Quentin Tarantino Wants You To Feel The Inhumanity Of Slavery In 'Django Unchained'

Quentin Tarantino wants you to know that if his depiction of slavery in Django Unchained disturbs you, the reality was much grislier.  "I'm here to tell you, that however bad things get in the movie, a lot worse shit happened," the filmmaker told a British Academy of Film and Television Arts crowd after screening his hotly anticipated spaghetti western in London.

Judging from a report in London's Guardian newspaper,  Tarantino intends Django Unchained to be a visceral, in-your-face depiction of slavery in America.  "We all intellectually 'know' the brutality and inhumanity of slavery, but after you do the research it's no longer intellectual any more, no longer just historical record — you feel it in your bones," Tarantino said. "It makes you angry, and you want to do something."

As was the case with Tarantino's Nazi revenge fantasy, Inglourious Basterds, the title character of Django Unchained -- who's played by Jamie Foxx -- gets to exact a great deal of cinematic retribution against the movie's slave owners and their accomplices.

But Tarantino told the BAFTA crowd that his movie is about more than payback: "When slave narratives are done on film, they tend to be historical with a capital H, with an arms-length quality to them," he said. "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."

"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."

Of special interest to Tarantino was the southern aristocracy which he called "an absurd, grotesque parody of European aristocracy."

From that same Q&A session, the website Bleeding Cool is reporting that Tarantino told the audience "I could conceive maybe someday doing a 30′s gangster picture, or something like that."  He also said that he could do "another Western, actually."

[The Guardian, Bleeding Cool]

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