Will Smith Elaborates on Turning Down Django Unchained

Will Smith has broken his silence about turning down the chance to lead the cast of Quentin Tarantino’s slave western “Django Unchained”, revealing he didn’t want to star in a vengeance movie. Arguably one of the more prominent career missteps in recent memory, Smith’s decision is cause for conversation time and time again, though the actor’s more recent choice to pass on a project is much more rational.

“It was about the creative direction of the story”, Smith said during the roundtable. Of course the same thing can’t be said about After Earth, which Smith starred in the following year. Will Smith has exposed he would have loved to have stared in Django Unchained, if it was not for all in that vengeance & violence. Smith revealed he was turned off by the violence and thought the story of a guy that learns how to kill to retrieve his wife that has been taken as a slave should be more about love than violence.

‘When I chose movies I’m choosing the arc: I read the first 35 pages and I read the ending; and to me that idea is ideal’.

“I wanted to make the greatest love story that African-Americans had ever seen from American cinema”, he explained to The Hollywood Reporter. Missed connection: He stated the director & he just could not see eye to eye relating to the core motivation of the story’Violence begets violence. He also had an issue with the level of violence in the film. But now Smith seems to have finally gotten down the real reason he turned down he chance to work with Quentin Tarantino? “Django wasn’t the lead, so it was like, I need to be the lead”, said Smith then.

Tarantino came close to working with Leonardo DiCaprio on Inglourious Basterds before they finally made Django Unchained, so here’s hoping a team-up between Tarantino and Smith is still in the cards somewhere down the line.