Original subtitles

By 2009, Quentin Tarantino

was at the top of his game.

We just wanna say we're a big fan of your work.

and the world.

"Inglorious Bastards" was a huge hit.

He'd taken the inglorious

and covered himself in glory.

Made over $300 million at the box office.

Sound good?

Yes, sir.

Leading some to conclude--

This is your masterpiece.

He had also established

a reputation for rewriting history.

We hear a story too good to be true,

- it ain't. - I really think

that's his own genre.

Damn good stuff, sir.

A slightly better version of history.

The man can just flat out fucking write.

And despite plenty of pushback,

he wasn't done using history

as his personal pinata.

In fact, he was about to bring it all home.

It's a big part of our history.

Gotta get going now.

Being on that plantation,

it was really soul wrenching.

Few Hollywood filmmakers

had taken on a subject matter this sensitive...

It was all the things that we know,

all the things that our forefathers have experienced.

...this controversial...

What's the Black intelligentsia

gonna say about this film?

I ain't impressed.

...or this risky.

Who the hell is this nigga?

Poitier said to him, "You got to face this head on."

She didn't have a body double.

I was horrified.

Let alone in quite this way.

Tarantino might not be the first white director

to take on slavery...

There was a lot of controversy

about the fact that Quentin was making the film.

It'd be disrespectful to my ancestors.

A movie directed by a white guy

that has the N word in it

like 572 times or whatever it is.

You want me to play a Black slaver?

...but for "Django Unchained"

not to be his undoing...

There was a lot of people

feeling deeply uncomfortable.

...he'd have to walk a very fine line.

Django.

If "Inglorious Bastards" proved anything,

it was that Tarantino relished playing God

when playing with history.

But following the World War II epic,

whom the director chose to play with

was set to change.

Longtime producer and confidant Lawrence Bender

was about to be consigned to history himself.

They definitely have had times apart and friction,

and they've had times together and great joy.

I think it's like any relationship.

They had just kind of run their course at that point.

Lawrence had his other interests.

It wasn't just Quentin anymore.

He was Lawrence Bender Productions.

While three producers

would fill the Lawrence Bender-shaped void

on Tarantino's next movie,

the idea for the film was seeded 15 years earlier.

I met Quentin Tarantino at an awards show.

We just launched into talking about movies.

And we got into this conversation

about movies about slavery.

It was 1997

and slavery was a subject on the minds

of some important American filmmakers.

Here are the true owners of these slaves.

Steven Spielberg's "Amistad,"

the story of a slave ship rebellion,

had gotten Reggie thinking.

That movie was 5% slave revolt

and 85% movie trial.

- Your Honor. - The problem

was not about slavery,

it was how filmmakers told stories about slavery.

Steven Spielberg's one of the greatest filmmakers

of all times,

but that's not the movie I wanted to see.

I wanted to see a movie

where the courtroom

was kind of a bracketing device

for a movie about mutiny on a slave ship.

In other words,

a movie where justice was served cold.

I want a movie that had more cathartic release to it.

Like it was for "Black Charley" in 1972.

I saw that movie when I was a kid,

and I can't remember a frame of the film,

but I remember leaving the movie feeling great

'cause Fred Williamson just kicked people's butts

for 90 minutes.

I don't want torture porn,

I wanna feel great.

What are you waiting for?

And that movie delivered.

- Out. - Reggie wanted to see

more Black justice than white guilt.

What if there were like an A class version

of a movie like that?

And that's when I felt like maybe there was

a little light bulb going off with Quentin.

That kind of just simmered away

in Tarantino's brain.

But Tarantino's inspiration

for a more victim-centered slave story

wouldn't come directly from Reggie

or even American history.

Hey, wait a minute.

It would come from Italian filmmakers,

Sergio Corbucci and Sergio Leone--

who had made Spaghetti Westerns.

A different vision of America,

told not by Americans, but Italians.

These extremely violent, extremely gritty Westerns,

which included one called "Django."

He thought, "Hang on, I could do this

kind of like nasty, brutal Western,"

which for Corbucci was very much influenced

by growing up and being part of Fascist Italy.

This is how he put together these two concepts.

Quentin had a title,

borrowed partly from Corbucci's "Django"

and partly from the French, Italian epic,

"Hercules Unchained."

And as far as Reggie knew,

that was all.

Jump to several years later.

When in 2011,

Reggie was invited to what sounded like a baby shower

for a newborn script.

I get a call and he's having a publication party.

Publication day is when Quentin

gives copies of his newly completed screenplay

to everyone he knows.

Gathered to welcome the latest edition

to the Tarantino family of films,

at least in script form,

were Hollywood luminaries.

My favorite memory from this experience

was Quentin hands Warren Beatty

a copy of the screenplay.

