Why Jamie Foxx Considered Quentin Tarantino a Hip Hop Artist
Quentin Tarantino collaborated with Jamie Foxx for the first time on Django Unchained. While working with the filmmaker, Tarantino’s style of directing reminded the comedian of listening to hip hop artists.
Jamie Foxx told Quentin Tarantino he’s hip hop
Foxx learned a lot about Tarantino after they worked together for Unchained. His experience with the filmmaker might have been different than with other directors, as he witnessed firsthand Tarantino’s ability to improvise while on set. To Foxx, this gave Tarantino’s filmmaking a musical quality.
“Quentin Tarantino is a hip-hop artist. I told him, ‘You’re hip-hop!’ 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 way his dialogue is, it is a musical,” Foxx once told Collider.
Foxx pointed to how Tarantino rewrote the ending to Unchained on a whim as a demonstration of his skills.
“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,’ and he was walking on the rubble, and then said, ‘Okay, I’ve got it!’ He went to his trailer, and then came back with the end of the movie. It was dope,” Foxx said.
How Jamie Foxx got Rick Ross to be in ‘Django Unchained’
Django Unchained’s soundtrack features several artists, including rapper Rick Ross. Ross made a track exclusive for the 2012 feature that can be heard in the middle of the film. But Foxx was the one who inspired the lyrics the hip hop artist would use for the film.
“I ran into Rick Ross and told him that he had to come by the set. Quentin doesn’t do original stuff, but I didn’t think it would hurt for him to come and feel it. Django is hip-hop. This is a different thing. So, Rick Ross showed up,” Foxx said.
Given that Ross was a fan of Tarantino himself, he was more than happy to make the record for the film.
“I said, ‘Rick, if you’re gonna write a song for it, I think you should say these words: I need a hundred black coffins for a hundred bad men, dig a hundred black graves so I can lay they ass in.’ That would be my contribution. What he does with it, I don’t know. But, if he does what I think he’s gonna do, it will be crazy,” Foxx remembered.
Jamie Foxx shared that filming ‘Django Unchained’ was more challenging than shooting his Oscar-winning project ‘Ray’
A few years before Django, Foxx starred in the 2006 movie Ray. The film famously saw Foxx portraying late singer Ray Charles in one of his most critically acclaimed performances. Foxx went on to win an Oscar for the role.
Foxx did a lot of preparation to do Ray Charles justice. This included studying how the singer performed, and even wearing prosthetics to make himself blind on set. Still, despite the challenges he faced in Ray, Foxx asserted that shooting Django Unchained was even more so.
“Yeah. Ray was a challenge, but we were having fun and it was music. This film was the constant thought, and I hope this sounds right for the majority, and people are going to take it no matter what because that’s the just the way it is, especially dealing with that subject matter, but that was the challenge. It was the things that you couldn’t put into words,” Foxx once told Black Film.
