Django is back.
The coffin-dragging, quick-draw gunslinger character introduced in Sergio Corbucci’s 1966 Spaghetti Western classic, which inspired dozens of sequels, spinoffs and tributes, most famously Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained, has finally arrived on the small screen.
Sky and Canal+’s 10-episode Django, which has its world premiere at the Rome Film Festival on Sunday, Oct. 16, is billed as a reimagining not just of Django, but of the Western genre itself.
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Set, like the original film, in the period after the American Civil War, the series combines plot elements from both Django and its official 1987 sequel Django Strikes Again, themes from Tarantino’s film — particularly the role of Black people and freed slaves in old West — as well as adding several original ideas of its own. Even Django’s famous weapons-packed coffin makes an appearance, though in a very different setting than the original.
The series’ main story sees Django, played by The Old Guard and Amsterdam actor Matthias Schoenaerts, searching for his lost daughter, whom he believes survived the murder of his family years before. His journey takes him to New Babylon, a town run by the visionary John Ellis (Top Boy’s Nicholas Pinnock), who has created a multi-cultural and multi-ethnic utopia walled off from the violent divisions of 19th century Texas.
“Django is extremely contemporary: it touches upon themes that go from characters’ psychology to family and from inclusivity to diversity,” says Nils Hartmann, executive vp of Sky Studios Italy and Germany, of the new show.
Alongside Schoenaerts and Pinnock, Django features a multinational cast including Lisa Vicari (Dark), Noomi Rapace (Prometheus, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo), Jyuddah Jaymes (Sanditon), Benny O. Arthur (Berlin Alexanderplatz), Eric Kole (Manhunt) and Tom Austen (Misfits).
Produced by Italy’s Cattleya, a division of ITV Studios, Django, which used Romania for its Western backdrops, is one of Sky’s most ambitious projects to date and arguably its most truly European series.
Previous Sky Italia series, such as Christian, Blocco 181 and There’s No Place Like Home, were “productions deeply entrenched in our country,” notes Hartmann. “Django, conversely, speaks to different audiences: for example, the Germans and Americans. We picked out an international cast with this exact goal in mind.”
“We have people from France, Romania and Germany, Spaniards and, of course, Italians and English people, and, at the edges, a few Americans,” says Cattleya president and founder Riccardo Tozzi. “We have the whole world here. But we could say that it was our intention. Django is a Western borne from globalization and inclusivity. Spaghetti Westerns told of uprisings; this one, instead, speaks of the complexity of the present times.”
Django‘s development started about five years ago, when Tozzi sent Hartmann the first draft of the script by Leonardo Fasoli and Maddalena Ravagli. Max Hurwitz is the third credited writer on the series. “One of the most convincing elements for me,” says Hartmann, “[was] their attempt to build a realistic setting [for the Western drama], especially when compared to what has been done until now.”
“Django is a Western open to a female audience: the characters were not built on stereotypes,” adds Tozzi, who also credits Francesca Comencini, a director on Cattleya’s popular mafia series Gomorrah, who directed the first four episodes of Django and is artistic director for the entire series, for putting a new spin on the classic genre.
“Our idea was clearly to take a genre we loved and go beyond it,” says Comencini, who considers herself a huge Western fan. “Some years ago, at the Turin Film Festival, I was asked to name my favorite movie, and I picked The Wild Bunch, for its air of freedom.”
But in re-inventing Django for television, she says, “We did not want to imitate anyone. The Westerns that spoke to me so clearly as a girl dealt with conflicts. We had to change that and use this genre and this giant machine to talk about something else: that is, differences, the lack of territorial and physical borders, and the uniqueness of each individual. And also, the fear we all feel.”
The series, says Comencini, “represented an enormous challenge for me. I faced this series trying to keep everything together without betraying the show’s aspirations. Along with the other two directors, we tried to focus on our strengths. David Evans (Downton Abbey) worked on the episodes with [a lot of] battles and combat. Enrico Maria Artale (Romulus) and I followed the same path: balanced, defined, homogeneous.”
Tozzi said the magnitude of Django, one of Cattleya’s biggest projects to date, “didn’t scare us, because we believe we can prove ourselves with it. We have both the producing and editorial resources for it.” He compares the show to Cattleya’s popular mafia series ZeroZeroZero and Gomorrah. The former was made for Sky Atlantic, Canal+ and Amazon Prime. The latter was a huge hit for Sky and aired on SundanceTV and HBO Max in the U.S. Cattleya’s next project is an Italian spin-off of Citadel, the Amazon Prime series created by Patrick Moran and the Russo brothers.
“ZeroZeroZero was an international crime series, while Django is a Western,” says Tozzi. “We’re using genres to tell other stories, to find deeper and more complex implications. Gomorrah is a series about organized crime, but at the core of the story is a dysfunctional family.”
And family, Cattleya’s founder explains, is also center stage in Django. “This series features all the Western tropes — the chases, the shootings, the endless landscapes — but it also possesses a sentimental, psychological core that focuses on family ties.”
A core theme of the Django series, says Comencini, is the crisis of masculinity. “That same masculinity codified in the old Westerns. The kind of masculinity that simply does not exist anymore. Django is a man who has failed in many aspects of his life, who does not believe in anything anymore and is stubbornly looking for a new chance.”
Schoenaerts, who Comencini says, combines “strength and melancholy,” was one of the first cast. “We found the rest one step at a time, thanks to the work of our casting director, Victor Jenkins. It was beautiful, seeing big stars like Noomi Rapace falling in love with the project, actors like Nicholas Pinnock giving it their all, and getting to know [younger] talents like Lisa Vicari. And we also found some new faces.”
The scale and scope of Django is reflective of the growing ambitions of both Sky and Cattleya. Sky reaches some 23 million subscribers across the U.K. and Ireland, as well as in German-speaking Europe and Italy. SkyShowtime, a new streaming joint venture, owned by Sky-parent Comcast and Paramount Global, launched Sept. 20 across the Nordic territories Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden and is rolling out next in the Netherlands, followed next year by Spain, Portugal, Andorra and Central and Eastern Europe. Alongside big feature content from Paramount and Universal Pictures — the likes of Top Gun: Maverick, Jurassic World Dominion and Minions: The Rise of Gru — SkyShowtime will highlight premium scripted series, such as Django.
“We, as Sky Italia, started with Gomorrah and got to There’s No Place Like Home, going from The Young Pope and ZeroZeroZero,” notes Hartmann. “Soon we will start shooting M., the series based on the book by Antonio Scurati on the ascension of Benito Mussolini. And then, to make our catalog more diverse, [we’re doing] the Italian remake of Call My Agent!”
If Django is any indication, the future of Sky is truly international. The series was set up as a co-production between Sky and France’s Canal+, with Cattleya and France’s Atlantique Productions, co-produced by Sky Studios and Canal+, in collaboration with Studiocanal and German producers Odeon Fiction and with the support of both the Italian ministry of culture and the Romanian government.
Django will roll out 2023 exclusively on Sky across its European pay-TV footprint, on Canal+ in France, Poland, Switzerland and Africa, and via M7 in Benelux, Hungary, Romania, Czech Republic and Slovak Republic. Studiocanal is selling the series worldwide.
