Leonardo DiCaprio takes on
his first truly villainous role by playing Calvin Candie, owner and proprietor
of an infamous plantation called Candyland, in Columbia Pictures' Oscar-winning
action-thriller “Django Unchained.”
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| Photo courtesy of Columbia Pictures |
Candyland
is the nucleus of a hostile, dysfunctional, powerful operation. “One of the
things that was interesting about the Antebellum South is the fact that when
you had slavery you had the equivalent of big corporations today,”
writer-director Quentin Tarantino says. “You had big corporations then, but
they would just be families.”
“Leo
let me know he was interested in the film,” Tarantino says of DiCaprio. “I
tried not to be that specific with the character in the script, and I tried not
to describe him too much, so it could be open for interpretation. But I was
thinking, possibly, of an older actor. And then Leo read the script and liked
it and we got together and started talking.”
DiCaprio
made an impact, and Tarantino’s concept of the character shifted. “I just
started imagining how much easier it would be to reconfigure the guy as a
Caligula; a boy emperor,” Tarantino says. “His daddy's daddy's daddy started a
cotton business and his daddy's daddy continued it and made it profitable, and
his daddy made it even more profitable. Now, he’s the fourth Candie in line to
take over the cotton business and he’s bored with it. He doesn’t care about
cotton: that’s why he’s into the Mandingo fighters. But he’s the petulant boy
prince. He’s Louis XIV in Versailles. So I wanted to really play with that
idea, of King Louis XIV, but in the South. Candyland is a completely enclosed
community, about 65 miles long. That’s a fiefdom. He has the power of a king;
he can execute people, or do whatever he wants.”
“One
of the most vile aspects of his character is that he’s just got this charm, and
yet he doesn’t really think he’s doing anything wrong,” co-star James Remar
says of Candie’s rationale. “He’s this guy that’s got too much money, too much
power, too much time on his hands, and he can run people’s lives. He’s a
Caligula. He’s quite mad, but he justifies all of it. People aren’t gonna like
him. But they’ll respect his work. I mean I’m watching it and I’m very drawn
in. He is very precise. He pays a great deal of attention to detail.”
“Leo
has a level of commitment and seriousness about his work that I don’t think
people recognize because he’s very quiet, and he’s very humble, and he keeps to
himself,” producer Stacy Sher describes DiCaprio. “He is the person who learned
as a young man from Robert De Niro in `This Boy's Life.' He’s the person who
cares about the filmmakers that he works with, and he brings his intelligence,
and his commitment, and his desire to get you closer and closer to the truth.”
Samuel
L. Jackson’s Stephen has perhaps the most complicated relationship with Candie.
“Once we started doing table readings in Los Angeles I discovered where I
wanted to go with him, who he was, and what I wanted him to be,” Jackson
explains of Stephen. “It’s an interesting relationship between Leo and I that
works out very well in terms of Django’s relationship to Dr. Schultz. Their
relationship is almost shadowed by our relationship.”
“I
was here since his father was here, and probably spent a lot of time with him
as a child and kind of raised him. I’m almost like the father that’s gone,”
Jackson says. “We have another relationship in private than the one we have in
public. Leo’s characterization is awesome, and when we’re alone he becomes the
child that I used to take care of, and teach things, and talk to, and have a
sterner relationship with in terms of making him get in line and understanding
what’s going on.”
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