Quentin Tarantino's new movie, Django Unchained, which scored well both with the critics and financially on its Christmas day release, features an original composition from Rick Ross and John Legend.

Tarantino is famous for the music in his films, while Django should be no different, this is the first time that he's employed tracks written specifically for his work. "[I've] never really asked an artist to write a composition for any of my movies because I don't know if I'm going to like it, and even if I do like it, I don't know if it will work with one of my films," Tarantino explained to MTV News during a recent press event for the film, "I never wanted to put myself in that embarrassing situation." 

So how did 9-time Grammy award-winning artist John Legend manage to convince the auteur that his tunes were right for the film? He went retro and sent him a cassette tape. Not a cd, USB flash drive, or an email - a cassette tape. "He had heard about the movie," Tarantino explained. "I think he had seen the commercial or something, and he liked the idea of what the movie was about so he wrote a song, not having read the script, he wrote a song that he thought could fit into what he thought I was trying to do and put it on cassette tape. I don't know if I would have actually listened to it if he hadn't have put it on a cassette tape. Well, I might have listened to a CD. If he had sent [a flash drive] to me, that would have sat in my hotel room never to be listened to."

Rick Ross - another legend via reputation rather than name - also features in the movie with his track, 100 Black Coffins. "Rick Ross and his team came on set -- we all got a contact high just standing next to his jacket," Tarantino joked. "It was really cool. We had a little sizzle reel that we showed at Comic-Con, so we showed him and his peeps that, and they loved it, and Jamie [Foxx] came up with the chorus of the song right then and there. And we were like, 'Oh, man, that sounds good.' That could be a black western song. Rick came up with the rap and Jamie produced it."

Django Unchained's Christmas release gleaned almost $15m in box office sales, and that figure looks to x10 in the next few weeks as mainstream cinema lovers and film-buff's alike flock to the big screen to check out the mercurial film-maker's latest offering.