”
he says later, “all of a sudden it just hit me. Quentin yelled
action, and… It just hit me like a ton of bricks. I got really
emotional.”
As well he might, since Billy Crash
could make him the breakout star of this movie, a bad, mean son of a
bitch – and we know how well Tarantino writes those characters.
“He is a despicable human being,” says the actor. “The
worst kind: the enforcer of the plantation system that subjugated and
violently oppressed an entire race of people in our country.” But,
adds Goggins, there's a catch. “Billy's a cool fuckin' guy,” he
continues. “And viewers are going to be conflicted, as they were
with Christoph in Inglourious Bastards. I mean, as awful a human
being as he was, Hans Landa was so interesting to watch.” He
laughs. “Really interesting to watch.”
Goggins doesn't know this yet, but if
Tarantino keeps to his schedule, there won't be too many chances for
any other actors to get the same break: the director plans to quit
directing at the age of 60, in 11 years time. It's not often, Empire
says, that we hear of a director prophesying their own decline, when,
on current form, there's not real sign of it.
“Oh, no,” Tarantino insists. “I'm
gonna stop before the decline. That's the thing.”
It's the end of the day now, and
Tarantino is choosing tomorrow's Quote Of The Day, from a bunch that
range from the innocently risqué to the unwittingly filthy.
“I don't wanna fuck up my
filmography.” he says. “I wish so many directors would've stopped
when they were good. One bad movie fucks up your filmography – your
grade point average is gone, it is officially fucked up. And
then, here's the thing, they keep on making movies, keep fucking
their average down even further and even further. I don't want that.
I'm all about my filmography – that is the most important
thing. I want to go out with 100 out of 100, at the very least 95.”
Is there a director that's got that 100
average?
“Well, Sergio Leone. He went out
great. He went out fuckin' awesome. He didn't piss his career away by
making movies he shouldn't've. But, y'know, they're like old boxers.
They all think it's gonna last forever, they all think that have one
more fight in them. But they don't care about…” He sighs.
“They're not artists, and they don't come from the same place I'm
coming from. They're journeymen, they're workers. To me, it's all
about the filmography. What I want is, ten years from, 20 years from
now, 30 years from now, some 12 year-old kid discovers my movies,
thinks I'm a groovy dude. And I want him to be able to pick any one of them, any one of them at all, and it's gonna burn with the
same fire as all of them did. Like Howard Hawks when you watch Rio
Lobo: aw fuck, all right!!! You see a Hitchcock movie and you're
like, Aw, great! But you don't know what the next one is, so you
watch Topaz by mistake – oh fuck!”
He pauses, thinking of his new film.
His eighth. His epic. His masterpiece?
“I don't want any Topazes,” he
snorts. “I don't want any of that shit.”
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