Tarantino fretted over 'Django Unchained'

Tarantino fretted over 'Django Unchained'

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Jamie Foxx plays a freed slave and Leonardo DiCaprio is a slave owner in 'Django Unchained.'

Even Quentin Tarantino thought he might have gone too far as he prepared to make “Django Unchained,” opening Tuesday.

He had written scenes of a chain gang of slaves en route to auction, slogging through the mud of Greenville, Miss. (“Like a black Auschwitz,” Tarantino termed it), and of more slaves picking cotton in a field under scorching sun with armed overseers guarding them on horseback.

But the idea of shooting those scenes in Louisiana, where most of “Django” was filmed, with black actors being asked to portray slaves, unnerved the usually self-confident director.

The prospect made him so edgy that he considered shooting those scenes in the West Indies or even Brazil, just so he wouldn’t be reenacting slave-related atrocities upon the landscape where such events actually happened.

So Tarantino turned to actor-director Sidney Poitier, the first African-American to win a Best Actor Oscar, for advice.

“Sidney basically told me to man up,” Tarantino says. “He said, ‘Quentin, for whatever reason, you’ve been inspired to make this film. You can’t be afraid of your own movie. You must treat them like actors, not property. If you do that, you’ll be fine.’ ”

By choosing to set his blend of spaghetti Western, 1970s revisionist action movie and blaxploitation film in pre-Civil War Mississippi, Tarantino wanted to confront the reality of slavery in a way Hollywood has avoided for virtually its entire history.

While there have been films â€" from “Gone With the Wind” to “Glory” â€" that have dealt with slaves and slavery, few of them have shown its brutality and inhumanity the way Tarantino does.

“It’s touchy, painful and uncomfortable,” the 49-year-old filmmaker says. “It makes people afraid â€" both black and white.

“Most countries have been forced to deal with the atrocities in their history â€" the world has made them. They’ve gotten through it.” But in the United States, he adds, the nation “didn’t even deal with our genocidal past with the American Indians until the 1960s.

“My goal with ‘Django’ was not to dramatize a history book or take it into a ‘Schindler’s List’ direction, though I think ‘Schindler’s List’ is a great film,” he says. “I wanted to tell an exciting adventure story with a 21st-century view.”

Having audaciously killed Adolf Hitler in the 2009 “Inglourious Basterds,” Tarantino goes completely hot-button with “Django Unchained.” He doesn’t just grab the live-wire issue of America’s shameful history of slavery. He does it in a movie that blends wildly violent action, adventure, romance, light comedy and more than 100 uses of the most verboten of racial epithets.

The film stars Jamie Foxx as a freed slave named Django, who sets off to free his wife (Kerry Washington) with the help of a courtly German bounty hunter (Oscar winner Christoph Waltz). But the wife is the property of a despicable plantation owner, Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), who trains male slaves â€" “mandingos” â€" for to-the-death, bare-knuckle boxing matches.

Notes Waltz, whose bounty hunter becomes Django’s partner and ally: “In a way, slavery is an unresolved issue, a topic that hasn’t been universally addressed. You would think that the victory of the North over the South would have ended the discussion, but it’s never been properly dealt with.”