The $11 Billion Year

by Anne Thompson

  Tarantino was afraid that Foxx wouldn’t be able to dig down below his entitled celebrity veneer to feeling like the lowly slave he is at the beginning of the film. At the very start Foxx offered too much self-confidence, and Tarantino told him to go back and imagine what being a slave was like. “I got together with Jamie, by ourselves, and I said, ‘You know, we don’t have a story if Django is already this magnificent heroic figure who just happens to be in chains,’ ” Tarantino says to Gates. “It’s like, look, the stuff that we show is really harsh, and it’s supposed to be harsh, but it was [actually] a lot worse.”

  “The most important thing was letting everything go because we all have egos,” Foxx informs Hall H. “That was what was unique for me, to actually do homework, to listen to what he says, strip yourself down, and start all over again.”

  Needless to say, the portrayal of poor slave conditions and violent treatment carried a considerable charge for the African Americans on set. “There were a lot of tough days,” Foxx admits. “To watch men is one thing, or to have something happening to me, but to watch Kerry Washington be whipped—she said, ‘I want to be hit with the lash,’ it was the nylon version—was one of the toughest things, how she embodied that. Quentin went to every person on that set, the extras, made sure they were okay between each scene. He’d crack a joke, play music to get our mind off things.”

  Washington was appalled to realize how little she knew about the details of what was done to African Americans during slavery. She thought iron masks put on slaves was a Tarantino exaggeration, not something discovered in painstaking research. “The face of the hero is one we don’t often get to see as the hero of this kind of film, the African American in the antebellum South,” she says. “Quentin has never been intimidated by evil or gore or blood, the dark side of humanity. In some ways that’s why he’s a powerful storyteller in the context of slavery. For a long time we’ve been afraid of portraying the ugliness of this history.” The actress found that out the hard way, not only by experiencing being whipped, but by spending hours in a tiny metal “hot box” buried in the ground, full of biting spiders, worms, and centipedes.

  They wound up filming on location at a historic New Orleans plantation for Candieland, which is ruled by Calvin Candie, played with an evil sneer by greasy-haired Leonardo DiCaprio. The star approached Tarantino about playing the character, who was written as a sixtyish older man. “The pretext we’re selling is this southern aristocratic society, what they consider to be European aristocracy,” he says to Hackford. “They took what they liked, and what they didn’t like, they threw out, and they made it up. They lived a life of barons and burgermeisters. Candie has sixty-five miles of land, not uncommon in an industrial plantation with an army of slaves. They were your subjects, and you had a whole army of poor white workers who were paid slave wages to keep the slaves in line. You were a king. What you say goes.”

  The director worked closely with DiCaprio on refining his character, says Tarantino: “Calvin Candie would be the perpetual boy emperor, his daddy’s daddy was a cotton man, he’s sick of it, the farm goes on for so long it takes care of itself. He’s the bored and petulant emperor, he comes up with hobbies to keep himself interested, like Mandingos.”

  DiCaprio added the notion that Candie was a student of the pseudoscience of phrenology. “That gave the white class a scientific proof and reason to be as racist as they were,” says Tarantino. “He gave me some phrenology books. This shit writes itself, it was so fucking crazy, what they’re saying.” During the filming, DiCaprio cracked open a glass and cut himself; as his blood flowed, Tarantino kept rolling. The crew applauded when he stopped. “My hand started really pouring blood all over the table,” DiCaprio recounts to the Hollywood Reporter. “Maybe they thought it was done with special effects. I wanted to keep going. It was more interesting to watch Quentin’s and Jamie’s reaction off camera than to look at my hand.” They bandaged his hand in later scenes in case Tarantino used that take. He did.

