The Star Online: Entertainment: Movies
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| Posted: 10 Mar 2013 12:13 AM PST Quentin Tarantino has a knack for picking actors who are either on their way down or those not many people are familiar with, such as Samuel L. Jackson and Christoph Waltz. These two actors keep appearing in his films as the Tarantino just loves the way they say his words. In 1994's Pulp Fiction, Samuel L. Jackson seemingly came out of nowhere to brilliantly play the Bible-quoting gangster Jules Winnfield. He was 46 years old. At that point, he had appeared in numerous films including Jungle Fever, Patriot Games, Jurassic Park and the Tarantino-written True Romance, having been in the industry since 1972. FYI, in the 1980s, he worked as a camera stand-in for Bill Cosby in The Cosby Show. The super-cool Jules changed all that for Jackson. He earned an Oscar nomination for the role and nowadays the 64-year-old appears in an average of three films a year and is such a big star that the avid golfer has a clause in his movie contracts which guarantees him easy access to golf courses, no matter where the shoot is. Austrian actor Christoph Waltz was working in European TV obscurity when Tarantino gave him the role of the charming but sadistic Colonel Hans Landa in Inglourious Basterds. This role earned him international stardom as he got his first Best Supporting Actor Oscar. Since then, he has gone on to play other colourful villains in big-budget Hollywood fare including The Green Hornet, Water For Elephants and The Three Musketeers. In Django Unchained, he gets rid of the bad-guy persona to portray a bounty hunter (and occasional dentist) who frees a slave and makes him his equal partner. The 57-year-old won his second Oscar for his work with Tarantino here. Waltz's successful streak looks set to continue with an upcoming movie with Matt Damon (Zero Theorem) and as Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik. Tarantino in Jacksonville Jules Winnfield in Pulp Fiction (1994) – An employee of gang boss Marsellus Wallace. Ordell Robbie in Jackie Brown (1997) – A black market gun runner who loves talking about guns. Rufus in Kill Bill: Vol 2 (2004) – A piano player at the Two Pines chapel. The Narrator in Inglourious Basterds (2009) – Yup, that voice is Jackson's. Stephen in Django Unchained (2012) – A racist house slave who maintains discipline on behalf of his owner, Calvin Candie. QT says: Sam said my dialogue so well – not for a while. He says my dialogue well today. But for a while there, he said it so perfectly that it was hard not to write for him. I spent about a year and a half writing Kill Bill. I think for the first six months, even though I didn't want Bill to be black, I was writing for Sam Jackson. I wasn't trying to write it for Sam Jackson. I could not not write for Sam Jackson. ... You hire an actor to learn the lines and say them. Now there are exceptions to that. Sam Jackson is the exception. Sam Jackson is a terrific writer. He's a terrific writer in character. He knows how his characters should talk. Now, he loves my words. That's one of the reasons that he works with me. That's one of the reasons he would tackle a character like Stephen (in Django Unchained). Tarantino dances to Waltz Col. Hans Landa in Inglourious Basterds (2009) – The evil deeds Landa has committed as a Nazi officer have earned him the title of "The Jew Hunter". Dr King Schultz in Django Unchained (2012) – A charming German bounty hunter, pretending to be a dentist. QT says: The day I met Christoph Waltz was a very, very lucky day in my life. We share a collaboration that I think is exquisite, that would be the only word to describe it. He says my dialogue, he sings my dialogue in a way nobody else has. His voice, his tone, his pitch. he gets it, and ... the experience of working with him has been wonderful. It's been a joy to write the part for him here. I didn't know who Django was, I didn't know who Calvin Candie was, but I knew who Dr Schultz was. |
| Posted: 09 Mar 2013 11:27 PM PST The latest film by Quentin Tarantino, Django Unchained, looks at men at their worst – and best. VICTORY must have tasted really sweet to Quentin Tarantino when he picked up the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for Django Unchained at the recent Academy Awards. Covering a sensitive topic, slavery, Tarantino had received a lot of negative criticism from various parties when the movie came out in the United States, despite positive reviews from critics and cinemagoers. Historians, for example, have spoken against an especially brutal scene in the film – dubbed Mandingo Fighting – commenting it doesn't correlate with facts. Acclaimed African-American director Spike Lee won't watch the film. Then there is the usage of the n-word – at 110 instances – that has ruffled more than a few feathers in the media. At the ceremony, he responded to the negative critique of the film saying: "All that criticism that came out; it ended up being kind of a good thing. I wanted to start a conversation about slavery." The director, who turns 50 this year, is known for utilising the blaxploitation genre to great storytelling success (Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown) and had wanted to tackle the subject of slavery for some time now. After all, the idea of a slave who becomes a bounty hunter and goes after his former owners was something that Tarantino came up with some 10 years ago. "I have been wishing other people would deal with that issue for a long time," he said at an interview in Cancun, Mexico, last year, in his signature hyperactive manner, gesturing furiously to complement his rapid-fire speech. "The subject is important to me. It's probably more important to me than any other subject. It's in my DNA. "I hope other people would realise what a fertile ground the topic is – to not only wring (their) hands about slavery and parade the misery of what happened there, but (to tell) rich stories. The heroism and the cowardice, the betrayal of love, hate. People say there are no new stories out there, but there is a whole wealth of stories that can be told, from a different perspective, that America has just been afraid to tackle. White and black." Interestingly, his film came out a month after Steven Spielberg's film Lincoln, which focuses on Abraham Lincoln's quest to abolish slavery.These two films may have different ways of approaching the topic – one is a serious historical drama and the other is a bloody revenge fantasy – but both push slavery and racism to the fore. Set two years before the Civil War when African men and women in the southern United States were living a dire existence, the film introduces us to Django (Jamie Foxx) as the sixth member of a slave train of seven. Along comes German-born bounty hunter Dr King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), who acquires him with the promise of freedom and reuniting Django with his wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington). First, however, Django must help him bring down some criminals he is tracking, who used to work as overseers for Django's previous owner. As they grow to become equals, their search leads them to Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), the cruel proprietor of a plantation that houses many slaves, including a loyal house slave named Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson). The unlikely bond between Django and Schultz is tested even as it brings about a great change to an otherwise static and sad situation. Making history Being both a film and history buff, Tarantino meshes the two worlds in Django Unchained by making his first spaghetti western and focusing on conditions in the South in the 19th century. He did not, however, want to refer to history books when writing the screenplay. Instead, he allowed his characters to take him on a journey of what might have happened during that troubling period. Naturally, at some point, he wanted his characters to exact revenge, a topic on which Tarantino is undoubtedly a master (Kill Bill and Inglourious Basterds, anyone?). Nonetheless, he wanted Django Unchained to have more substance than straightforward revenge fare. "Revenge is definitely a big part of this film, and it's (a) gratifying part of the film – who doesn't want to see a slave get revenge against his evil master or overseer? I'd buy the ticket to that right now. The movie doesn't even need to be good and I will probably get a kick out of it. "It's not just that; I could've easily done that 10 years ago. This is more than that. It's saving the princess from the castle. He is going to save his wife – she is in the worst place to be, with Calvin Candie, the worst person to possibly own her, the worst plantation any slave can go to. So he is going into hell to extract her. And to me, that is very exciting. "The whole revenge aspect is a staple of genre storytelling not just in cinema, but paperback novels, Greek tragedy, Shakespearan drama. Seeing a character overcome (an) oppressor is one of the most emotional feelings you can have sitting in the cinema. Whenever I see that, it's cathartic ... when it's done well." Shoot 'em up Once upon a time, justice was best served in westerns – the good and the bad have a face-off, and the good would typically win with a single bullet at high noon. Now, Tarantino is a huge fan of the spaghetti western genre (a term used for cowboy films that were produced and directed by Italians like Sergio Leone and Tarantino's favourite, Sergio Corbucci). His previous films do have a touch of the western in them even as they