Tag Archive: Filming

Django Unchained News: Rome Premiere, Costume Design, Awards Update, and More

django unchained premiere

Weekend Box Office Figures:  Django Unchained came in at #2 this weekend with $20 million. Texas Chainsaw 3D was #1 with $21 million, and The Hobbit #3 with $17.5 million.

Awards News:  The Producers Guild of America nominated Django Unchained’s producers for its Darryl F. Zanuck Award for Outstanding Producer of Theatrical Motion Pictures award.

The Art Directors Guild nominated Django Unchained production designer J. Michael Riva for a Nominees for Excellence in Production Design for a Feature Film in 2012 award.

BTW, Academy Award nominations will be announced on January 10th (Thursday).

Vulture has two more great articles up about Django Unchained:

What Was Cut From Django Unchained

Why Django Unchained’s Slavery Tale Had to Be a Spaghetti Western

django unchained costume

Entertainment Weekly has a great article up about Django Unchained’s costume designer Sharen Davis.

“Broomhilda’s clothes aren’t her own,” the actress told EW. “Even in talking it through with [Sharen], when we were talking about the Broomhilda stuff, it was always ‘What would he put her in?’ ’What would the woman of the house dress her in? Oh, she’d dress her like a doll.’”

“Quentin was very hands-on,” Davis says of working with Tarantino. “I would do these sketches, but I would also have freeze-frames from the spaghetti Westerns he had me watch to go along with the illustrations so I could show him exactly where the ideas came from. Because this is a Tarantino movie, the dresses are all a little above reality.”

Louis Farrakhan claims that Django Unchained is “preparation for a race war.”

To me, the movie had a purpose,” he said. “If a black man came out of that movie thinking like Djngo and white people came out of that movie seeing the slaughter of white people and they are armed to the teeth, it’s preparation for a race war.”

Quentin Tarantino gave a 60-second interview with BET about his use of the word “nigger”:

Thanks, Grahmhatch , for spotting this!

JaVale McGee Django Unchained

Basketball player JaVale McGee posted the above picture of his shoes on Instagram.

Dennis Christopher, who plays Leonide Moguy in the film, did an interview about how he ended up in Django Unchained.

Apparently The Mutter Museum (a museum specializing in medical history) made a special instructional video just for Quentin Tarantino and Leonardo DiCaprio about how to saw a human skulls using mid-19th century medical equipment. Click the link to watch them.

Samuel L. Jackson recently made headlines by trying to goad a reporter into saying the word “nigger” instead of “the N-word.” Video and transcript are here.

Quentin Tarantino revealed why he did not give the role of Django to Idris Elba, who auditioned for it.

“Yeah, Idris is British and this is an American story. I think a problem with a lot of movies that deal with this issue is they cast British actors to play the Southerners and it goes a long way to distancing the movie. They put on their gargoyle masks and they do their phoney accents and you are not telling an American story any more. They are just making hay of it, whether it be James Mason in Mandingo or Michael Caine in Hurry Sundown, they get British actors to do this.”

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Django Unchained News Update: Box Office Figures, History Lessons, Great Interviews & More

django unchained set

Don’t forget to post your thoughts about Django Unchained in our Open Thread!

Django Unchained took in $15 million on Christmas Day, putting it at #2 behind Les Miserables ($18.2 million). The Hobbit came in at #3 with $11.3 million. This makes Django Unchained the fifth highest-grossing Christmas release.

Quentin Tarantino has a streaming, track-by-track commentary of the Django Unchained soundtrack on the official website available through January 2nd. Worth listening to if you have the time.

Slate has an excellent commentary comparing Django Unchained to blaxploitation westerns from the 70s like The Legend of Nigger Charley trilogy (which is available for free on Youtube). I added a few new movies to my “To Watch” list after reading this one.

Slate also has an excellent article about the history of Mandingo fighting.

Did the U.S. have anything like this form of gladiatorial combat?

No. While slaves could be called upon to perform for their owners with other forms of entertainment, such as singing and dancing, no slavery historian we spoke with had ever come across anything that closely resembled this human version of cock fighting. As David Blight, the director of Yale’s center for the study of slavery, told me: One reason slave owners wouldn’t have pitted their slaves against each other in such a way is strictly economic. Slavery was built upon money, and the fortune to be made for owners was in buying, selling, and working them, not in sending them out to fight at the risk of death.

The Root has a great interview with Quentin Tarantino about race issues and the use of the word “nigger” in the film. Here what he had to say in response to Spike Lee’s recent criticism:

Henry Louis Gates Jr.: Spike Lee’s on your ass all the time about using the word “nigger.” What would you say to black filmmakers who are offended by the use of the word “nigger” and/or offended by the depictions of the horrors of slavery in the film?

Quentin Tarantino: Well, you know if you’re going to make a movie about slavery and are taking a 21st-century viewer and putting them in that time period, you’re going to hear some things that are going to be ugly, and you’re going see some things that are going be ugly. That’s just part and parcel of dealing truthfully with this story, with this environment, with this land.

