It's only when you want to change something that it's possible that you might just be restricted to one layer.
I think the idea of the template is that you have one template and many views, and possibly that a template can be created of many different smaller templates, e.g. header, footer, sidebar.
Here is an example of something that I wanted to do with a very specific template that wouldn't be used on any other page.
My model gives distance in meters, for each of the objects and I wanted to display it in miles. So I had to add a new method to the model dist_miles. Instead of just saying round(cinema.dist / 1600, 2) in the template.
I've only been using django for a week now so its quite possible that I'm going about it all wrong.