The first thing Beatty does

is go to the last page,

and he's like, "167 pages."

Quentin says, without missing a beat,

"Yep, still shorter than 'Reds.'"

Tarantino had no intention of making another "Reds,"

the three-hour plus Warren Beatty vehicle

that definitely needed its intermission.

Instead, Tarantino had written the film

Reggie had always wanted to see.

A film you could say Reggie kind of manifested.

He said, "You were the seed

and this script is the tree."

I'm like, "Really?"

Like an excited boy,

Reggie immediately climbed to the tree.

I went home and I read "Django Unchained."

So he called me, he said, "What do you think?"

I said, "Oh, I love it. This is so great,

and I can't wait to see this movie.

I'm so glad you're going back to work."

He goes, "Oh, no, no, we're doing it together."

I'm like, "What?"

"We start work immediately."

Reggie's experience at Paramount

and as president of BET

also made him the ideal choice for producer.

He was also an accomplished filmmaker.

So, we're on our way to house party.

with a string of hits under his belt.

The first note Reggie brought to the project

went all the way back

to their first discussion years earlier

about movies dealing with slavery.

For a movie on this subject to work,

there needs to be a two-to-one ratio.

And for every bad thing that happens to an enslaved person,

twice as many bad things have to happen to enslavers.

You just have to be mindful as you make the film

that there's payback all along the way.

This formula suited Tarantino,

who some believed built his career

on a different kind of revenge porn.

When it came to payback,

Tarantino had one man in mind

for the vengeful lead.

The slave, he becomes freed,

he becomes a bounty hunter.

An actor who had dispensed

Tarantino's particular brand of retribution

in multiple films.

- Who's that? - That's Beaumont.

That character was conceived for Samuel L. Jackson.

We're gonna be cool.

The idea was that it would start

with Django later in his life,

but would flash back telling his origin story.

But I don't want that.

Quentin realized that actually the whole film

needed to be that origin story,

and that necessarily made Django a younger person.

Oh, it's like that, huh?

But Jackson would be too old for Django.

- Shit. - Instead, he was offered--

- You miss me, huh? - Oh, yes, sir.

the role of a right-hand man

to the slave owner.

Most Black Americans understand

where that character comes from.

You stay right here.

A sympathizer on the wrong side of history.

Even though we don't agree with that character,

I believe sometimes we have to show

what the past really is

without sugarcoating it,

so that we can appreciate where we are right now.

But what Black actor

would be willing to be that guy?

It might've been a hard sell for any other actor.

This is another cheeky Black bugger like yourself, Stephen.

Sam is an actor of tremendous courage.

The niggas we sell to LeQuint Dickey

got it worse than that.

Weirdly, when it came

to the slave owner himself...

Quit stalling now.

...Tarantino was having to beat them off.

Well, at least one guy.

Leonardo DiCaprio got hold of the script

and said, "I wanna do this film with you

and I wanna be Calvin Candie."

Tarantino had imagined

an older man in the role,

but then--

Leonardo was not an insubstantial piece of casting.

You little Dickens, you.

I don't see why not.

So he reconfigured the part for DiCaprio

Actors were lining up.

But what about a studio?

Nervous but committed,

Tarantino's longtime executives, the Weinsteins, pressed on,

hunting for a distributor

brave enough to take the risk.

Quentin with a new script and a new idea

is gonna excite a lot of different places.

You know, we're meeting with Universal

and we're meeting with Fox

and I think Sony was the last big meeting.

The studios were falling over themselves

to secure a deal with Tarantino.

But a movie about slavery

in the hands of a renegade white director?

Even with Tarantino,

it raised a million questions.

One of the top studio execs there asked us,

"What's the Black intelligentsia gonna say about this film?"

Sony was interested in the idea

of a new take on America's slavery story

despite the controversial subject matter.

And then people go, "Oh, I don't wanna see

any more slave movies."

I go, "I get it, no one wants to see

the horrors of that."

Except for this man

and his friend, Quentin Tarantino.

We have to tell the story of the Holocaust,

the stories of Rwanda,

the stories of Cambodia.

We have to tell the stories of American slavery.

All genocides must be told

so that we don't forget.

Because when we forget, we repeat.

That said, the studio,

much like the Weinsteins,

had concerns.

I'm aware this is probably disconcerting news.

One of the top studio execs asked us,

"What's the Black intelligentsia

gonna say about this film?"

And that's when Quentin and I looked at each other

like, "Well."

You had my curiosity,

but now you have my attention.

Most people look at the Black audience

as kind of a monolith.

And the fact is, there's all these different constituencies

that make up the, quote-unquote, "Black audience."

So the fact that this person was aware of that

was very impressive to me.

