Leonardo DiCaprio in Talks for Quentin Tarantino Film

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Leonardo DiCaprio is in early talks to play one of the lead villains in Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained, a spaghetti Western about a slave in the Old South who teams with a German bounty hunter to search for his wife.

DiCaprio's involvement has been the subject of online scuttlebutt for weeks. He has no deal, and sources say formal negotiations are at a very early stage. But the Oscar nominee is keen on doing the film, and momentum has built in recent days for him to pull the trigger.

Sources inside the actor's camp say if a deal makes, the actor would play Monsieur Calvin Candie, the owner of a plantation named Candyland, a playground for him to sexually torture women slaves while forcing male ones to engage is death matches. Candie wins Django's wife in a poker tournament.

The way the script is written now, the character wouldn't appear until the second hour of the script, where he dominates until his exit.

According to Hollywood lore, Tarantino wrote the part of the Nazi bad guy in Inglourious Basterds for DiCaprio but a teaming up never came to fruition. The part ultimately went to Christoph Waltz, who won an Oscar for the role. (Waltz is now likely to play a German bounty hunter who helps and trains Django.)

Will Smith was in talks to play Django, but those appear to be cooling down, and Tarantino may be moving on, with Jamie Foxx and Idris Elba names that have surfaced.

Candie isn't the only meaty bad guy part in Django; Candie has a house slave named Stephen who lords over other slaves and is a character Django must face after defeating Candie. The part is expected to be filled by Tarantino stalwart Samuel L. Jackson.