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'I wanted to break that history-under-glass aspect [of slavery]' …
Quentin Tarantino on the set of Django Unchained. Photograph:
Moviestore/Rex Features
Quentin Tarantino defended his decision to make slavery the
backdrop to his new revenge-western Django Unchained, saying that he
found the research he did on the subject "incredibly shocking" and that,
violent as his film may be, the reality was "far worse".
Tarantino was speaking to an audience of Bafta members and critics
after the first UK screening of Django Unchained on Thursday night,
which sees former slave Django Freeman (played by Jamie Foxx) team up
with a German bounty hunter (Christoph Waltz) to find and rescue his
enslaved wife.
"We all intellectually 'know' the brutality and inhumanity of slavery,"
Tarantino said, "but after you do the research it's no longer intellectual any
more, no longer just historical record – you feel it in your bones. It makes
you angry, and want to do something … I'm here to tell you, that however
bad things get in the movie, a lot worse shit actually happened."
"When slave narratives are done on film, they tend to be historical
with a capital H, with an arms-length quality to them. 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."
Tarantino said he was particularly concerned to target what he called
the southern aristocracy – the plantation-owing families represented in the
film by Leonardo DiCaprio's character Calvin Candie – calling them "an
absurd, grotesque parody of European aristocracy". "I did a lot of research