Calvin Candie: The character Quentin Tarantino “really, really hated”
There have only been a handful of directors who have a singular vision for their movies quite like Quentin Tarantino. Throughout his work in the 1990s up until the present day, Tarantino’s unique approach to film and outlandish scripts have provided the backdrop to the biggest movies in recent memory, from the long-forgotten look at 1960s glamour in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood to the controlled chaos going on throughout every frame of Pulp Fiction. Although Tarantino is known to write every character in his movies, certain people have stuck as more revolting than others in his mind.
Then again, Tarantino villains have always been hard to empathise with from the beginning. When looking at movies like Inglorious Basterds, seeing the pure evil inside Christoph Walz’s Hans Landa has been enough to fill audiences with hate from the moment he steps onscreen. Although some villains have been more vile than others, seeing the cronies in The Manson Family being completely inept at their jobs in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is also oddly funny in a way only Tarantino can deliver.
Throughout his time working in Hollywood, though, Tarantino’s greatest strength comes when he tries to rewrite the history of certain events. Instead of the usual historically accurate documentaries, Inglorious Basterds is the kind of movie that depicts how history could have gone down, with Nazis getting what they truly deserve throughout most of the runtime.
Regarding the pure evil in American history, Tarantino wasn’t messing around when working on Django Unchained. Telling the story of a freed slave going down South to rescue his other half, the movie doesn’t shy away from the demeaning nature of slavery, especially at the expense of Calvin Candie.
Played to a tee by Leonardo DiCaprio, Candie is one of the most loathsome characters in Tarantino’s canon. While he presents himself as one of the most proper men in the south, he is the ultimate example of what slavery can do to the slaveowner, thinking that he can play God with the lives of innocent people of colour.
By the time Tarantino had finished writing the movie, even he would say that he despised everything that Candie stood for, saying, “Calvin Candie was different from the rest of them. I kind of detested the character. I really, really hated him. It was weird to write a character that I hated, and kind of feel that way about the character. Because of that, I thought he was a substandard character”.
Even though the writing stages may have been hard for the director to work through, it would become another matter when DiCaprio brought him to the screen. Absorbing himself in the role, DiCaprio is electrifying onscreen, especially in the infamous dinner scene where the actor ended up breaking a glass on the table and proceeded to keep the take going with a bleeding hand. While it may be difficult trying to put together the ideal villain on the page, it sometimes takes the actor’s power to make the most repulsive characters come to life.
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