Jamie Foxx explains how Quentin Tarantino’s filmmaking is like hip-hop
Jamie Foxx is the definition of a jack of all trades. After starting out in standup comedy, he eventually landed his own self-titled sitcom, The Jamie Foxx Show. From there, Foxx embarked upon a successful career in acting that would see him star in superhero films, sports biopics, beloved musicals, and even a Quentin Tarantino project.
Foxx’s success and influence in the entertainment industry stretches far beyond the cinematic landscape, though. In between picking up Academy Award nominations and working with the likes of Will Smith and Tom Cruise, the actor also made a name for himself in music. In the same year that he contributed to Kanye West’s hit ‘Gold Digger’, Foxx found himself with a number-one album with Unpredictable.
Just behind Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby and Barbra Streisand, the record made Foxx the fourth person to have received both an Academy Award and a number-one album. Equally accomplished and acclaimed across the two art forms, it’s safe to say that Foxx knows exactly what he’s talking about when it comes to film and music.
The artist once correlated the two art forms while discussing the work of his previous collaborator, Tarantino, equating the director both to a hip-hop artist and to Mozart. “Quentin Tarantino is a hip-hop artist,” Foxx told Collider while promoting the 2012 revisionist western film, Django Unchained, “I told him, ‘You’re hip-hop!’”
Foxx’s comparison was drawn from how Tarantino promotes his films, as he explained: “You keep seeing surprises, and a clip here and there, because Quentin is hip-hop. A hip-hop artist will drop a single, leak something over here, and drop something over there ‘cause he knows it’s hot. He’s on the spot with the way he does things.”
The actor also saw musicality in Tarantino’s dialogue and writing, recalling how the director made the decision to change the ending to Django Unchained at the last moment. “The way his dialogue is, it is a musical. On the spur of the moment, he rewrote the end of the film. He blew up the house and said, ‘My ending doesn’t work.’ We were like, ‘What do you wanna do?’ He said, ‘Give me a second,’” Foxx recalled.
Between a walk on the remaining rubble and a quick trip to his trailer, Tarantino had reconceptualised his ending. “It was dope!” Foxx enthused, “Nobody does that. When a writer writes a movie, he goes and gets a cabin and is there for nine months, and then comes down with the tablets. This dude just went in his trailer [and did it]. That’s the difference. He has a musical quality where he’s riffing, but he’s riffing as a genius would, like Mozart.”
There certainly is a musicality and an innovation to Tarantino’s work that has set him apart from his peers, earning him an indisputable reputation as the cult filmmaker of a generation.
Revisit the final scene from Django Unchained below.
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