page_title: Django Unchained
section_title: Development
hierarchical_section_title: Django Unchained / Production / Development
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Quentin Tarantino à l'avant-première parisienne de "Django unchained"English: Quentin Tarantino in Paris at the French premiere of "Django unchained"
context_page_description: Django Unchained is a 2012 American revisionist Western film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, starring Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio, Kerry Washington, and Samuel L. Jackson, with Walton Goggins, Dennis Christopher, James Remar, Michael Parks, and Don Johnson in supporting roles. Set in the Old West and Antebellum South, it is a highly-stylized, heavily-revisionist tribute to Spaghetti Westerns, in particular the 1966 Italian film Django by Sergio Corbucci, whose star Franco Nero has a cameo appearance.
  Development of Django Unchained began in 2007 when Tarantino was writing a book on Corbucci. By April 2011, Tarantino sent his final draft of the script to The Weinstein Company. Casting began in the summer of 2011, with Michael K. Williams and Will Smith being considered for the role of the title character before Foxx was cast. Principal photography took place from November 2011 to March 2012 in California, Wyoming, and Louisiana.
context_section_description: In 2007, Tarantino discussed an idea for a type of Spaghetti Western set in the United States' pre-Civil War Deep South. He called this type of film "a Southern", stating that he wanted: 
  to do movies that deal with America's horrible past with slavery and stuff but do them like Spaghetti Westerns, not like big issue movies. I want to do them like they're genre films, but they deal with everything that America has never dealt with because it's ashamed of it, and other countries don't really deal with because they don't feel they have the right to.
   Tarantino later explained the genesis of the idea: 
  I was writing a book about Sergio Corbucci when I came up with a way to tell the story. ... I was writing about how his movies have this evil Wild West, a horrible Wild West. It was surreal, it dealt a lot with fascism. So I'm writing this whole piece on this, and I'm thinking: 'I don't really know if Sergio was thinking [this] while he was doing this. But I know I'm thinking it now. And I can do it!' 
  Tarantino finished the script on April 26, 2011, and handed in the final draft to The Weinstein Company. In October 2012, frequent Tarantino collaborator RZA said that he and Tarantino had intended to cross over Django Unchained with RZA's Tarantino-presented martial-arts film The Man with the Iron Fists. The crossover would have seen a younger version of the blacksmith character from RZA's film appear as a slave in an auction. However, scheduling conflicts prevented RZA's participation.
  One inspiration for the film is Corbucci's 1966 Spaghetti Western Django, whose star Franco Nero has a cameo appearance in Django Unchained. Another inspiration is the 1975 film Mandingo, about a slave trained to fight other slaves. Tarantino included scenes in the snow as a homage to The Great Silence. "Silenzio takes place in the snow. I liked the action in the snow so much, Django Unchained has a big snow section in the middle," Tarantino said in an interview.
  The title Django Unchained alludes to the titles of the 1966 Corbucci film Django; Hercules Unchained, the American title for the 1959 Italian epic fantasy film Ercole e la regina di Lidia, about the mythical hero's escape from enslavement to a wicked master; and to Angel Unchained, the 1970 American biker film about a biker exacting revenge on a large group of rednecks.
caption: Tarantino in Paris at the film's French premiere, January 2013
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