It was only a matter of time before Quentin Tarantino made his first full-blown western and Django Unchained (our review!) proves to be one of the most playful, inventive examples of the genre in decades. The writer-director is adamant about his belief that audiences have always enjoyed entertaining westerns, but he believes that we’ve been deprived of this in recent years. “I think it started in the ’80s and continued through the ’90s,” he explains. “Directors wanted to do westerns and they were never lucky enough to get them going. When a filmmaker finally did get one going, they were so enamored with themselves that they all wanted that to be their classic western for all time. They all wanted to make these classic movies and they all got really long and beauty shots became the most important thing about them.”

Tarantino invokes the westerns of the ’50s and ’60s—the heyday of Anthony Mann, Sam Peckinpah, and the spaghetti westerns he holds so dear—explaining that these films didn’t wear their artistic ambition on their sleeve. “They were the action movies that you would go and see the way people go and see cop movies or serial killer movies now,” Tarantino says. “And so with all the beauty shots and all the trying to take on John Ford about this or that and the other, the last four generations of people that go and see westerns think they’re boring because they’re all pastoral. Westerns were never supposed to be that pastoral.”

Instead of recent Hollywood westerns, Tarantino drew upon the gritty nihilism of spaghetti westerns, particularly the films of Sergio Corbucci (Django, The Great Silence). “Of all the [versions of the] West that had been depicted in cinema, consistently his was the most brutal,” he argues. “His was the most violent. His villains were the most depraved. His heroes were the most, in some ways, unheroic. They could be bad guys in another movie, but by virtue of the fact that his villains are so loathsome, they’re the good guys by process of elimination.”

In recent years, Tarantino has been writing film criticism in his spare time and the work of Corbucci has been one of his areas of focus. In studying the Italian director’s work, he started to detect subtle and even overt allusions to real life oppression. “They always dealt with the fascism left over from World War 2 to some degree or another, which would be honest enough coming from his point of view, having lived under Mussolini,” says Tarantino, suggesting parallels to the world of his last film, Inglourious Basterds. “A lot of that might actually be me having just done Basterds and reading that into it, but if you look at the movies, you can make the case. Also, more than [Sergio] Leone (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly), he brought over-the-top violence into his movies and an even more surrealistic view of things, where Leone might have brought a more operatic view. In trying to think of a tale that could use this kind of Corbucci West, what could be a place that could be so brutal and the land and the people so pitiless? I thought being a slave in the Antebellum South would be the perfect American representation of a Corbucci West.”

While this is Tarantino’s second consecutive historical epic, he doesn’t believe he’s taken any great liberties this time around. “In the case of Inglourious Basterds, I can’t really bristle much if you say it’s an alternative history because I kill Hitler at the end, but I don’t really think this is alternative history at all,” he says of Django Unchained. “Everything that happens in the movie has a really strong historical basis. I’m not following a true story—you know, ‘based on a true story’—I’m not following a slave narrative from the history books, but the world that the movie takes place in, the business of slavery and Mississippi at that time, is very true to life.”

This director and his stars confronted this reality head-on while shooting scenes on real plantations, locations with a beauty that Tarantino finds somewhat paradoxical. “On one hand, a lot of ugly stuff happened in those places,” Tarantino explains. “But then there’s the weird dichotomy of how beautiful these places are. We think of and describe Candieland as like hell on earth and then you get there and it’s actually quite pretty. It’s not Dachau. It has a completely different feeling there, even though things like that happened there. It makes it seem even more sinister.”

During the shoot, the memory of real slaves weighed heavily on Tarantino—and he felt their spirits watching over the production. “When we did the scene where Broomhilda gets whipped, we did it in the area of the plantation where the slaves lived,” he says. “When you see that and you see the little shacks in the background, those are all the actual real slave living quarters. They’re still standing to this day. You could feel the blood in the grass. You could feel the bits of flesh on the trees. And you also felt the spirits of the people that came before us, even kind of watching this story that we were telling.”

Tarantino’s pursuit of authenticity in depicting the atrocities of American history spilled over to his more playful recreation of film history. This was particularly evident when he moved the production from California to Wyoming in search of snow. “Shooting in Wyoming was amazing and wonderful,” he explains. “Right in the Grand Tetons. Right where they shot Shane. And I wanted real snow, not just a little bit of snow. The globe is ravaged by global warming now. The only places you can go in America and count on snow is pretty much Wyoming and Utah. I actually think the most gorgeous shots in the movie are the snow shots—during the “I Got a Name” montage. That breath, the real breath that you see is important or the fact that you actually see the horses struggling.”

Shooting the film throughout much of 2012, Tarantino lost several cast members—including Kevin Costner, Kurt Russell, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Sasha Baron Cohen—due to scheduling conflicts. However, one actor he was surprised to gain was Leonardo DiCaprio, whose character (Calvin Candie) was written to be much older. “We got together and we talked and he had a really interesting take on the piece,” Tarantino says. “It became fun to actually re-think the whole movie with a younger Candie. What would that do? Would that change anything? Is there anything negative that’s happening here? Is there anything positive that’s coming from that? And it all became positive to me when I started thinking about it because I actually did like the idea. As opposed to Candie being the soiled old brutal king of the plantation, him being the petulant boy emperor. More of a Caligula-like character. Or a Louis the Fourteenth in Southern drag.”

When Tarantino started casting the film, it was widely reported that he wrote the title role for Will Smith, but the writer-director suggests that this isn’t quite accurate. “It’s been a little blown out of proportion that I was offering Will Smith the part of Django on a silver platter or that I was writing it for him,” he explains. “That really wasn’t the case. Django was Django when I was writing him the entire time. I didn’t really have an idea who would play him. I considered Will Smith. I considered a few other people. He got the script and he read it and he liked it and we got together to talk, but it just didn’t seem like the right fit.”

Tarantino sees casting as an intuitive process. Rather than convince himself to cast a particular actor, he waits for the feeling that tells him he’s found the right person for the job. This is the sensation he felt when he met Django Unchained star Jamie Foxx. “He was my cowboy,” Tarantino explains. “There was just a cowboy quality to him. He’s from Texas. We’re more or less around the same age. He knows what it’s like to be a kid in the ’70s and actually experience racism and he shared that. That was a big part of his whole thing with me, giving me a little hint into his life and what he’s seen and what he’s experienced. Frankly, now I can’t imagine anybody but Jamie being Django.”

Foxx had a strong grasp of Tarantino’s vision for the film, but he also grasped his vision for its future, one one that both men agreed was the real reason to make Django Unchained. “Now we’re thinking of it as this brand new movie that’s coming out and we’re sort of getting all this attention because it’s brand new and everything,” says Tarantino. “But then in a few months that won’t be the case anymore and we’ll live in a world where Django Unchained already exists. There’s a whole lot of black kids yet to be born and I think Django Unchained might be a seminal movie for them as they grow up. Jamie got all that.”