  The Ku Klux Klan sequence was among the most daring, in that it was not only intended to be hilarious, but to make direct reference to the infamous silent film The Birth of a Nation.” “It was my ‘fuck you’ to D. W. Griffith,” Tarantino says at the DGA. “I had a trepidation about doing the bag scene. I thought it was one of the funniest scenes in the script, but it played so funny on the page that I was positive I’d fuck it up, it was too funny. I did it, felt okay about it, was scared about editing it.”

  So he elected to film the KKK charge first, “to get our feet wet. So we did the charge, so fun to shoot. So I did that, and they’re actually scary.” The director realized that if he “showed that they’re fucking idiots right at the beginning, I’m going to kick the whole sequence in the shins.” So he decided to use a flashback. “I wasn’t sure if it worked. We had a research screening, and we showed it. And everyone laughed more than they did throughout the film, and it’s everyone’s favorite scene.”

  The director invited his cast and crew to Sunday screenings at the Sergio Corbucci Theater every week. “You get a film history class through his telling of the story behind one movie,” says Walton Goggins (Justified), who plays a ruthless Mandingo fight trainer on Candie’s plantation. “There’s realism and absurdity inherent in all of Quentin’s characters. It seems real to me.”

  Working with a more relaxed production schedule, with Oscar-winning cinematographer Robert Richardson shooting in 35 millimeter, Tarantino loosened up on figuring out his shots in advance and was open to experimentation and a more rock-and-roll approach. “Good-looking for Quentin is a different aesthetic,” Richardson told Thompson on Hollywood’s Bill Desowitz. “The beauty of a Tarantino film is that the visuals match the rhythm of the words. That’s his goal. And that’s my goal.”

  They shot in Lone Pine, California, and Louisiana from late November 2011 to July 25, 2012. Various things set the production behind by three weeks. During a Hollywood Reporter Q&A, producer Stacey Sher said she was ready to shoot the winter scenes of Django Unchained in a Mammoth, California, ski resort location, but no snow was falling—for the first time in one hundred years. After several days of anxiously tracking weather reports, the production had to pick up and move the set to Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

  All the actors are excellent: Waltz’s charming but ruthless German bounty hunter; Foxx as the slave who comes into his own and will move mountains to rescue his lovely lost wife, Broomhilda (Washington), who is owned by DiCaprio’s entertainingly debauched Candie; and Samuel L. Jackson, who gives a brilliant, layered performance as the head house slave. It’s Jackson who comments on an entire history of actors playing Uncle Tom. “His character, Stephen, makes Stepin Fetchit look like Malcolm X,” marvels Henry Louis Gates.

  “Sam is a good writer,” Tarantino responds. “Some actors try to improvise and everything, but you know, frankly, if they’re not just adding ‘mmms’ and ‘ahs’ or cusswords, that’s actually called writing, and that’s usually not what you hire actors to do. Having said that, he sprinkles the dialogue with his own little bit of Sam Jackson seasoning. But that character is on the page.”

  Tarantino worked on a relatively intense delivery schedule between 2009’s Inglourious Basterds and 2012’s Django Unchained, partly because the Weinsteins needed him to deliver to have a commercially lucrative release over the holiday season.

  Thus Tarantino had to complete the movie in time for a December 25 wide release. The film officially wrapped around July 7, which meant that Django would not have the benefit of the fall film festival circuit. A provocative movie like this could have used careful handling and set-up from critics and media to educate audiences on what to expect. While Django Unchained is not sensationally exploitative like Richard Fleischer’s 1975 Mandingo, Tarantino’s movie was clearly designed to blow people’s gaskets.

  Tarantino finally relinquished the film to the Weinstein Company weeks late, after a long battle in the editing room to get it down to two hours and for
ty-five minutes. This is nothing new for the slow and deliberate writer-director. But Tarantino had been accustomed to working closely with longtime editor Sally Menke, who sadly died at age fifty-six in September 2010 while hiking in L.A.’s Griffith Park on one of the hottest days in the city’s recorded history. Tarantino called Menke, who was nominated for Oscars for both Pulp Fiction and Inglourious Basterds, “my only true genuine collaborator,” like a cowriter in the editing room. She and Tarantino had established a working pace. She’d get started early every morning; he’d come in noonish to work with her for the rest of the day. He trusted her, and she could argue with him; she knew his rhythms, the pace of the long shots, dialogue, and action, how to adapt to changes in tone, sequence by sequence. On Inglourious Basterds, she convinced him to try to structure the narrative without the separate chapters, she told me. It didn’t work, and they returned to the way he wrote it.

