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Popcorn & Hot Dogs
With Inglourious Basterds hitting the small screen, we tapped a few words from its glourious writer director.
"Making a film is like climbing Mount Everest," says Quentin Tarantino. "That's always my analogy," he smiles. "Because when you're climbing Mount Everest you're not thinking about back home, you're not thinking about life, you're thinking about the mountain and nothing else."
Inglorious Basterds was indeed all consuming for the director. He first came up with the story almost ten years ago and began to sketch out some ideas. But then, another project, Kill Bill, took precedence and Basterds slipped down the list of priorities.
That all changed in the summer of 2008 when Tarantino announced to his producer, Lawrence Bender, that it was definitely back at the top and it was all systems go.
They then pulled out all of the stops to cast the film and get it into production in Berlin and ready in time for the Cannes Film Festival in May 2009. "It's amazing that we did it because it was a kind of a crazy deadline," says Tarantino. "And it's a tribute to those wonderful guys on the crew, and the cast; they did it."
Brad Pitt led an ensemble international cast. Quentin Tarantino had wanted to work with Pitt - and vice versa - for years. In the end, it all came down to lucky timing and a pact sealed over a somewhat boozy dinner.
"Brad and I had met each other very briefly a couple of times and he let it be known - or we let it be known to each other - that we were fans of each other," recalls the director. "And we were very interested in working together.
"I sent the script off to him. He read it and he wanted to meet me. And so we met at his place and we had about five bottles of wine - Brad's own rose, because he has a vineyard. It's amazing. That was quite a night," QT laughs.
As always, there were a host of films that inspired his story but in the end, Inglourious Basterds is uniquely, unmistakably Tarantino - a World War Two western, a fairytale that dares to re-write history in a way that perhaps only this particular filmmaker would dare to do.
Tarantino says that the power of cinema is a central theme in Inglorious Basterds. For instance, central to the plot is a German propaganda film, Nation's Pride, which extols a Nazi hero (played by Daniel Bruhl). The Basterds plan to assassinate the highranking Nazis, including Hitler, who will attend the premier of Nation's Pride in a Parisian cinema.
"What's interesting to me about that is that on the one hand it's a very juicy metaphor and on the other hand it's not a metaphor at all, it's literal," says Tarantino. "It's the film itself that is going to bring down the Third Reich. So I love the duality of the fact that it works as a great metaphor but also I love the fact that it's an
actuality, not just a poetic conceit - it's film itself that brings it down."
He clearly enjoyed filming at Berlin's famous Babelsberg Studios and every week would host ‘film
night' for his cast and crew. Film night was purely for fun, he stresses, and the movies shown weren't influences on Inglorious Basterds.
"It wasn't like, "we'll watch this because we're going to do this... Most of them were prints out of my collection, so we watched, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, Five Fingers, Sammo Hung's Eastern Condors, and there's a big Italian battle movie called La Battaglia di El Alamein. I always introduced the movies and we had popcorn and hotdogs."
Inglourious Basterds in available on Blu-ray and DVD from December 17, 2009.
Picture Caption: Quentin Tarantino gives the victory salute at the Sydney premiere of Inglourious Basterds.
