As fans to wait to unpack the myriad of influences that are bound to be felt throughout Quentin Tarantino's upcoming slavery-era, vengeance flick "Django Unchained," a brand new trailer has arrived to give everyone a new taste. And one filmmaker QT has revealed played a role in his approach is none other than the Italian cinematic maestro, Sergio Corbucci, who directed "Django," the spaghetti western that Tarantino is obviously homaging this time around.
"As I was working on an essay about how Corbucci’s archetypes worked, I started thinking, I don’t really know if Corbucci was thinking any of these things when he was making these movies. But I know I’m thinking them now. And if I did a western, I could put them into practice," the director recently wrote in The New York Times. "When I actually put pen to paper for the script, I thought, What will push the characters to their extremes? I thought the closest equivalent to Corbucci’s brutal landscapes would be the antebellum South. When you learn of the rules and practices of slavery, it was as violent as anything I could do — and absurd and bizarre. You can’t believe it’s happening, which is the nature of true surrealism."
The new trailer is familiar in tone (rock n' roll-ish, bad-ass, etc.), but features lots of new footage and gives us a better look at Samuel L. Jackson, Kerry Washington, Jonah Hill (as a Ku Klux Klansman) and some of the other supporting characters in the picture. There is one pretty killer line in the end, where Leonardo DiCaprio's evil plantation owner character laughs, "adult supervision is required" which is a nice touch given the bloody R-rated nature of the film and its hot-button subject matter (slavery in the South). It's actually an improvement from what we've seen thus far and genuinely seems playful, with a devilish sense of humor.
Also, for soundtrack trainspotters, note at the end of the trailer: there's a little sting from Luis Bacalov's "Django" main theme from the original 1966, aforementioned spaghetti western. As one commenter notes, "I'm A Man" by Black Strobe (featured in Guy Ritchie's "RocknRolla") is the other major tune in the trailer. "Django Unchained" stars Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio and comes over on the horizon Christmas Day. A few new images from the trailer below. [Apple]