  Tarantino writes each script so that it can stand alone as a piece of writing, whether or not he winds up directing it, and he doesn’t necessarily intend to shoot or include everything. He knows he’ll lose things in the editing room. Django editor Fred Raskin had worked as assistant editor with Menke on Kill Bill volumes I and II. Arguably, Django Unchained could have used more time to find its proper pace, length, and tone. There are ways this story could have reached beyond the genre of an entertaining, sometimes shocking spaghetti western to find real comedy and pathos; it often feels flat, constrained, and stuck. Finally, Tarantino admitted to Longworth, without Menke he had to be more responsible for his own movie.

  And the score is noisy and intrusive. Tarantino had been using spaghetti western music in his past five films; on Django Unchained he went all-out and, for the first time, collaborated with artists to create original film music. The score, packed with anachronistic spaghetti-western-style songs (new ones from Rick Ross and John Legend, along with vinyl recordings from his collection) and some fabulous original music from Ennio Morricone, doesn’t help to build emotion; it feels cluttered, attention-grabbing, and disjunctive.

  In the preview process, Tarantino realized that what was fine for him in the more violent scenes was too upsetting for audiences. Both the Mandingo male slaves fighting to the death for sport and the gruesome dog-mauling scene were cut back. “This movie has to work on a bunch of different levels,” he told Gates. “The comedy, the horrific serious scenes had to be able to work, I have to be able to get you to laugh a sequence after that to bring you back from [the horror]. When the Mandingo scene and the dog scene were rougher, I traumatized [the audience] too much, because they actually had been enjoying the movie before then. And the thing is, I actually got them back.”

  The black community reacted in a range of ways. Historian Gates, to his credit, engages Tarantino in a serious and provocative debate in which they dig into what was real and what was exaggerated in the film, as well as the use of violence, the N-word, and Foxx’s discomfort with playing a slave. Tarantino also expresses his hatred for western master John Ford, partly because he was willing to play a klansman in The Birth of a Nation. Both men know their history, give each other respect. And Tarantino holds his own.

  When Gates asks about the use of the N-word in the film, Tarantino replies, “Well, you know, if you’re going to make a movie about slavery and are taking a twenty-first-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 to see some things that are going to 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.”

  On the other hand, on Twitter @SpikeLee engaged with his fans by explaining why he refused to see the film: “American Slavery Was Not a Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western. It Was A Holocaust. My Ancestors Are Slaves. Stolen From Africa. I Will Honor Them.”

  And filmmaker Ava DuVernay writes me an explanation of why she, Lee, and others are reluctant to check out the movie themselves (Lee does not tell anyone not to go see it): they don’t want to deal with this subject in this manner. I still think that Lee could have engaged meaningfully if he had actually seen the movie. I’m not the only one who is eager to know what his reaction would be. In some ways, Tarantino makes the dicey and horrific subject matter easier to handle via the genre. He’s providing a distancing device. A realm of safety. But he also backs off of some of the emotion that way.

  When Tarantino’s bloody western-down-South opened Christmas Day, many critics raved (89 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, 80 percent on MetaCritic), singing the praises of the film’s stellar cast and its fierce yet disturbingly funny confrontation with the most shameful chapter of American history. More divisive was the film’s length, with some enjoying the epic 165-minute run time, and others finding it an overbloated self-indulgence. While many thought this violent western was too gory for Christmas audiences—it certainly wasn’t PG family fare—adults flocked to see it. That’s why Harvey Weinstein rushed the film into holiday release, convincing Tarantino not to wait until March. He wanted that heightened vacation playing time, when hordes of moviegoers flock to theaters. The movie grossed $424 million worldwide.

