Quentin Tarantino’s “next” film is an amorphous and constantly shifting entity that seems to only find its final form once the cameras start rolling, but that’s never stopped the internet from bandying about titles, plots, and cast lists as if they were confirmed plans. At various times the divisive director has been reportedly about to start work on The Vega Brothers with John Travolta and Michael Madsen, a follow-up to Inglourious Basterds that would place Brad Pitt and his merry men in the racist South of the 1950’s, a re-imagining of The Shadow, a third Kill Bill film, and even a remake of Russ Meyers’ Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
None of these have come to fruition (yet), but recent days have seen speculation that Tarantino’s upcoming film would be a Western set in the American South. Adding nothing concrete at all to the rumor was the apparent leak of the cover page to his just completed script for a film titled Django Unchained.
Yes please.
Per Thompson On Hollywood the title and partial cast have actually been confirmed by Tarantino’s agency. Christoph Waltz is set to star alongside some rumored names including Keith Carradine, Treat Williams, and Franco Nero. If Nero’s name sounds familiar, congratulations, you’ve probably watched some entertainingly bad movies from the sixties and seventies… one of which is the violent and odd spaghetti western, Django, about a mysterious gunslinger who arrives in a troubled town towing a casket with his horse.
As far as plot details go the only real lead seems to come from an anonymous source quoted over at Shadow and Act who claims the following:
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.”
Sounds a little sketchy in its effusive praise. The brief plot synopsis may be somewhat accurate or just wishful thinking, but the bits about racism as it’s rarely been seen in Hollywood and it being a “pure genius” look at slave owners? I loved Inglourious Basterds (best film of 2009 IMO), but it didn’t do anything particularly genius-worthy with the Nazis.
The film is due to start shooting by the end of the year so clearly more information will be flooding the internet tubes over the next several months. Until then the only things we can assume for sure is that movie will feature bloody deaths, smart dialogue, excessive use of the term “porch monkey”, and at least one scene stolen lifted liberated borrowed replicated homaged from a past spaghetti western.
The question now though, provided the description above is true… is who will play Django? Names already being mentioned include Djimon Hounsou, Don Cheadle, Idris Elba, and Chiwetel Ejiofor. All fine suggestions, but we’re going to toss in Anthony Mackie, Donald Glover, and Meryl Streep for good measure. Who do you think would make the ideal ass-kicking, vengeance seeking, German befriending ex-slave?
Initial source that tipped us off before we went looking to see who actually broke the story: Deadline Deadwood
Related Topics: Quentin Tarantino
