Perhaps aware that a spaghetti western — even if directed by Quentin Tarantino, who is a brand name director now — centered around the subject of slavery might be a tricky sell, The Weinstein Company are getting the marketing campaign out early for the film that won't be arriving until Christmas. But that means even for all the advertising, the footage for now will remain the same until the movie is closer to completion (or until Comic-Con where Tarantino will be making an appearance).
So tonight a new one-minute teaser spot has arrived and it's more or less pretty much everything you've seen before except with a bit more Samuel L. Jackson and Kerry Washington. Producer Reginald Hudlin recent spoke to Ebony about the movie and revealed that, according to him, there hasn't been that many great movies about slavery. "So we got into this whole debate about movies on this topic of slavery, and I was very frank about how I hated 90 percent of them. I thought they were cod liver oil movies that were — and when I say cod liver oil, I mean movies that taste bad — but you’re supposed to swallow it anyways, because it’s supposed to be good for you," he explained. "I don’t understand how that works because if it’s not entertaining, if it’s not something you want to go see, why bother, because no one’s going to see it. And I just felt like these movies should be exciting, they should be action-packed and most of all, I felt like they should have plenty of kicking ass because at the end of the day, the world needs black people who fought back."
And this explains why he felt it was important to see Django whipping a slave master in Tarantino's film (a clip of which has been in the trailers so far): "You know the end of 'Roots' where the white slave master’s tied to the post and the black man has the whip and then he goes, ‘Oh, I can’t beat you. That would lower me to your level’ …? I was a kid in East St. Louis, watching that screaming at the TV, ‘Oh, hell no!!!’ I have never seen John Wayne go, ‘Oh no, I can’t do that.’ John Wayne handles his business at the end of every movie," Hudlin said. "But somehow when the black man is at the end of the movie, the rules are different. And the fact is Quentin was in South Bay, California, screaming the same thing, having the same reaction! So for us, we have a black man beat a white slave master with his own whip, which, as far as I know, has never happened in the history of cinema. It’s like, Wow, we’re doing our jobs."
"Django Unchained" delivers vengeance on Christmas Day.