DJANGO UNCHAINED (Comic-Con)

• DJANGO UNCHAINED (Comic-Con)

There’s one more week of shooting on Django, and they just did scenes with Jonah Hill as a member of the Regulators (the pre-Civil War version of the KKK).

Kerry Washington

Quentin Tarantino said it turned into one of the funniest scenes he’s ever done, which he says is up there with the name-colors conversation in Reservoir Dogs.

There is one character in the movie that ties into the larger Tarantino-verse which he’s keeping a surprise, but he says Kerry Washington‘s character Brunhilde von Shaft is, in his mind, an ancestor of John Shaft (That’s Right, Tarantino suggest that Django is a prequel to SHAFT).

The panel was moderated by Anthony Breznican from Entertainment Weekly, who said he needed a whole new level of grandiloquent profanity to describe Django, a “twisted, bloody fairy tale,” before introducing Jamie Foxx, Walton Goggins, Don Johnson, Christoph Waltz, Washington, and Tarantino.

Asked about historical accuracy (i.e. will there be anything like killing Hitler,) Tarantino said there was no need, “the pre-Civil War South can’t be depicted as any scarier or more surreal than it was in real life. Django begins the story as an anonymous slave on a chain gang and becomes a cowboy and hero at the end.”

Quentin Tarantino

Foxx drew on experiences growing up in Texas, where he said he had “certain parallel experiences” to Django.

Waltz said he loved that Italians had taken the American genre of the western and made spaghetti westerns, and now American director Tarantino is appropriating their take on that genre. His character, a dentist named Dr. King Schulz, “doesn’t care about other white men.” He doesn’t “rescue” Django, but needs him.

Tarantino said he felt most westerns bend over backwards not to mention slavery, and placing western tropes in the antebellum South with a black character made it fresh for him.

Goggins’ character was described as the kind of person Basil Rathbone used to play in swashbucklers, the “schemer who has the king’s ear.” Johnson got a big laugh when he said he worked on his Big Daddy accent by studying Foghorn Leghorn. It turns out Sacha Baron Cohen isn’t in the movie after all, but Quentin still wants to work with him on something. Answering the inevitable fan question, Tarantino said he has no idea what his next movie will be.

Django Unchained releases on December 25^th.