The one and only character that Quentin Tarantino wrote and “hated”
In the filmography of Quentin Tarantino, in all its luscious gore and violence, there are a fair few characters who are deeply unlikeable, though often enjoyably so. Glancing over his career, the likes of the titular Bill from Kill Bill, Hans Landa from Inglourious Basterds and Robert De Niro’s Louis Gara stand out as the worst of the lot. There is one other character so detestable, however, that even Quentin Tarantino hated their existence.
The filmmaker has a passion for grisly on-screen violence, snappy dialogue, and peculiar shots of people’s feet. Nothing defines Tarantino better than his characters, whose cinematic reputation often precedes the movies they star in. Ever since his very first major feature film, Reservoir Dogs, in 1992, the director has proven that, thanks to his tightly written scripts, he’s adept at creating layered characters that ooze larger-than-life charisma.
There is no better scenario for such a horrific character to flourish than in the wild west, a period of time on the American frontier when the law was taken into the hands of cowboys and bandits each battling with supremacy and survival. A significant lover of the western genre thanks to filmmakers such as Sergio Leone, Sergio Corbucci and Duccio Tessar, Tarantino often suffused the styles of such directors in with his own films.
Leone particularly was a great inspiration for Tarantino, with the Pulp Fiction director telling The Spectator in 2019: “The movie that made me consider filmmaking, the movie that showed me how a director does what he does, how a director can control a movie through his camera, is Once Upon a Time in the West”.
Continuing, Tarantino added that Sergio Leone’s 1969 classic starring Charles Bronson and Henry Fonda, “Really illustrated how to make an impact as a filmmaker…I found myself completely fascinated, thinking: ‘That’s how you do it.’ It ended up creating an aesthetic in my mind”.
This led Quentin Tarantino to create two westerns of his own, Django Unchained in 2012 and The Hateful Eight in 2015, with Kill Bill also containing elements from the classic American genre. The first, and best, of these efforts was Django Unchained starring Christoph Waltz, Jamie Foxx, Samuel L. Jackson and Leonardo DiCaprio in a revenge film that saw Foxx depict a free slave-hunting down an evil plantation owner.
The villain in question, Calvin Candie, is played by Leonardo DiCaprio and was the only character written by Quentin Tarantino that he has “hated”. Speaking to Playboy Magazine upon the release of the film in 2012, the director wrote, “I hated Candie and I normally like my villains no matter how bad they are”. Getting too involved in the psychology of the character, Tarantino added, “I could see his point of view, but I hated it so much. For the first time as a writer, I just fucking hated this guy”.
Calvin dubs his plantation – the fourth largest in the state – Candyland, and subjects every non-white person he encounters to heinous acts of racism. DiCaprio’s character is evil in every sense of the word, and he takes great joy in watching other people suffer. The actor does a brilliant job of playing a character that has absolutely no redeeming qualities, eventually reaping the consequences of his actions by receiving a fatal gunshot to the heart.
Played a little too well by Leonardo DiCaprio, Calvin Candie is known as one of the most dislikeable characters in Quentin Tarantino’s filmography thanks to his nasty racist rhetoric and evil grin of pleasure in expressing such abhorrent views. Taking his method acting to a new level of realism, in one scene, DiCaprio even accidentally cuts his hand, only to continue the scene and deliver a truly monstrous performance.
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