Impressive enough for Sony to secure the deal.

So they bought it not knowing who Django was gonna be,

but knowing we had Sam Jackson

and we had Leonardo.

I say splendid.

But the subject matter

was but one question mark on the studio executives' minds.

There was a lot of controversy

about the fact that Quentin was making the film.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

And this was not just a white director,

but a white director with a totally different take.

Everybody calm down.

That's why Django is a Southern,

meaning it's a Western set in the South.

For Reggie, there was only one man for the job.

The only way this story would be told

with this excellence

would be with someone like Quentin Tarantino.

But the right woman for the job was gone.

Tarantino was taking on his most challenging film yet

without his most trusted collaborator.

There was a lot of concern about losing Sally.

She was a wonderful person

and a trusted collaborator.

The untimely death of editor Sally Menke

deprived Tarantino of a guiding light

that had been there since "Reservoir Dogs."

You're right, this is bad.

Sally was irreplaceable.

But there was a way to tap into his former editor's legacy.

I started as an assistant editor.

I was working with Sally Menke.

Fred had worked with Sally on "Kill Bill,"

but it was the artful skid marks

of a major Hollywood franchise

that sealed the deal.

In his home theater,

Quentin got a print of "Tokyo Drift"

and "Fast & Furious."

Both films on which Fred worked.

And then he was going to a midnight show of "Fast Five."

And why'd you drag us halfway around the world?

'Cause we got a job.

I didn't realize it at the time,

but this was Quentin checking out my work.

But while Quentin was checking out Fred,

Fred wasn't leaving anything to chance.

Hollywood appreciates a bold move.

I emailed Quentin.

"I realize that you're gonna have

every editor in Hollywood

knocking on your door.

I am certainly far less experienced

than almost all of them,

but I can guarantee you

I will work harder than any of them."

So what do you say, am I worthy?

I got an email back from Quentin.

"I've actually been thinking about

having you do this with me.

Don't take any other jobs."

Have a good time.

This was the single most exciting email

I had ever received in my entire life.

Exactly whose performances

Fred would be finessing into a story,

particularly in the title character,

remained a big question mark.

But Tarantino had already discovered

the genial German he wanted to costar.

One of the great discoveries in motion picture history

is Christoph playing in "Inglorious Bastards."

Bingo! How fun.

Waltz would play a brutal

but sympathetic German bounty hunter.

Who's that stumbling around in the dark?

A part Tarantino had written

specifically for him.

I'm Dr. King Schultz, this is my horse, Fritz.

But who would play Django?

At one point, the answer was simple.

The biggest Black actor in Hollywood.

I will be at the South Street Seaport

every day at midday.

There were real conversations with Will Smith.

Who was definitely coming from a happy place.

I'm getting a better job.

But an actor of Smith's clout

was inclined to use it.

Don't ever let somebody tell you

you can't do something.

And Will ultimately told Quentin

he couldn't be in a role this violent, ironically.

Ultimately, they just couldn't agree

on things that Will wanted to do

that Quentin was like, "Nah,

that would take my script too far off course."

There was another actor with Oscar pedigree...

I remember he told me and the other producers,

"I'm gonna meet with Jamie Foxx tonight."

...who had played everything from American icons

You hear that?

Her heart just skipped a beat.

to talking birds.

So are you here for Carnival?

And I knew that Jamie was from Terrell, Texas.

He grew up a cowboy for real.

Jamie has his own horse.

I had no doubt

he could pull off everything required for the role.

And I turned to the other producers

and I said, "He's gonna offer it to Jamie Foxx tonight."

They said, "Reggie, no.

He said he's gonna meet with every actor twice."

I said, "I know what he said."

So the next day, he called and said,

"Ah, so I met with Jamie."

I said, "Yeah, how'd it go?"

And he goes, "Ah, I offered him the role."

First-choice Kerry Washington

landed the role of Django's wife.

They call me Hildy.

Quentin and I were pretty sure

that Kerry was pretty perfect for the role.

I also love that her name was Broomhilda von Shaft.

- Broomhilda? - Mm-hmm.

I said, "Of course her name is von Shaft."

Reggie approved for its references

to the iconic Black action hero

of the '70s.

♪ Shaft ♪

♪ Damn right ♪

"Because these are the ancestors of John Shaft.

And Quentin said, "They are?"

I said, "Absolutely."

♪ John Shaft ♪

Walton Goggins was cast as Billy Crash.

A role nearly played

by first Kevin Costner

and then Kurt Russell.

Kurt Russell, made clothes for him, had a fitting.

who ultimately wasn't the right fit.

Sorry.

In the role of Old Man Carrucan,

Tarantino decided once more

to reanimate another childhood favorite.