  And Weinstein knew that a late release could pay off in award season—it’s the freshest thing on voters’ minds. But attendance at movie wickets got off to a slow start; and Weinstein had held off from sending the special “for your consideration” DVD screeners to the homes of Academy voters, a routine promotion for awards-seekers.

  DVD screeners take weeks to prepare and ship. While Django Unchained, with its stellar cast, landed five Golden Globe nominations, it lost out on any mentions from the Screen Actors Guild. Later, Weinstein admitted that he had stalled on shipping screeners because he wanted voters to see it on the big screen. Would this move hurt its Oscar chances?

  CHAPTER 9

  TEN THINGS THAT CHANGED THE OSCAR RACE

  The Oscar race starts slowly with a couple of indie candidates introduced at Sundance, picks up speed at Cannes, takes off at the fall film festivals, and goes full throttle over the Christmas holidays, when critics groups build momentum with their awards. This is followed in the New Year by awards from the writers, actors, producers, directors, and craft guilds; the Golden Globes; the Oscar nominations; and finally the Oscar telecast, which is beamed live to some hundreds of millions of viewers in 250 countries around the world.

  The 2012 Oscar derby is less predictable than usual because various rule changes and calendar idiosyncrasies have been thrown into the mix. There’s been grumbling ever since the Academy elected to increase the number of Best Picture nominees from five to ten in an attempt to open the door to more mainstream movies such as Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, which missed being among the top five 2009 films, passed over in favor of The Reader, Milk, Frost/Nixon, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and ultimate winner Slumdog Millionaire. No question, the 2010 show could have used a major ratings boost. It was among the lowest rated. (The best-watched shows are the ones featuring the biggest blockbusters, such as James Cameron’s Titanic and Avatar, and Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.)

  However, inviting voters to choose ten films effectively added more indies to the Best Picture nominees, among them Precious, An Education, A Serious Man, Pixar’s Up and Toy Story 3, and, yes, Nolan’s Inception. So the Academy tweaked the rules once more for the 2012 Oscar show, allowing for as few as five nominees if the top candidates don’t earn enough votes. The goal: voters won’t feel like they’re stretching to incl
ude lesser films as the year’s best.

  No question, the preferential balloting system is mathematically arcane. Voters fill out a ballot with a list of films they rank from one to five. Basically, movies that don’t earn a substantial number of first-place votes get thrown out, and a movie that gets many first-place votes also needs to accrue second- and third-place votes to stay in play. Eight popular 2011 films were nominated for Best Picture, and nine 2012 films will vie for the top spot.

  For the 2012 Oscar-year voting, led by new CEO Dawn Hudson—the ex-head of successful nonprofit Film Independent, which mounts the Independent Spirit Awards—the Academy gets over its fears of potential security breaches and provides online electronic balloting for its members. Unfortunately, such elaborate hurdles are erected to keep hackers at bay that the first-ever online voting for the nominations is frustrating even for the computer literate—at first, Mac users with Safari browsers are shut out. Many voters give up and either drive to Academy offices in New York, London, or Beverly Hills to vote in a kiosk in the lobby under supervision, or ask for old-fashioned paper ballots. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) president Hawk Koch insists that with heaps of e-mail reminders and trade ads, more members wind up voting than ever before. At a May 2013 Beverly Hills town hall membership gathering at the Academy in Beverly Hills, Koch states that 90 percent of the membership voted for the 2012 Oscars.

  As with any political campaign, pressing the flesh, charming the voters, and reminding them why they like you makes a huge difference. So do any perceived changes in direction, outright mistakes, or even the subtlest of miscues, which can lead to significant wins and losses in any awards derby. Awards year 2012 is no exception.