There was a time when Will Smith was to saddle up for Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained, and having his name attached helped get the movie rolling. Of course, it ultimately went to Jamie Foxx and the rest is R-rated history. It was a shame, at the time, because Smith had never done a film that would’ve required him to get so violent, and as it turns out, that’s one of the reasons why he turned it down. Well, that and he didn’t want to make a movie about slavery.
The irony is that he is, right now, shooting Antoine Fuqua’s runaway slave epic, Emancipation. So what changed for Smith that he would take on one film on the topic but not the other? It’s all about tone and message, he told GQ…
“I’ve always avoided making films about slavery. In the early part of my career… I didn’t want to show Black people in that light. I wanted to be a superhero. So I wanted to depict Black excellence alongside my white counterparts. I wanted to play roles that you would give to Tom Cruise. And the first time I considered it was ‘Django.’ But I didn’t want to make a slavery film about vengeance.”
Smith continued, “[‘Emancipation’] was one that was about love and the power of Black love,” Smith said. “And that was something that I could rock with. We were going to make a story about how Black love makes us invincible.”
I would argue that Django Unchained is about a Helluva lot more than just vengeance, and he might want to give it another watch. Or a first one. Something tells me he never actually saw it.
Anyway, Emancipation is based on the true story of “whipped Peter”, a slave whose picture of his scarred back became a rallying cry for abolitionists in 1863. The story follows his escape from a Louisiana plantation to the north where he becomes part of the Union army. Smith is joined in the cast by Ben Foster, Charmaine Bingwa, and Mustafa Shakir.