He had grown up seeing me in a bunch

of the TV Westerns, "Gunsmoke."

I got time off for good behavior, boy.

"Big Valley."

As soon as they see me,

they're gonna kill me.

He said, "Doing this movie, 'Django,'

and I really don't have a part for you."

You wouldn't be playing foxy grandpa with me?

"If Quentin wrote a scene for you,

would you come down to New Orleans and do it?"

And I said--

- All right. - Sure.

And to round out the ensemble,

Don Johnson emerged from obscurity

to star as plantation owner, Big Daddy.

That's them sons of bitches.

Jonah Hill was cast

as Broomhilda's one-time owner, Scotty Harmony.

This was what anyone would call...

A Quentin Tarantino-worthy cast.

Oh, and there was one other cast member

who had already worked extensively with Jamie Foxx.

Jamie's horse in the movie is Jamie's horse.

And Cheetah, as he was named,

was not just your average horse.

♪ He's the talk of the West ♪

Little tricks that the horse does

that horse could actually do,

and Foxx had taught it to do that.

♪ Alive with his Colt .45 ♪

Foxx was a natural in the saddle.

The same couldn't be said of his costar.

Christophe Waltz was taking riding lessons.

Just as shooting was scheduled to start

in November of 2011,

"Django Unchained" found the first bee in its bonnet.

A bee got under the saddle of the horse,

kicked him off,

and he fell and broke his hip.

At that, Christophe Waltz

was not going to waltz onto Tarantino's set,

not after a disagreement

between a bumblebee and a horse he was riding

in preparation for his role.

The horse got stung by a bee,

and it threw him off.

He fell and broke his hip.

I think he broke his tailbone.

Actually it was a dislocated bone

in his pelvis.

Not good for Christophe

and not good for his character.

In the screenplay, he's introduced riding a horse.

So Christophe couldn't ride a horse.

I feel vaguely responsible.

And so they had to come up with a way of riding

that would be somewhat more comfortable.

Alas.

I think it was Quentin who came up with the idea

of the dentist wagon.

So I guess we can thank

that insect and that horse

for this delightful contraption.

What's everybody's staring at?

Quentin came up with the idea

of the tooth on the spring.

And once anointed--

It is the Quentin Tarantino version

of a Spaghetti Western.

Good morning, innkeeper.

Shooting could begin on schedule

in November of 2011.

But nothing about dealing with the theme of slavery

was going to be easy.

What's your name?

Certainly not for the man at the center of it all.

Django.

I did notice this was a little, I think,

more challenging for him.

Jamie trying to find the Django.

Point me in that direction.

Jamie walked on set,

and he's like walking in,

you know, he's like in character as Django.

And Quentin goes, "Jamie, I need you to come over here."

And he's like, "What the fuck is that?

That's Jamie Foxx.

This is not Jamie Foxx.

You're a slave."

You know, and it's like, fuck, for a white guy

to feel that comfortable,

it has to be 'cause he's speaking

on behalf of something else,

which is the vision.

And Jamie's fucking great

'cause he's like, "Oh yeah, right."

Django's transformation

from a withered slave on the run

to a dignified dandy

helped Jamie Foxx transform himself

into the character.

It's scripted he puts on a valet costume.

Christoph's character was giving it to him.

I looked at Quentin and I said,

"Why don't we just make it more pronounced?"

I showed him "Blue Boy."

That's this "Blue Boy,"

Thomas Gainsborough's 1770 portrait

of an adolescent aristocrat.

So when we did that,

Quentin and Christophe and Jamie

all decided to adjust the script,

decide, "Oh, no, he picked that out himself."

♪ ...along the countryside ♪

Basically he became a prince in his head.

You mean you wanna dress like that?

Just as the lead actor was finding his feet,

another used his to walk off the project.

Jonah Hill jumped ship

to take the lead in this comedy.

He's actually right.

Pigs have uniforms,

I think we should have uniforms too.

He was recast to a smaller roll.

Hey, Marty, bring any extra bags?

- No. - Now known

simply as Bag Head,

Hill left behind one memorable scene of the darkest comedy.

I can't see fucking shit outta this thing.

Jonah Hill was so unbelievably funny.

It's actually Jonah and Quentin,

'cause Quentin is the other dummy underneath the mask.

What about you, Robert, can you see?

Not too good.

And what looked like

the most straightforward of costumes for Sharon

was instead as loaded as the guns

the characters carried.

That was a very challenging costume for me

because Quentin did not want them

to ever look like the clan.

Wishing to skate alongside

the historical reality,

Tarantino again took his inspiration

from a safe distance.

He gave me some footage

of some obscure Spaghetti Western

that had those kind of masks.

And I couldn't figure out

how to place it on their face

so it wouldn't move

because it had no structure.

