What makes you such a Mandingo expert?
I'm curious what makes you so curious.
This is Calvin Candie, and he is one
of Tarantino's most reprehensible
and terrifying characters.
Calvin Candie is written less like a plantation owner
and more like a psychopathic Roman emperor who
has become drunk with power.
And it's DiCaprio's incredibly nuanced performance
that distills all of this grandiosity, murder,
and hatred into a character that feels very
real in very horrible ways.
[GROANING]
Go on, boy.
Finish him.
[GROANING]
A good actor must live undeniably
in the truth of the moment, despite
the imaginary circumstances surrounding them.
And sometimes, those imaginary circumstances
can be so unfathomably cruel and awful
that it can be hard to watch.
Before we get started, don't forget
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if you haven't done so already.
Django Unchained is the seventh film
in the Tarantino canon of work.
The film is centered around the titular protagonist Django,
played by Jamie Foxx, who is a slave freed by a dentist turned
bounty hunter named Dr. King Schultz,
played by Christoph Waltz.
The two embark on a journey and deceive
a wealthy and brutal Southern slave
owner named Calvin Candie in an effort
to free Django's wife, Broomhilda, played by Kerry
Washington, from a life of servitude
at Calvin Candie's estate.
Hey, little troublemaker.
[WATER SPILLING]
[WHIMPERING]
[THUDDING]
You silver-tongued devil, you.
It's heavily inspired by the Spaghetti Western genre
and is loosely based on the 1966 film Django directed
by Sergio Corbucci.
Quentin Tarantino is known for delivering stylized genre
films that don't pull any punches when it comes
to blending nuanced and intriguing dialogue
with gritty violence in a way that feels filled with style,
symbolism, and meaning.
This is all part of what makes a Tarantino film great,
but none of that would be possible without hiring
the absolute best talent available.
Calvin Candie is the first character
that Tarantino has ever gone on record
to say that he actually hates.
In an interview with Playboy Magazine,
Tarantino stated, "I hate Candie,
and I normally like my villains, no matter how bad they are."
Tarantino's catalog of completely reprehensible
characters is quite long, Zed from Pulp Fiction; Bill
from Kill Bill; and of course, Hans Landa
are all about as horrible as a person could possibly imagine.
For Tarantino to say that this is
the character that made him uncomfortable
is actually quite a statement.
From the outset, Calvin Candie is conveyed to us
as a disgusting and brutal maniac.
The first scene in which Calvin Candie is introduced
gives us everything we need to know about this character.
Megalomania is reaching out of the screen
and punching us in the face as Dr. King Schultz
and Django aren't even given a moment
to speak before Calvin Candie demands them to address him.
Why do you want to get in the Mandingo business?
[GROANING]
You don't intend to allow your second
to make the proper introductions?
It is very clear to us that this room,
with its bloodstained floors, billiard table, wet bar,
and comfortable seating, is Kelvin Candie's throne room.
And it is a testament to his inhumane brutality
and complete sociopathy.
The setting here is quite disturbing,
mostly because of how sparsely attended and intimate
this fight actually is.
It's just Calvin Candie and one other guy watching
two slaves fight to the death while they sip on tea cocktails
five feet away.
You can almost smell this room.
We are processing so much discussed
during this scene it's almost hard to track the narrative.
There are some quick cutaways to the reactions
of Calvin Candie's slaves during the sequence, which
serve as an extremely efficient reminder
that anyone in this room who isn't white
is filled with anxiety and fear.
Candie's response to these grotesque events playing out
is that of a person riding a roller coaster.
[WHOOPING]
Outside of Candie displaying all of this violent hedonism
over the bloodshed, we begin to understand
that this is an egotistical flex over Dr. King
Schultz and Django.
Showing them what he is capable of instills
fear in them before beginning the sales negotiation
for which they have come.
The choices that DiCaprio makes here as a performer
are very small and incredibly powerful.
The dialogue is minimal and the eye contact
is everything as Candie sizes up Django
and King Schultz's tolerance for cruelty.
The cherry on top is that DiCaprio
is able to sprinkle in some amusement
behind these monstrous antics in a way that
amplifies the horror of this scene three times over.
Candie enjoys these displays of savagery,
and he enjoys observing the effects
that they have on others.
And it's not necessarily the acts themselves that terrify us
but the established normalcy of them.
Throughout the rest of the film, we delve deeper and deeper
into Calvin Candie's depravity.
En route to Candieland, Calvin orders
his henchmen to allow their dogs to eat
a slave alive for underperforming in a fight.
