Django Unchained is an upcoming Western film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. The film stars Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Kerry Washington, and is scheduled to be released on December 25, 2012 in the United States and Canada.

Principal photography started in California in November 2011, Wyoming in February 2012, and at the a National Historic Landmark Evergreen Plantation in Wallace, Louisiana, outside of New Orleans in March 2012.

Django (Jamie Foxx) is a slave living in the Deep South after having been separated from his wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington). When Django is held for a slave auction, Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), a bounty hunter, frees Django from his vicious masters, the Speck brothers (James Remar and James Russo) and gives him the option of hunting down and killing the Brittle Brothers, a ruthless gang of killers whom only Django has seen. In return, Schultz will free Django from slavery completely and help rescue Broomhilda from the plantation of the charming but ruthless Francophile owner, Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio).

Development on Django Unchained began in 2007, when Quentin Tarantino, speaking with The Daily Telegraph discussed an idea for a form of spaghetti western set in America’s Deep South which he called “a southern”, stating that he wanted “to do movies that deal with America’s horrible past with slavery and stuff but do them like spaghetti westerns, not like big issue movies. I want to do them like they’re genre films, but they deal with everything that America has never dealt with because it’s ashamed of it, and other countries don’t really deal with because they don’t feel they have the right to”.

In December of 2009 Tarantino revealed that he had another project but wouldn’t reveal any details except that it was less epic in scale and in a different genre entirely from Basterds and that he could finish it in a five to six month period of intensive writing, to which on May 2, 2011, it was confirmed that project was the “Southern” that he had talked about in 2007, the title is Django Unchained and features the revenge of a slave on his former master.[34] Tarantino finished the script on April 26, 2011, and handed in the final draft to The Weinstein Company.[citation needed]

The film is being shot in the anamorphic format on 35 mm film. Django Unchained will be the first Tarantino film not edited by Sally Menke, who died in 2010. Editing duties will be handled by Fred Raskin, who has worked as an assistant editor in Tarantino’s previous films.