When did you first get the idea for the film?

I’ve been working for the last couple of years on a book on different filmmakers. I’m not in any hurry to finish it, it’s one of those things I do for pleasure. And I was writing a big, big piece that turned into a mammoth piece on Sergio Corbucci (director of the 1966 Django). I started re-watching his work and really trying to break down what it is he did. And I realised that actually all the great Western directors have their version of the West. You know, there’s (Sam) Peckinpah’s West, there’s Anthony Mann’s West … And then there’s Corbucci’s West — the most brutal, the most violent and the most pitiless West out there.

I go, ‘Okay, if I want to create this kind of brutal, pitiless surrealism, but backed by gallows humour, what would the equivalent of that be in America?’ Being a black man in the antebellum south would be the American equivalent of that. And so then the idea to do a spaghetti Western, but placed in the south before the Civil War, well, I’ve never seen that before. I thought that could be really interesting.

It kind of all came about, this eureka idea, when I was in Japan doing press on Inglourious Basterds. I just sat down and ended up writing the first scene of the movie. And once I wrote it, I knew, ‘Okay, this is my next movie’.

I didn’t know what to expect, but the characters of Schultz (Christoph Waltz) and Django (Jamie Foxx) just blossomed. I knew I was sunk (laughs)... I couldn’t stop until I finished.

How hard was it to find your Django?

I met with about six different leading men to talk about Django. They all had different things about them that were interesting. But Jamie kind of just won me over, pretty much rightaway. He was the one I enjoyed talking about the script with the most. I think he got the script the most. He’s from Texas, so he gets the Western idea. We’re a similar age, so he grew up watching all the same Western shows that I did. And he’s just a cowboy. Of all those guys, he was the cowboy... I remember thinking if in the ’60s, back when every handsome young leading man in America had their own Western on TV, that if they cast blacks in Westerns like that in the ’60s, Jamie would have had his own show. Well, that was good enough for me.

Quentin Tarantino on the sets of Django Unchained

His pairing with Christoph Waltz is amazing. Did you do a screen-test with them?

No, I wrote it for Christoph so it was always going to be him, and then I found Jamie. So it was just about integrating them during rehearsal. People either like each other or they don’t. We did a scene in the rehearsal room once and — boom — that was it. When they did this scene in the rehearsal room, it just clicked. It was everything I wanted it to be and they felt it [too]… I just showed the first hour of the movie to the producers and everybody was just saying how they love Django and Schultz together. In its own way, it’s its own love story.

Tell us about Leonardo DiCaprio.

He’s never played a character like this before. Ever. What happened was he had read the script and got in touch with me. He wanted to talk to me about playing Calvin Candie. He’s actually my neighbour, so I went down to his house and we talked about it. Now, the character that I originally wrote was older than Leo. I never made it specific how old he was, but you read it and you get the impression that he’s probably older than Leo. So he was sitting there talking to me about it. He loved the character. He’s been as fascinated and intrigued with this period of history… and he’s been wanting to work with me for a long time. So I walked away and started thinking about it, about how to twist it to make it work in my mind that he would be younger. And I fell in love with what I came up with… a giant plantation owner has 300 slaves, not to mention 75 poor white workers, all living and working on his grounds — he’s a king.

We always see the theme of revenge in your movies. What’s the attraction for you?

It’s almost too easy to say on this film; there are definitely revenge elements about it. But it’s actually a hero’s journey. He’s kind of going into the mouth of hell to face the devil to save his woman. So it’s more of a hero’s journey than revenge, but, nevertheless, to see the slave take the whip from the master and turn it on him is an exciting prospect.

In real life, anytime I’ve wished somebody ill about anything, or wished somebody got their comeuppance about something and it happened, it was never a good thing. I was never happy about it. Actually it made me feel worse. Hattori Hanzo in Kill Bill says it very well. He says, “Revenge is a forest. It’s easy to lose your way in and it’s easy to get lost while you’re in there.” But as far as an emotion to engage an audience with, I think it’s magnificent.

What was the biggest challenge making Django Unchained?

Anytime you’re going to try to make an epic and you’re really going for a big canvas and a big look, it’s an endurance test. That’s the biggest challenge of making a movie like this.

Jamie Foxx has said that you decided to change the ending while you were filming. Why did you decide to change it?

You know, he’s making a little bigger deal out of that than it really is (laughs). I mean, I’m always kind of tweaking and changing things all along. The ending of Kill Bill is very different from the script we all started with and actually the same thing for Inglourious Basterds. He’s just not used to it (laughs). My scripts are very, very literary. I write them in script form, but they’re really pretty much books and they’re far too much to ever shoot straight as a movie. It’s a silly way to do it, alright. It can be a pain in the ass. But it’s the way I do it now and I really like it… I write these big pieces and they work as a piece of literature. And then I need to find my movie inside of that. It usually affects the endings the most, because by the time I’ve gotten to the end of this process it’s a different proposition than when I was just writing. Now I know what I’ve shot. I know what I’ve got. Now I know what I need to wrap it up. It’s hard. But I think it’s a very creative way to make a movie, to just constantly keep shaping the material as you go on.

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