Personally, I find [the criticism] ridiculous. Because it would be one thing if people are out there saying, “You use it much more excessively in this movie than it was used in 1858 in Mississippi.” Well, nobody’s saying that. And if you’re not saying that, you’re simply saying I should be lying. I should be watering it down. I should be making it more easy to digest.

No, I don’t want it to be easy to digest. I want it to be a big, gigantic boulder, a jagged pill and you have no water.

The Root has some other great articles about Django Unchained: Tarantino Unchained Pt. 1 Tarantino Unchained Pt. 3 and Django Unchained: A Postracial Epic?

Collider has a video interviews up with the cast of Django Unchained. Here they are: Jamie Foxx and Kerry Washington, Christoph Waltz, and Walton Goggins. Walton Goggins might want to check out his interview with Crave Online, too.

Esquire magazine argues that Django Unchained is a better film about slavery than Lincoln.

It was inevitable that someone would make a Django Unchained / Blazing Saddles mashup.

The New York Times published their review of Django Unchained.

Samuel L. Jackson talks about deleted scenes in Django Unchained as well as playing the “Dick Cheney of Candyland.”

The free $2 Amazon MP3 credit at Fandango expires soon! Make sure you get your ticket orders in before it goes away.

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Django Unchained News Update: Walton Goggins, Sidney Poitier, John Legend & More

django unchained set

Last chance to reserve your tickets for Django Unchained’s release tomorrow. You get a free $2 Amazon MP3 credit when you order tickets through Fandango.

The Washington Post published an article about Walton Goggins and how he landed a role in Django Unchained. A great read for Goggins fans!

“I texted him and said: ‘Robert [Robert Rodriguez], this is not my thing, I don’t do this, but I’m asking: Please text QT! Please! Just send him one line. Just two words: Walton Goggins.’ He said, ‘Okay, I’ll do it,’ and maybe an hour later, or the next day, he forwarded me Quentin’s response. It said, ‘Walton Goggins has been on my radar for a very long time.’ ”

Rolling Stone has an excellent article about how the Django Unchained soundtrack came to fruition. John Legend talks about how he wanted to write a song for Django Unchained as soon as he heard what the film was about. He then recorded the song (“Who Did That to You?“) and sent it to Quentin Tarantino on a cassette tape. What a great story!

“We heard from an inside source that [Tarantino] really likes listening to music on cassette in his car,” Legend said. “So we converted the digital material into a cassette and I wrote him a note and I said, ‘I wrote this song for your film, wanted to know if you would use it.’”

At last week’s premiere, the technophobic Tarantino told a packed house at the Ziegfeld in New York, he received the tape with two months left in the shoot. “If I had gotten a link or something to plug into my computer, I would have thrown that shit away, because I don’t know how to do that shit, but I got a cassette tape, and that I know how to play.” The director ended up deploying the song in one of the film’s most climatic scenes.

Quentin Tarantino recently discussed getting inspiration from Sidney Poitier to take Django Unchained as far as he did:

But the idea of shooting those scenes in Louisiana, where most of “Django” was filmed, with black actors being asked to portray slaves, unnerved the usually self-confident director.

The prospect made him so edgy that he considered shooting those scenes in the West Indies or even Brazil, just so he wouldn’t be reenacting slave-related atrocities upon the landscape where such events actually happened.

So Tarantino turned to actor-director Sidney Poitier, the first African-American to win a Best Actor Oscar, for advice.

“Sidney basically told me to man up,” Tarantino says. “He said, ‘Quentin, for whatever reason, you’ve been inspired to make this film. You can’t be afraid of your own movie. You must treat them like actors, not property. If you do that, you’ll be fine.’ ”

The Christian Film & Television Commission is calling for a NC-17 rating on Django Unchained. “This movie ends with two of the most violent scenes we’ve ever seen in more than 27 years of reviewing movies,” said founder and spokesman Dr. Ted Baehr. That just makes me want to see this movie even more!

Spike Lee says he’s not going to see Django Unchained because it would “be disrespectful to my ancestors.” He didn’t elaborate any further. You can watch the video of this here, but it’s literally 40 seconds of Spike Lee repeating the same “it would be disrespectful to my ancestors” line. The only reason worth going to this link is to read the top Youtube comment: “YOU GUYS KNOW GOD DAMN WELL HE IS GOING TO SEE THAT SHIT on NETFLIX and pretend he never saw it.”

Speaking of Hollywood lodumouths, comedian Katt Williams had to throw in his two cents about Django Unchained:

“F**k Jamie Foxx and the Django Unchained check he cashed,” he said.

“They offered me the script and I said, ‘Any ni**a that do this deserves to die. And the next thing I heard, Jamie Foxx was in makeup,” Williams also claimed.

It should go without saying that Kat Williams was not on the short list of actors Quentin Tarantino auditioned for the role of Django.

Django Unchained producer Reginald Hudlin gave an interview with The Root.

A behind-the-scenes video of the Django Unchained filming:

(Thanks, Renato, for the link!)

Well, this is it, folks. We’re less than 24 hours away. I’ll be posting an open thread on December 25th where you can post your thoughts about Django Unchained. Come on over and share your opinion after you’ve seen the film!

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