Django Kill is a surreal, gothic vision starring Tomas Milian as The Stranger, a half-breed bandit left for dead by his doublecrossing gang members. Rising from the grave, he sets about seeking revenge, aided by a pair of mystic Native Americans and armed only with a pistol and a supply of golden bullets. His quest leads him to a strange town called ‘The Unhappy Place’ where he is plunged into a bizarre world of gruesome torture, mindless violence, sexual depravity and unfathomable madness. Courtesy of Argent Films and in collaboration with the Centre for World Cinemas, University of Leeds.
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Django Kill was created by Giulio Questi and Kim Arcalli as a crazy generic experiment. Questi defines the film in just three words: ‘sweat, dust and blood’. For the actor Tomas Milian, Django Kill is an ‘auteur film’: ‘It was like working with Antonioni, in a way, because Questi is a revolutionary intellectual. He has been an assistant director, a screenwriter, everything’. Seen today, Django Kill can be regarded as one of the genre’s masterpieces and it remains Questi and Arcalli’s best movie. A lot of the film’s success lies in its direction and editing. It was supposed to be a commissioned assignment but soon the duo ran wild and the result was something completely different and anarchic.
Questi remembers: ‘It was one of the many movies produced by one of those little filmmaking ‘adventures’, people producing the worst Roman cinematographic rubbish… an ex-bankrupt started producing, and when he ran out of capital he partnered with a butcher who had a lot of money.’ And this producer convinced Questi to do a western, which would be written by the director and his friend Franco Arcalli. ‘We had an idea so we began writing Django Kill immediately. It was a very intense job. It was a commissioned movie. Our creativity was born out of our desperation. We wanted to escape the genre. We had the intention to manipulate the genre in a pop art kind of way.’ Questi would also recall the historic-political origins that underpin the film. ‘It was a very authentic movie for me and that’s because I wanted to talk about my experiences during the resistance war in the mountains, when I fought in Valtellina.’
From Dizionario del Western all’Italiana by Marco Giusti (2007, Milano: Arnoldo Mondadori).
Translated by Marco Brunello and Lee Broughton.
BBFC Cert 15.
