So it looks like Tarantino’s finished his next script.
It was reported awhile back that he was going to tackle a Spaghetti Western next, and since then a few things have bubbled up in the form of names (Christoph Waltz, Keith Carradine, Franco Nero?) and at one point Uma Thurman had referred to it as “a Southern,” but that was really all there was as QT was still writing it. But now it’s done and the title page of that script has shown up on the internet via the twitter feed of @Agent Trainee (I saw it last night on SlashFilm’s Facebook Feed but at this point practically every film site on the net could be cited as a source).
Django Unchained. Django is a fairly popular character and even if you’ve never seen or heard of the film, chances are you’re aware of the name. And if you haven’t seen Sergio Corbucci’s 1966 spaghetti western (I haven’t seen it top to bottom but I’ve seen enough pieces of it to know it’s amazing) about a coffin-dragging gunslinger who takes on everybody from the KKK to Mexican bandits, it’s on Instant, if that’s an option for you.
At any rate, when this turned up last night and swept the internet, there was the understandable cautious optimism: “Sure, it sounds awesome and sure it’s reminiscent of the hand-written cover page for Basterds, but…is it real?”
Turns out the answer is yes. Yes indeed it is. SlashFilm reports (via Indiewire), that QT’s agency has confirmed the title. And not only THAT but Anne Thompson over at Indiewire has also claimed to have read the script and describes it thusly (spoiler warning?):
Django is a freed slave, who, under the tutelage of a German bounty hunter (played by Christopher Waltz the evil Nazi officer in Inglorious Basterds) becomes a bad-ass bounty hunter himself, and after assisting Waltz in taking down some bad guys for profit, is helped by Waltz in tracking down his slave wife and liberating her from an evil plantation owner. And that doesn’t even half begin to cover it! This film deals with racism as I’ve rarely seen it handled in a Hollywood film. While it’s 100 percent pure popcorn and revenge flick, it is pure genius in the way it takes on the evil slave owning south. Think of what he did with the Nazis in Inglorious and you’ll get a sense of what he’s doing with slave owners and slave overseers in this one.
And there ya go. Sounds amazing and more Christoph Waltz is always welcome and with QT having said this about the racism angle “I want to explore something that really hasn’t been done. I want to do movies that deal with America’s horrible past with slavery and stuff but do them like spaghetti westerns, not like big issue movies. I want to do them like they’re genre films, but they deal with everything that America has never dealt with because it’s ashamed of it, and other countries don’t really deal with because they don’t feel they have the right to” I think it’s fair to expect something amazing. As always, we’ll keep you posted.