Gee Leonardo DiCaprio, what are you going to use that hammer for? Just in case you are wondering that’s Dicaprio here above as Calvin Candie, owner of the Candie Land slave plantation that will be seen in Quentin Tarantino‘s new film Django Unchained (full image here below). So I think that hammer will be used for more nefarious things rather than what its actually intended for.

Following the release of the magnificent first poster for Django Unchained, we got our first looks at DiCaprio as Candie, and Christoph Waltz and Jamie Foxx as the German dentist turned bounty hunter and freed slave (second image here below).

Quentin Tarantino‘s upcoming “southern” Django Unchained won’t be hitting theaters until Christmas, but in the meantime the Weinstein Company and Columbia Pictures have released the film’s first poster.

You can check it out here below.

No cruddy Photoshop hack work here folks, this is the real deal. Tarantino has spoken many times in the past about his unabashed love for Italian spaghetti westerns and how they have influenced his own style of filmmaking. Several of his recent films, including Kill Bill V.2 and Inglourious Basterds, have worn that influence with pride. Tarantino has even used music score cues composed for the best Italian westerns by the great Ennio Morricone on the soundtracks of some of his past features. Thus, it’s very fitting that the poster for Django Unchained would recall the minimalist movie poster style of the 1960’s when directors like Sergio Leone, Sergio Corbucci, and Enzo G. Castellari were revered as cinematic gods to western fans and young movie geeks like Tarantino who were just itching for the sweaty, bloody thrills they a spaghetti western could deliver without fail.

Special effects make-up wizard Greg Nicotero (the “N” in KNB EFX) has become a close collaborator of writer-director Quentin Tarantino after working his FX magic on many of the iconoclastic filmmaker’s best known works including Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill, and Inglourious Basterds.

Nicotero spoke with MTV about working with Tarantino on the director’s latest film, Django Unchained, recently during a Television Critics Association event for AMC’s The Walking Dead, on which he serves as effects supervisor and co-executive producer. You can watch a video of Nicotero’s comments here below.

One of the many things that director Quentin Tarantino is known for is putting together great casts for his movies; even for some of the smaller characters he has, such as Mike Myers in Inglourious Basterds for example. It sounded strange when first reported, but worked out great in the final product.

Perhaps not quite as strange as that particular casting, it’s being reported that Tarantino has chosen Sacha Baron Cohen for a small role in his upcoming movie, Django Unchained.

Christmas 2012 just got a whole lot more interesting.

With Leonardo DiCaprio set to see the release of his Quentin Tarantino-directed slave picture, Django Unchained on Christmas Day next year, Box Office Mojo has revealed that another DiCaprio film has set the day as its debut date. The outlet reports that the actor’s turn as Jay Gatsby in Baz Luhrmann‘s long gestating take on the F. Scott Fitzgerald story, The Great Gatsby will premiere on that date as well. Talk about a hunky way to spend Christmas.