(The Root) — If you thought Quentin Tarantino was done with historical revenge fantasies after Inglourious Basterds and his latest, Django Unchained — a "postmodern, slave-narrative Western," in the words of The Root's editor-in-chief, Henry Louis Gates Jr. — you'd be wrong.
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The spaghetti Western-inspired Django Unchained, for which Tarantino won an Academy Award for best original screenplay on Sunday, depicts the horrors of slavery — with graphic violence and racial slurs aplenty — in the antebellum South. It tells the tale with the irreverence we've come to expect from a Tarantino film. Of course, the epic tale, about a slave-turned-bounty hunter (Jamie Foxx) on a mission to free his wife (Kerry Washington) from a brutal Mississippi cotton plantation with the help of his mentor (Christoph Waltz), has generated praise from black critics and intellectuals, as well as criticism. In an excerpt from a recent three-part, sweeping interview with The Root's resident scholar of the slave narrative, Tarantino details his idea for a Django-Inglourious Basterds trilogy.
Henry Louis Gates Jr.: You've targeted Nazis in Inglourious Basterds and slave owners in Django Unchained. What's next on the list of oppressors to off?
Quentin Tarantino: I don't know exactly when I'm going to do it, but there's something about this that would suggest a trilogy. My original idea for Inglourious Basterds way back when was that this [would be] a huge story that included the [smaller] story that you saw in the film, but also followed a bunch of black troops, and they had been f—ked over by the American military and kind of go apes—t. They basically — the way Lt. Aldo Raines (Brad Pitt) and the Basterds are having an "Apache resistance" — [the] black troops go on an Apache warpath and kill a bunch of white soldiers and white officers on a military base and are just making a warpath to Switzerland.
So that was always going to be part of it. And I was going to do it as a miniseries, and that was going to be one of the big storylines. When I decided to try to turn it into a movie, that was a section I had to take out to help tame my material. I have most of that written. It's ready to go; I just have to write the second half of it.
HLG: That might very well be the third of the trilogy.
QT: That would be the third of the trilogy. It would be [connected to] Inglourious Basterds, too, because "Inglourious Basterds" are in it, but it is about the soldiers. It would be called Killer Crow or something like that.
HLG: When would it be set?
QT: In '44. It would be after Normandy.
Henry Louis Gates Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research at Harvard University. He is also the editor-in-chief of The Root.
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