7. The Beauty Of Juxtaposition
You know a relatively simple way to create an instant intrigue with your characters? Give them a quality that seems relatively bizarre when you attach it to them. Seriously. You'll have glimpsed this in pretty much every movie ever made (hitman with a heart for example, has been done to death), but it's a handy tip to remember, because it usually works so well. And QT does it all the time: in the case of
Django Unchained, he makes Dr. Schultz a dentist. It's isn't the weirdest concept in the world, and it's never explained in much detail, but it makes him unique, and that's automatically appealing to audiences - we like to imagine backstories and picture past events. And anyway, the sheer notion of a dentist turned bounty hunter is an amusing and interesting one, right? You could also consider the idea that Calvin Candie, the film's central antagonist, is actually controlled by his house slave, Stephen. This is a juxtaposition that grants us great insight, because it says a lot about Candie's character - he's a racist, certainly, but he couldn't function without Stephen. Stephen is the brains of the operation. Had QT just written Candie in as the mastermind and had Stephen as a passive character, it might've still worked, but it's nowhere near as interesting. Don't be afraid to flip proceedings on their heads and shoot from different angles: you'll often find that the opposite idea works better than the first one that comes to your head. And juxtapositions are a good way to make your screenplay stand out - to imbue them with a bit of charm, as it were.