The first time we see Broomhilda,
she is being hauled out of a sweat box
for attempting to escape.
He later orders Broomhilda to remove her clothes
at the dinner table to show his guests the scars from a beating
he administered to her for trying to run away,
referring to them as--
It's like a painting painted, look at that.
Calvin!
All of this reprehensible, torturous, megalomania
culminates in this climactic scene in which Calvin Candie
discovers Django and King Schultz's
ruse through the help of his head of house
slave, Stephen, played by Samuel L. Jackson.
Prior to this scene, Stephen was seen as little more
than a bumbling sycophant.
[LAUGHING] Yes, sir.
I miss you like a hog miss slop.
But in this room, we see that Stephen
is more intelligent than Calvin himself.
Them mother-- [BLEEP] ain't here to buy no Mandingos.
When Stephen finally convinces Calvin
of the current ruse occurring under his roof,
we see Calvin's blood boil.
Based on our earlier understanding
of this character, he is a man who commanded his dog
to eat a human being alive over a matter of just
a few hundred dollars.
So who knows what he is going to be
able to do to people actively defrauding him over thousands
of dollars in his own home.
When Calvin re-enters, we are expecting
him to exhibit outward rage, but what we get
is almost the exact opposite.
Calvin enters with a frightening amount of confidence
due to his new understanding of the situation at hand.
It's a subtle shift.
DiCaprio is able to show us that this character is barely
containing his anger as he reaches into his apothecary bag
and places a human skull on the table.
We have no idea what is about to transpire,
but we know it's not going to be very good.
After weaving the tale of the slave
to whom this skull belonged, Candie
begins the less-than-hospitable act
of aggressively sawing into the skull of a former slave.
This is all done in an attempt to psychologically justify
white supremacy.
He breaks into the back of this skull
to prove his point scientifically.
Area associated with submissiveness
is larger than any human or any other subhuman species
on planet Earth.
This deranged, misguided, and insane viewpoint
is all derived from a man who owns
slaves, who he abuses and murders with reckless abandon.
This tonal shift indicates to our protagonists
that clearly the jig is up.
When Candie threatens to break Django's skull open,
Django and Schultz leap from their seats in terror only
to be met with the barrel end of a shotgun.
Candie then explodes, smashing his hand down
on a glass in an explosion of rage.
This glass was not a prop, by the way.
Leonardo DiCaprio unintentionally
smashed his hand into this glass,
puncturing his palm on the stem on the way down.
So all of the blood coming out of his hand at this point
is 100% real.
This take actually broke Jamie Foxx out of character,
and Tarantino's initial response to the moment
was that Leonardo DiCaprio planned the stunt out and used
a fake blood rig.
This is largely because DiCaprio didn't miss a single beat
and incorporated the injury into the scene.
This is where DiCaprio's intelligence as a performer
truly shines.
Instead of yelling to cut and calling for a set medic,
Leonardo DiCaprio embraces the performance philosophy of there
are no mistakes, only new opportunities
and uses his injury to further fuel his character.
It's incredibly effective.
Naturally, when the camera cut, DiCaprio
received necessary medical attention
before they resumed filming the remainder of the scene.
So he didn't actually smear his own blood
all over Kerry Washington's face,
but this incident speaks to the level of emotional depth
DiCaprio brings to his performances.
The emotions he is portraying are true and real.
They are only delivered through imaginary circumstances.
The scene at Candieland has now transitioned
from something tense and dangerous
to something straight out of American Psycho.
The word "unhinged" just doesn't quite
begin to cover what is being conveyed
through DiCaprio's performance.
Humanity has left his eyes as Candie explains
that he is ready and willing to bludgeon Broomhilda to death
with his hammer and will do so with great pleasure
if they do not accept his new offer of $12,000 for Broomhilda
and Broomhilda alone.
Once Candie gets paid, he brings the hammer down away from her
and closes the deal.
Then somehow DiCaprio is able to seamlessly morph back
into his charming Southern persona.
If you care to join me in the parlor,
we will be serving white cake.
DiCaprio delivers a performance so strong a viewer can actually
have a physical reaction to how much they hate him.
In the hands of a lesser performer,
Calvin Candie may not have worked at all.
Emotional intelligence is everything
when it comes to delivering a performance,
and DiCaprio has an innate ability
to navigate uncharted territory in the human psyche
in order to deliver the frightening realism
necessary to bring this character to life.
I will have you know, there is no one in the [BLEEP] game
that appreciates the value of showmanship
more than Monsieur Calvin J. Candie here.
Nobody.
That's it for this one, folks.
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