Hold on, I'm fucking with my eye holes.

- Oh. - They were never even,

and they looked crazy.

Who made this goddamn shit?

I thought, "This is a fantastic way

of dealing with the Klu Klux Klan,"

because their whole thing is they're scary,

but it's like, well, they're buffoons.

Not pointing any fingers,

they could've been done better.

I thought that was a brilliant piece of social justice.

There was no doubt Tarantino

was bringing his own irreverent take

on dark histories,

but what no one could tell Tarantino

was whether that tone was right.

After all...

What's the Black intelligentsia

gonna say about this film?

You mind telling me what the hell you doing?

He did start like worrying

about appropriateness

and the comfort factor for his actors

in portraying, you know, such a dark period

of American history.

It's one thing to write on a piece of paper,

you know, "100 slaves are marched through the mud

in a slave auction town,

moved along by white men on horses and with guns,"

and it's another thing

to put 100 human beings in those chains.

So he thought maybe one way to kind of mitigate this

would be to shoot it outside of the state.

Almost like culturally neutral territory in a way.

Tarantino even sought counsel

from one of the most respected figures in Black cinema.

You're not in trouble, are you?

Celebrated actor and civil rights activist,

Sidney Poitier.

"You've gotta lean into it.

Don't lean away from it.

This is the film you're making.

You've absolutely got to face this head on."

Y'all done heard the man.

Get ass up outta that.

So in the end, Tarantino did exactly that.

He found a historic plantation

which still has like 22 slave huts

and used that as the main base

of the Candie Land plantation.

But leaning into his story and its history

meant confronting America's darkest truths.

We kind of all learned the history

of this certain plantation,

which was horrible.

And for his Black cast,

playing in the sandbox of history

involved digging up the painful past.

That was a tough one,

'cause it's so horrible.

Stop.

Framed like the Spaghetti Westerns

that inspired it,

it was easy for Tarantino's cast and crew

to forget they were working on

his most controversial project yet.

The first part of filming,

we were in different parts of California,

and we were making a Western.

Come out right now with your hands over your head.

And it was fun.

"Oh, we're making a Western.

They're riding into town."

But "Django Unchained"

wasn't a Western, remember?

It was a Southern.

Meaning it's a Western set in the South.

The Deep South.

Now we're making a slave movie.

The production had shifted

to a real plantation.

And the thing about plantations

is that they're beautiful physically.

It's all the weeping willows and all that stuff.

A place whose beauty belied its brutal history,

But they're concentration camps.

Unspeakable horrors happened there.

So you're constantly aware of that.

And the whole tone of the entire cast and crew

just got darker.

As real as the location

was the language in Tarantino's script.

What did you say?

And one violently loaded word

and inevitable point of contention.

The N word.

Get that nigger outta here.

And in this script, it was as unavoidable

as it was unutterable.

I think it was counted 110 times.

I believe it's around 116 times.

That was at least 110 times

too many for one actor.

I was in his dressing room where he goes,

"I really don't wanna say it anymore.

I can't, I don't want to say..."

I could see he just was really not into doing it.

- Why? - Because I said so,

that's why.

'Cause how uncomfortable is it to play that guy?

What's your name, boy?

It was really painful to him.

You're in trouble now, son.

Yes, sir.

In the end, there was really

only one person on set

able to help by lending some perspective,

and it wasn't Tarantino.

My understanding was that Sam said,

"Hey, man, this is just Tuesday for us."

It would appear that Broomhilda

is in fact the right nigga.

I give him the utmost respect for doing so.

- This nigga here? - That nigga there.

Because it's so not him.

Now, gentlemen, I do apologize.

While Leonardo DiCaprio

was challenged by a single word,

Kerry Washington embraced the challenge

few would have the courage to confront.

She didn't have a body double.

I remember her going through everything herself.

She had committed to the method

for her performance

as the victimized wife of Django, Broomhilda.

She's a serious actor.

But it makes sense, right?

I mean, her character is so emotionally loaded in that film.

If you're gonna have a body double

for all the emotional heavy parts,

I mean, there's gonna be something missing, right?

But method acting this role

involved embracing the trauma

at the very center of the story.

And it wasn't only emotional.

The hot box scene, man,

that was a tough one.

It's so horrible.

It was one of those things

that were just a little too realistic.

And she seemed pretty okay when we left the dressing room.

But I know it was really a struggle for her.

More than a struggle,

her role would become an ordeal

when she refused a stand in

or stunt woman for this scene.

When it came time to shoot that scene,

Kerry's performance was so powerful.

All of us were just being crushed.

I was horrified.

The stunt whip was made of nylon

to limit physical injury,

but it still hurt significantly.

Everyone was being pushed to their limits.

