“... AND FRANKLY
OFTENTIMES THEY
JUST FEEL LIKE
DUSTY TEXTBOOKS
JUST BARELY
DRAMATIZED.”
Friend’s Birthday, the film he
co-wrote and directed with Craig
Hamann in 1984. Unfortunately a
fire destroyed 34 minutes of the
amateur film with an estimated
budget of $5,000 and a handful of
help from his video store co-work-
ers and acting class buddies – far
from his later film Django Un-
chained packed with the famous
faces of Leonardo DiCaprio and
Jamie Foxx, and a fat budget of
$100 million.
Upon the release of Django
Unchained, the budget was more
than covered; but the script’s
portrayal of “racist” violence
was not entirely. When making
a killing at the box office, raking
in a total of $425.4 million glob-
ally, there is absolutely no way no
buttons were pushed. On conven-
tional slave narratives on screen;
Tarantino makes no apologies
for his honesty. This isn’t to say
that the script was a big f**k you
to viewers, rather he told Fresh
Air host Terry Gross that he was
much more comfortable with the
prospect of writing the language
of white supremacists and direct-
ing African-Americans in scenes
depicting slavery on American
soil than he was about any physi-
cal violence being portrayed. His
anxiety about directing the slavery
scenes was so great, in fact, that
he considered shooting abroad.
But that was only temporary
12
FILMMAKER SPRING 2016
SCRIPT OF DJANGO UNCHAINED
trepidation.
This is what brings in hundreds
of millions of dollars; this is what
makes him the man, the myth, the
legendary screenwriter: “Quentin
Tarantino”. He has a rare ability
to push the envelope just enough
so that the masses continually
receive his heavy work with open
arms. He writes about all of the
things that we want to talk about,
and for some reason, don’t. The
issues at hand - and Django’s
particularly, aren’t new to cinema,
and Tarantino is quick to explain
to Gross how his version is simply
a more enjoyable history lesson,
“There haven’t been that many
slave narratives in the last 40
years of cinema, and usually when
there are, they’re usually done
on television, and for the most
part ... they’re historical movies,
like history with a capital H. Basi-
cally, ‘This happened, then this
happened, then that happened,
then this happened.’ And that can
be fine, well enough, but for the
most part they keep you at arm’s
length dramatically. Because also
there is this kind of level of good
taste that they’re trying to deal
with ... and frankly oftentimes
they just feel like dusty textbooks
just barely dramatized.”
This last Christmas Tarantino
released his most recent, “The
Hateful Eight”, despite the fact
that an early draft (out of three)
was released. During a recent
appearance on Jimmy Kimmel
live he shared his reason for
feeling contempt. “I wanted to
write three drafts of the script.
Go through three different times.
Tell the story three different times
and then decide, ‘OK, this is the
movie.’ And so I did the first draft.
It was completely unfinished.
There was an end, but it wasn’t
THE end. … So to have it exposed,
that version, was really… it got
to me.” This is solid insight into
the mind of one of todays most
recognized screenwriters. He cer-
tainly doesn’t just s**t out quality
works like Pulp Fiction and Reser-
voir Dogs that sincerely make you
question humanity on all levels
after viewing.