It began Friday afternoon with the image to the right, which was tweeted and has since been removed by a Los Angeles agent going by the name of AgentTrainee on Twitter. The image proposed the title of Quentin Tarantino’s new, and previously untitled, spaghetti western was Django Unchained and showed he’d finished and delivered his last draft on Tuesday, April 16. The question was, however, was it real?
It turns out it was and is, as Anne Thompson confirmed with Tarantino’s agents and on top of that, the newly acquired indieWire blog Shadow and Act says they’ve read the script and offer the following synopsis.
I have not read the following text and have no idea how much of the story it spoils. So if you want to remain in the dark as to the plot, skip the following paragraph:
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.
The reason I held off on posting the story until now was because it had not yet been confirmed to be real and because I wanted to watch one of the films said to have inspired Tarantino’s script, the 1966 Sergio Corbucci feature Django (trailer to the right) starring Franco Nero as the title character, a coffin-dragging gunman who finds himself in the middle of a war between a bunch of vigilantes resembling the Ku Klux Klan and a group of Mexican bandits. Along with Waltz, Nero is expected to be in the film and thankfully Django was available in HD on NetFlix Instant Play and served as my Saturday morning matinee.
Tarantino.info also says the film was inspired by Takashi Miike’s Sukiyaki Western Django in which Tarantino had a small role.
I’ve now seen both films and unfortunately Sukiyaki isn’t burned in my memory, though reading through my review from 2008 it would appear I wasn’t entirely impressed. I will have to give it a second look though, but probably not before we get closer to the Django Unchained release date so I can walk in with some reference points to go from.
According to Mike Fleming at Deadline the film is on the fast track with the Weinstein Co. already on board to distribute domestically with production expected to begin later this year. Outside of Waltz and Nero, two rumored cast members include Keith Carradine and Treat Williams. There’s no word yet on whether Nero, Carradine or Williams are confirmed as Waltz appears to be the only cast member currently attached.
Here’s a clean look at the script cover page via Tarantino.info.