And I remember Quentin,

his eye was at the viewfinder shooting,

and then he lifted his eye up

and he was weeping.

Unfortunately, this cast member's character

never got a spotlight.

Just a swift chop.

Tracker Peg has a whole history.

My bottom jaw has been ripped off.

Zoe's character, Tracker Peg, was cut down.

There was this whole fight scene we'd set up.

There'd be this amazing ax fight.

Tarantino of course had proven his form

when it came to artfully dispatching

an odd ax or two.

My scarf was meant to unravel

and you're meant to see that half of my jaw is missing.

It was just a brilliant classic Quentin Tarantino

big fight scene.

Or it would've been,

the scene was reduced to this.

One shot of Django just shooting everybody in there.

We got to that part of production,

he was like, "We can't have

a big fight scene that late."

Because...

Quentin knew the movie was just too long.

We had too much movie.

And while some action and bloodletting

was jettisoned,

spirited performances made sure there would be blood,

real blood.

In the midst of the take,

Leo had slammed his hand down on the table...

Now lay your palms flat on that tabletop.

...had cut himself on a wine glass.

The blood is forming on his hand.

It was not scripted like that.

Broomhilda here is my property.

Did not stop his performance,

kept going all the way through.

I can choose to do with my property

whatever I so desire.

Tarantino liked what he saw.

However...

No one was 100% certain

that it was going to really play.

Because if we go with the bloody hand take,

all the coverage afterwards

has to account for the bloody hand

or a bandage around his hand afterwards.

So producers elected to shoot a bloodless backup.

So from that point on,

they shot the movie two different ways.

One with his hand bleeding and then bandaged-

One more moment, Doctor.

and then one without any of the blood.

But there was no equivocating

about the amount of blood in the film's crucial crescendo.

A bloodbath scene.

Whatever they were shooting now,

it was what was already in the can that mattered next.

Because the first audience to watch it

was the head of the studio.

And he has concerns.

Quentin Tarantino was rewriting

the third act of "Django Unchained"

to make sure it went out with a bang.

One as big as it was bloody.

Because it had to top

what was a very poignant storytelling moment

closer to the middle.

That was this scene with Walton Goggins

as a sadistic slave handler-

Cock-a-doodle-doo.

which was not only poignant,

but unpleasantly pointy.

He's playing with his genitals.

Time to say goodnight to them nuts.

He's going to torture him before he kills him.

I got you.

Just one reason "Django Unchained"

has never been adapted into a Broadway musical.

But editor Fred Raskin had another fire to put out

when he received a heads-up.

"Harvey's gonna come into the cutting room.

Quentin has basically given his okay

for you to show him whatever he wants to see."

Harvey Weinstein was getting nervous

about the film's subject matter,

and what was potentially

the most controversial Tarantino property he had produced.

Fred knew exactly the scene to showcase-

Everybody calm down.

the classically Tarantino-esque blend

of tension and bloody action.

I played the first scene of the movie for Harvey.

Last chance, fancy pants.

It comes to an end

and I bring up the lights.

So then I turn around,

and I just go, "And that is how you open a movie."

- No doubt. - Well, Harvey just laughed

and he was like, "Keep playing."

With Harvey's approval of the edit,

Tarantino could shoot his reimagined final scene,

instead of Django exacting his easy revenge

at Candie's funeral,

Tarantino wanted...

A bloodbath scene.

I couldn't resist.

And he moved it into the house.

An orgiastic dispensing of summary justice,

Django's ultimate revenge on his enslavers.

A gunfight so big that, once again,

Tarantino's longtime special effects pals, KNB,

would be called upon to keep the blood pumping.

He changed the whole ending like out of the blue.

It's like, "It's not a lot of stuff."

And it turned out to be tons of stuff.

And not only that,

Tarantino had to call on his crew

to make up the numbers.

Quentin comes to set,

and he said, "Oh yeah, and then we're gonna shoot this

and then we're gonna shoot Dieter the Kid."

Dieter the Kid was not a character in the film.

It was Tarantino's nickname

for his trusty production assistant

who was about to become a character in the film,

albeit briefly.

John McLeod--

That's special effects supervisor, John McLeod.

And he's like, "Oh, so we're gonna put on

a leather plate under your chest

and put the squib on top."

I'm like, "Ah, I don't need that."

And he's like, "Okay, well."

I mean, the squibs could be like this big.

Squibs being the explosive blood bags

that do this when triggered.

I was so nervous, I just flew backwards

without it going off, and then it went off

while I was flying backwards.

It felt like a horse giving you a kick in the chest.

I was like, okay, I went up to him like,

"Hey, John, can I get that leather plate?"

I don't know how actors do it, man.

You gotta have it in your blood.

