LOS ANGELES — Legendary filmmaker Quentin Tarantino told actor Jamie Foxx he was being “too cool”while filming his slave role in ‘Django Unchained’.
The 57-year-old actor starred in the 2012 action-western as slave-turned-bounty hunter Django in the movie.
During an appearance on ‘The Graham Norton Show’, Foxx said: “I worked with him on ‘Django Unchained’, and he was very strict. I was playing a slave, but he told me I was too cool to be a slave and that I needed to let all the trappings of my real life go. Once I stripped all those things away, the role made sense.”
Set in 1858 Texas where the slave trade thrives, ‘Django Unchained’ follows Foxx in the title role as he is freed by bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz played by Christoph Waltz and goes on a mission to save his wife Bromhilda von Schaft essayed by Kerry Washington from a plantation run by the despicable Leonardo DiCaprio’s Calvin Candie and his sinister servant Stephen, who was played by Samuel L. Jackson.
While ‘Django Unchained’ has several scenes that some could find distressing, including a sequence where one of Calvin’s slaves is mauled to death by a dog as punishment for attempting to escape the plantation, Tarantino previously insisted “what happened during slavery times is a thousand times worse” than what is shown on screen in his movie.
Speaking on NPR’s ‘Fresh Air’ programme, he said: “If I were to show it a thousand times worse, to me, that wouldn't be exploitative, that would just be how it is. If you can't take it, you can't take it.”
While he is happy with the movie, the filmmaker admitted he was concerned he would be forced to cut one of his favourite scenes from the flick - in which a group of Ku Klux Klan members argue about their masks made out of bags.
During an appearance on the ‘Empire Film Podcast’, Tarantino said: “That has as much hysterical laughter as I’ve ever heard in any screening of any movie, and it happens all over the world.
“That was everyone’s favourite scene in the script. (Sony executive) Amy Pascal, half the reason she wanted to make the movie at Columbia was because of that scene.”
“But it was one of those scenes that it was such a hit on the page, I started getting intimidated about would it be that good in the movie? Does everyone love it so much on the page (that it’s) gonna lose something in the translation once I get a bunch of actors playing the roles? Because it’s not based on one performance, it’s a whole lot of people. And it happens at a weird part of the movie.”