As the acting class was going on, I just realized I just knew more about cinema than the other people in the class. I cared about cinema and they cared about themselves. But two, was actually at a certain point I just realized that I love movies too much to simply appear in them. I wanted the movies to be my movies.

If there is something magic about the collaborations I have with actors it's because I put the character first.

If I've made it a little easier for artists to work in violence, great! I've accomplished something.

Frankly, Django is an American story that needs to be told, when you think of slavery existing in this country for 245 years. In slave narratives there were all types of tales and drama and heroism and pain and love that happened during that time. That's rich material for drama! Everyone complains that there are no new stories left to tell. Not true, there are a whole bunch of them, and they're all American with a capital A.

I don't really consider myself an American filmmaker like, say, Ron Howard might be considered an American filmmaker. If I'm doing something and it seems to me to be reminiscent of an Italian giallo, I'm gonna to do it like an Italian giallo.

You know, the art films would usually be more, I mean the exploitation movies would usually be more lurid, but not that much more. I mean, actually back in those days that was what foreign films had. They had sex, they were selling Laura Antonelli.

To me, movies and music go hand in hand. When I'm writing a script, one of the first things I do is find the music I'm going to play for the opening sequence.