So to speak.

This bloodbath certainly satisfied

Reggie's golden ratio of two to one

when it came to Black vengeance over white crimes.

And besides, this was a Tarantino signature...

- Oh. - ...written in blood, of course.

Not you, Steven.

You right where you belong.

Following the massacre at Candie Land,

there was just one thing left to do.

Blowing up Candie Land.

That is to say their sudden

cataclysmic disassembly

of this carefully constructed facade.

Okay, three, two, one.

And it was gone.

And with that,

"Django Unchained" wrapped principal photography.

The Western that was really a Southern

was finally in the can.

And not a moment too soon.

Quentin said, "I can't do this anymore."

"Let's go back to LA."

But the can was overflowing with film.

Even with whole action sequences dumped,

the assembly cut...

Believe ran four hours and 27 minutes long.

It was long.

We had too much movie.

Initially choosing what storylines

would stay was simple.

If it bleeds, it leads.

Like Leonardo.

It was clear to everyone upon watching it the first time

that the blood was the way we were gonna go.

It was a pleasure doing business with y'all.

And that was that.

Getting the comedy right

would prove more tricky.

The bags-on-their-head scene--

Do we have to wear 'em when we ride?

We screened that a few times

for people that were just visiting us

in the editing room.

Make your own goddamn masks.

Every time we played it back,

it barely got laughs.

I could've cut it better than this.

And Quentin said,

"I wanna take that scene out of the movie."

Next time, we do the bags right.

And we may never have seen this

were it not for one audience.

I didn't say no bags.

The test audience,

which included the man himself.

Quentin sits in the middle of the audience.

When you sit there

and you just have your antenna out

and you're feeling the room.

Are they enjoying it?

Are they laughing at things? Are they not?

Okay, I'm confused.

Are the bags on or off?

They laughed uproariously.

You could barely hear the dialogue

they were laughing so loud.

And all I can hear is criticize,

- criticize, criticize. - And so we knew,

"Okay, this scene is staying."

Even trickier was working out

how much the film should bleed.

Turn him around now.

We discovered the Mandingo fight

was pretty traumatizing for the audience.

And before they've had a chance to recover,

they watch a guy get eaten by dogs.

Tarantino's take on treading a fine line

was so Tarantino

it might've been a scene in one of his films.

Quentin had a phrase where it was like,

"I cut their heads off,

but then their heads grow back.

If their heads don't grow back,

then I've lost them."

And you wanna cut their heads off,

but give them a chance for recovery.

Aw.

We softened both of those scenes just enough.

Would you please shut these goddamn dogs up?

I cannot hear myself think.

You still hated Calvin Candie,

but you also were not so traumatizing the audience

that they couldn't actually enjoy the movie.

But an unsuspecting test audience

was never going to be Django's toughest crowd.

My memory is, after the screening,

there was heated conversations,

and I'm pretty sure it had to do with the N word.

Initial unease about a white director

running roughshod over Black history

now seemed warranted.

It's against the law for niggas

to ride horses in this territory.

And there was like a, "Maybe we need to pull back

on not just the N word,"

but effectively that became the symbol

of what they were talking about.

Sons of bitches.

Tarantino understood the concerns,

but refused to compromise.

And I'm not trying to speak for him,

but if it makes you uncomfortable,

there's a reason it makes you uncomfortable,

and you should feel uncomfortable.

Unsurprisingly, critics begged to differ,

including some of Black America's most respected voices.

He doesn't really like the way he used the N word.

I wish to purchase one of your nigga gals.

The report on the internet

is that it is the movie

that has the most uses of the word in film history.

Spike Lee was outspoken

in his criticism of the film.

He refused to watch.

It would be disrespectful to my ancestors.

He felt that this movie did disservice

and that it was a caricature of his ancestors' experience.

The American slave experience

was not a Sergio Spaghetti Western.

Why y'all wanna come into my town

and start trouble?

Sam L. Jackson defended Tarantino,

saying he's not a racist director.

Oh, come on, I ain't got no problem with it.

That he's speaking in the language of the characters.

That's how they would talk.

Now, what you got to say about that?

I'm not seeing it.

He may have been

one of the hottest directors in Hollywood,

but on the eve of its release,

the studio executives were getting cold feet

about Quentin Tarantino's most controversial film.

There was some upset people,

and Quentin included.

He wasn't feeling supported,

and the people he wasn't feeling supported by

were probably just feeling fucking terrified.

"Django Unchained" was released

in December of 2012.

♪ Django ♪

And it was "Django Unchanged" for Tarantino.

If you know you're coming from the place

you're coming from,

you have to believe it and you have to fight for it.

They're a little tense out there.

Whatever Tarantino was saying...

I count two guns, nigga.

