The D Is Silent: 10 Behind-The-Scenes Facts About Django Unchained

The case could be made that all of Quentin Tarantino’s movies are spaghetti westerns. They certainly all take visual and stylistic cues from the classic films of Sergio Leone and Sergio Corbucci. But the director didn’t actually make a western until he sat down to write his groundbreaking “southern,” Django Unchained, the story of a freed slave who becomes a bounty hunter and sets out to rescue his wife from a sadistic plantation owner.

The movie was controversial, for obvious reasons, when it hit theaters in 2012, but it was also critically acclaimed. So, here are 10 Behind-The-Scenes Facts About Django Unchained.

10 Christoph Waltz initially turned down the role of Dr. Schultz

Quentin Tarantino found a new regular collaborator when he cast Christoph Waltz to play Col. Hans Landa in Inglourious Basterds. Waltz came as a godsend, as the director was beginning to fear that the role of Landa was unplayable. Then, Waltz came in and knocked it out of the park.

When he was writing his next movie, Django Unchained, Tarantino made sure to write a role for Waltz, as the German dentist-turned-bounty hunter who frees Django, trains him in his trade, and then helps to save his wife. Waltz initially turned down the role, feeling it was too obviously tailored towards him and wouldn’t be a challenge, but Tarantino persuaded him to take the part.

9 The original Django, Franco Nero, has a cameo appearance

The lead character’s name in Django Unchained comes from Sergio Corbucci’s old spaghetti western Django, which starred Franco Nero as the titular gunslinger. Nero has a cameo appearance in Django Unchained as an homage to the actor’s most iconic work.

He plays the man at the bar who asks Django for his name. Django tells him, “The D is silent,” and in a pitch-perfect, self-referencing, wink-to-the-audience response, Nero says, “I know.” Apparently, when Nero first met Quentin Tarantino, he was impressed by the director’s knowledge of his filmography, quoting dozens of lines and even songs from his old movies to him.

8 The theme song mixes samples of Tupac and James Brown

In order to create the theme song for Django Unchained, Quentin Tarantino brought together two of music’s fallen icons. The director brought in Tupac’s old sound engineer Claudio Cueni to combine the Swizz Beatz Remix of the late rapper’s classic track “Untouchable” with James Brown’s iconic song “The Payback.”

Mixed together, these two songs became “Unchained,” the awesome theme song from Django Unchained. The song is featured most prominently during the movie’s climactic shootout, and it appears on the soundtrack album. Cueni also mixed in samples of a few lines of dialogue from the film, such as, “I like the way you die, boy.”

7 Django wears the same sunglasses that Charles Bronson wore in The White Buffalo

Dressing Django was a difficult challenge for the wardrobe department, because they wanted to make the character a badass, but they didn’t want to be culturally insensitive. It was a tough line to walk, and they ended up drawing in influences from many places, like Thomas Gainsborough’s famous painting “The Blue Boy.”

Sharen Davis, one of the costume designers, wanted to bring a “rock ‘n roll take” to the character of Django – which was certainly a challenge, because the movie’s subject matter doesn’t lend itself to rock ‘n roll – so she gave him the same pair of sunglasses that Charles Bronson wore in the movie The White Buffalo.

6 A lot of A-list actors were considered to play Django

Jamie Foxx ended up being the perfect choice to play Django, but he wasn’t Quentin Tarantino’s first choice for the part. Instead, Tarantino wanted Will Smith for the lead character. Smith turned it down, because he felt that Django wasn’t the lead character in the script; Dr. Schultz was.

With Smith out of the running, Terrence Howard, Chris Tucker, Tyrese Gibson, and The Wire’s Idris Elba (Stringer) and Michael K. Williams (Omar) were all considered. Cuba Gooding, Jr. openly lobbied for the part, but Tarantino didn’t feel like Gooding was right for it, so he wouldn’t even give him an audition for the role.

5 Calvin Candie is the only character Tarantino has created that he really hates

Quentin Tarantino has created a lot of iconic characters over the years, and many of them have been deplorable villains, but they usually have some kind of humanity. Even Hans Landa simply sees himself as a detective with a job to do. But Tarantino has said that Django Unchained’s Calvin Candie is the only character he’s ever created that he really hates.

Leonardo DiCaprio had been the first choice for the role of Hans Landa in Inglourious Basterds. He turned out to be wrong for that part, but Tarantino still liked the idea of DiCaprio playing a villain, so he wrote the role of Calvin in Django Unchained specifically with the actor in mind.

4 Jonah Hill was supposed to have a bigger role

Jonah Hill makes a surprising cameo appearance in Django Unchained as one of the guys in white hoods who are supposed to be a primitive version of the Ku Klux Klan. Originally, Hill was offered a much larger role in the film.

His character was called Scotty Harmony, and he would’ve been the son of some Southern slave buyers who wanted his parents to buy Broomhilda so that she could be his lover. This whole part of the story was cut, and so Hill was given a much smaller role as an unnamed member of the K.K.K. with just a couple of lines.

3 Frank Ocean wrote a song for the film that was scrapped

Frank Ocean wrote, performed, and submitted a song for the Django Unchained soundtrack, and although Quentin Tarantino loved it, he couldn’t find a place for it in the movie, so it was scrapped.

Tarantino explained why he didn’t end up using the song: “Frank Ocean wrote a fantastic ballad that was truly lovely and poetic in every way – there just wasn’t a scene for it. I could have thrown it in quickly, just to have it, but that’s not why he wrote it and not his intention. So, I didn’t want to cheapen his effort.” Ocean eventually released the song separately under the title “Wise Man.”

2 Christoph Waltz has the most screen time of any Best Supporting Actor winner

Just as he did for Quentin Tarantino’s previous film Inglourious Basterds, Christoph Waltz won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in Django Unchained. With one hour, six minutes, and 17 seconds of screen time, this is the highest amount of screen time for any actor who won an Oscar in a supporting category.

This is a reversal of Anthony Hopkins’ famous Best Actor win for The Silence of the Lambs, which he managed to earn with just around 20 minutes of screen time. Waltz won Best Supporting Actor with triple the screen time that Hopkins won Best Actor with.

1 Leonardo DiCaprio cut his hand for real in the dinner scene

This is a pretty well-known story. During the dinner scene in which Calvin Candie delivers a long monologue before cutting his hand and wiping his blood all over Broomhilda’s face, Leonardo DiCaprio’s hand actually started bleeding. He decided not to let a little hiccup like gushing blood from an open wound ruin a good take, so he just rolled with it, and incorporated the blood into the scene.

Kerry Washington reacts with real horror when Calvin smears blood on her, because she wasn’t expecting it to happen. DiCaprio is known as a notorious method actor, and this just proves it.

About The Author

Ben Sherlock
(3461 Articles Published)

Ben Sherlock is a writer, comedian, independent filmmaker, and Burt Reynolds enthusiast. He writes lists for Screen Rant and features and reviews for Game Rant. He’s currently in pre-production on his first feature (and has been for a while, because filmmaking is expensive). You can catch him performing standup at odd pubs around the UK that will give him stage time. Previously, he wrote for Taste of Cinema, Comic Book Resources, and BabbleTop.

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