are celebrating other genres like kung fu films. Nonetheless, he did not connect the Django Unchained story – sitting in the back burner of his mind – with westerns. Well, not until he went to Japan for the last leg of Inglourious Basterds' press tour. He recalled: "In Japan, spaghetti westerns are still really, really popular – they call them Macaroni Westerns – and you can get tonnes of DVDs of them. I loaded up with a whole bunch of scores, I hit the mother lode. I found a whole bunch of really great scores that I had never been able to find before on CD. So I was in my hotel room and I was blasting the scores and having a good time and then the story kind of just came to me. I actually sat down and wrote the opening scene. And because the opening scene was good, I knew I was committing now to tell the story." When he came back home, he worked some more on the script. He knew he wanted Waltz to play Dr Schultz in the movie and the Austrian actor – who won his second Oscar working with Tarantino – got the chance to read the script as the filmmaker was writing it, longhand. Work on the script was done in April 2011 and production began in November that same year. One of the locations used was Melody Ranch, in Santa Clarita, California, which had been used in other classic western movies and television series including Stagecoach, High Noon and Gunsmoke. "I always knew I wanted to do a spaghetti western. And that there'd be spaghetti sauce on it," he concluded with a chuckle. Django Unchained opens in cinemas nationwide on March 14. |
| Posted: 09 Mar 2013 11:25 PM PST RIGHT from the very first film he wrote and directed, Reservoir Dogs (which features a dude getting his ear cut off to Stealers Wheel's Stuck In The Middle With You), Quentin Tarantino has been spilling buckets of blood in his films. He turns up the dial quite a few notches in his latest, Django Unchained, where blood gushes out of bodies in gigantic crimson geysers. At an interview in Cancun, Tarantino touched on his bloodletting: "I have been working with the same effects company since Reservoir Dogs. Sometime around Kill Bill, we solidified the colour of blood. I like it much more Japanese, (the) style of blood, where the red has a paint-like quality. You can put it on metal, and it has this vividness. The normal stuff they use in Hollywood is this stuff that looks like pancake syrup, raspberry pancake syrup. It looks OK to put in the mouth and spit it out and everything, but when you put it on metal or (other) objects, it looks like pancake syrup." Here are five Tarantino films that went crazy with the crimson. Django Unchained – Tarantino came up with the idea of a bloody scene when he was writing the script. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, he said: "I wrote, 'Insert: red blood splashing white cotton bolls.' And I was like, 'Wow. I've never seen that before. That will be really cool.' " So he did just that with Christoph Waltz's character blasting a baddie off his horse and the blood spraying on the cotton fields. By the way, that is only one bloody scene in the movie, with plenty more to come. Kill Bill, Vol 1 – It doesn't get any redder than when The Bride (Uma Thurman) goes to the House Of Blue Leaves to confront O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu). After slashing through countless members of the Crazy 88 crew and taking on killer schoolgirl Gogo Yubari, The Bride finally has a face-off with O-Ren at a serene Japanese garden behind the restaurant. That Hattori Hanzo sword is definitely not to be messed with. Kill Bill, Vol 2 – Go on, admit it. Weren't you just a little too happy when a bloody and almost beaten Bride gouged out Elle Driver's (a.k.a. California Mountain Snake as portrayed by Daryl Hannah) other eye with one swift move? This happened after a long and painful battle between the two women in a trailer. Phew. Cats have nothing on these two ladies when it comes to fights. Inglourious Basterds – Revenge is sweet when the man on the receiving end of a machine-gun wielded by Jewish-American soldiers is Adolf Hitler. Though the film clearly took liberties with the facts to suit its story, it definitely put a new slant on history when Hitler and his cronies were trapped in a burning cinema with flying bullets raining down on them at the climax. Whee! Pulp Fiction – Death is a funny thing ... at least, in Tarantino's hands. Vincent (John Travolta) and Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) are having a discussion in their car about divine intervention, with Marvin (Phil LaMarr) sitting in the back, when Vincent's gun goes off. Turns out he accidentally shot Marvin in the face, leaving the car drenched in blood and paving the way for his own cameo. Much hilarity ensues. |
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