...and however he was saying it,

audiences wanted to hear it.

All you Black folks,

I suggest you get away from all these white folks.

This spoke to a deep-seated need in Black viewers,

and they finally got to see what they really wanted to see.

You know, we were right.

The Spaghetti Western-inspired Southern

raked in over $425 million

from its $100 million budget.

This phase of Tarantino's career

is like each movie is like,

oh, it's bigger than the last one.

So "Inglorious Bastards," his biggest ever.

- No longer, no. - Nein, nein, nein.

This was Tarantino's biggest hit yet.

Everyone fucking loved that movie.

That's accurate.

With "Django" so warmly received,

two years later, Tarantino saddled up once more

for "The Hateful Eight."

Well, I'll be double-dog-damned.

"The Hateful Eight."

Tarantino reprised a dream team

of his own acting alumni,

and gave one favorite a leading role,

some said was overdue.

Got room for one more?

I liked that Sam got to finally star

in a Quentin Tarantino in "Hateful Eight."

That gets me.

I think it is a profound

collaboration in cinema history,

I really do.

It gets me too.

But another of Tarantino's collaborations...

I want to thank Harvey Weinstein.

would not end so well.

Harvey was just a pig.

Three days after multiple sexual abuse charges

against the producer became public,

Harvey Weinstein was fired from the company

that bore his name.

Quentin knew about it, I knew about it.

Most people did know,

but nobody was gonna say fuck all,

because you just wouldn't do that,

'cause he's Harvey Weinstein for Christ's sake.

He was the most powerful guy in the industry.

Everybody was scared shitless of him.

He definitely wreaked havoc in a lot of our lives.

His outing sparked a global reckoning.

This happened to a lot of women.

And the ground zero of the scandal

proved to be right at the heart of Tarantino's world,

from Mira Sorvino, Salma Hayek, to Rosanna Arquette...

My heart was racing,

as soon as, it was like, "Danger, danger."

to Daryl Hannah.

She goes, "I'm in the bathroom. I got the door closed,

and he's out there and he won't leave."

And at the epicenter,

his own muse, Uma Thurman.

Many of Weinstein's victims

were actresses who had helped make Tarantino who he was.

And yet the price paid for some survivors,

like Rose McGowan, was their careers.

I think that the fact that we've got a man this powerful

to see Lady Justice staring him down,

it feels like a huge win already.

Weinstein was jailed in 2023

for rape and sexual assault.

He's lost his career.

He's a very sick man.

Tarantino severed ties with the man

who had helped make him a star.

Very understandably,

and necessarily parted ways.

That's a great idea, Kato.

His next film, "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,"

would be his first without Weinstein

and would serve as an autobiographical epic

tying together his cinematic universe.

And cut.

Quentin Tarantino, who's made a career

out of stealing from everybody else-

You got a problem with that?

this piece actually takes everything from his own movies.

We got the Western,

we got the "Django" and "The Hateful Eight" with the Lancer.

Nobody likes Spaghetti Westerns.

The car from "Reservoir Dogs."

How are those pickles?

There's a piece of him from all of his movies

in "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood."

Could you roll me one of those, cowboy?

Now, I smoke red apples.

A sort of highlights reel of Tarantino

sounded like a recipe for success at the cinema.

What a picture.

And was, to the tune of $390 million

from a budget of 90 million.

Not bad, Kato.

His second-biggest hit,

it brought Tarantino's total box office over nine films

to over $1.9 billion.

But this is not really a story about money.

It's the little differences.

It's the as-yet-unfinished tale

of a postmodern American auteur.

Quentin's got a pulse right on the emotional nerve

of the audience.

A bold young filmmaker

who found his feet as a director

and never stopped.

Quentin's done an amazing job of,

I was gonna say walking the line,

but also just being like, "Fuck the line.

I'm just gonna put my shit out there,

knowing that I love humans,

I'm fascinated by humans,

I love history, I love film."

He loves all of these things.

And then if people take offense,

they can take offense.

That's life in the Tarantino-verse.

I'm sure you'll like it.

Yeah, I like it a lot, smartass.

The former video store clerk, movie junkie,

turned writer, director and occasionally actor...

What the fuck was I talking about?

...somehow created his own movie language.

That's the difference from Quentin Tarantino pictures

to any picture that anybody else might do anywhere.

The very best there is.

And like all risk-taking rule breakers,

he changed the game.

He changed the way things went in Hollywood.

The rules are different,

the game is unique,

and everybody wants to be a part of it.

His often-quoted aim to make just 10 movies

means one thing.

He's got one left.

I'm sure he'll make it.

You have not heard the last of his voice.

He's too great a filmmaker

to stop giving us incredible movies.

So thank you, Quentin.