By Gaynor Flynn
Whatever way you look at it, 2009 was always going to be a big year for Quentin Tarantino. The script that he’d been writing for ten years, Inglourious Basterds, had finally been made into a film, and its unveiling was taking place at The Cannes Film Festival. This is, of course, the same film festival that cemented Tarantino’s career fifteen years earlier when his audacious crime thriller Pulp Fiction walked away with the prestigious Palm d’Or, after the writer/director had so memorably burst onto the scene with his crackling debut, Reservoir Dogs.
The Cannes Film Festival, however, is not for the weak hearted. Audiences are infamously and extremely vocal about what they like and dislike. They’ll boo and make an assortment of other rude noises if they think your film stinks. But they’re just as forthcoming if they love it, and many a filmmaker will tell you that there is nothing quite like being in the Grand Lumiere Cinema with thousands of people applauding rapturously and screaming out bravo. Tarantino is not weak hearted. He relished whatever Cannes had to throw at him. “When people boo, it’s out of passion,” he says in that now instantly recognisable sing-song voice of his. “Cinema matters here, and it means something. There’s also the fact that all of the world’s film press is here. You drop the movie and, ‘Bam!’, everybody weighs in at the exact same time. They argue and they jostle, and it’s like the cat is out of the bag for the entire planet. I’m down with that. I’m not an American filmmaker; I make movies for the planet earth, and Cannes is the place that represents that.”

The world’s press jostled alright, and they argued up and down The Croisette. Inglourious Basterds radically divided audiences. A critic from Variety wrote, “Inglourious Basterds is great fun to watch, but the movie isn’t entirely engaging. Tarantino throws you out of the movie with titles, chapter headings, and snatches of music. You don’t jump into the world of the film in a participatory way; you watch it from a distance, appreciating the references and the masterful mis-en-scene. This is a film that will benefit from a second viewing. I can’t wait to see it again.”
Then there were those who hated all 152 minutes of the WW2 film. The Guardian called it “an armour plated turkey” and went on to say, “It’s achtung-achtung-ach-mein-Gott atrocious. It isn’t funny; it isn’t exciting; it isn’t a realistic war movie, yet neither is it an entertaining genre spoof or a clever counterfactual wartime yarn.” Tarantino laughs in that slightly maniacal way of his, and takes the bad reviews in his stride. “That’s cool,” he told FilmInk amiably at Cannes. “They’re entitled to their opinion.”
Geniality aside, it must be crushing to get negative reviews after pouring a decade of your life into a film. Obviously Tarantino would have been hoping for a repeat performance of 1994, when he became the darling of the festival. Still, despite what the critics thought, the film received an eleven-minute standing ovation, and German actor, Christoph Waltz, who plays Nazi Col. Hans Landa so effectively in the film, won the Best Actor award at the festival. Inglourious Basterds opens with the title card, “Once upon a time in Nazi-occupied France”, instantly setting up its status as something quite separate from an accurate, historically driven WW2 movie.
The film revolves around a group of Jewish-American soldiers known as The Basterds, who have been chosen specifically to spread fear throughout The Third Reich by scalping and brutally killing Nazis throughout Europe. Led by Brad Pitt’s Lt. Aldo Raine (a one-time moonshiner from the hills of The Deep South with a can-do attitude and a scar around his neck that suggests an attempted lynching), The Basterds soon cross paths with a French-Jewish girl called Shosanna (Melanie Laurent), whose family was slaughtered by the Nazis. After escaping from Waltz’s aforementioned Col. Hans Landa, telling nicknamed The Jew Hunter, Shosanna now runs a movie theatre in Paris. Nazi bigwig Joseph Goebbels is convinced to hold the premiere of The Third Reich’s latest propaganda film there, after the movie’s star, Fredrick Zoller (Daniel Bruhl) – a solider famous for killing over a hundred Allied soldiers, and self described as a “German Sergeant York” – develops a crush on the beautiful Shosanna. All the top Nazi honchos will be there, including Adolf Hitler himself. The Basterds – with the help of a British commando and former film critic (Michael Fassbender) and a German movie star (Diane Kruger) turned double agent – mobilise to blow up the cinema, and Tarantino rewrites history.

“I like dealing in genres,” the director replied when asked why he chose to make a WW2 film. “There are westerns, musicals, swashbucklers, and all kinds of things like that. The WW2 film is another genre that I’ve always really liked. Not only that, but I’ve always liked the sub-genre aspect of the war movie: there’s the ‘big battle film’ or the ‘bunch of guys on a mission movie’ [which is how he describes Inglourious Basterds]. So the thing that sits me down and gets me to do it is the fact that I like the genre. I think to myself, ‘Let me try a movie in that genre; that would be cool.’ That’s what sits me down to do it. Then once I sit down and do it, I start dealing with the war and dealing with the implications of it, and all that follows after that. But the thing that just sits me down is the thought, ‘Hey, wouldn’t it be fun to make a war movie?’” So, was it fun to make a war movie? “Hell yeah,” Tarantino laughs. The cast agree, but more on them later. The film might take its name from Enzo Castellari’s 1978 low level B-grade cult film, but Tarantino borrows little else. “I guess the only thing that you could say is that like Sam Peckinpah, Castellari is a master of slow motion,” says the director. “He has really great slow motion sequences in his films, and I do break out a couple of those slow motion sequences in my film. Other than that, it was just the title, but I am a huge fan of Castellari.”
Like much of Tarantino’s work, the plot revolves around a revenge fantasy. The director himself has described it as a “spaghetti western with WW2 iconography.” Others thought that a “Jewish revenge flick” was a more apt description. Which does he prefer? “A Jewish revenge movie wouldn’t be exactly how I would define it 100%,” Tarantino laughs. “But I think you could definitely say that, and it works completely. That wouldn’t be the section of the video store where I would put it in. It’s funny – people have come up to me a lot, and they’ve asked me, ‘Is it a fairy tale? Is it a Jewish wish fulfillment film and fantasy, or is it just a fantasy? There are aspects of that. The exact way that I look at it is this: my characters changed the outcome of the war. Now, that didn’t happen because my characters didn’t exist. But if they had existed, and if there had have been a Fredrick Zoller who did what he did, they very well might have made a movie about him, because the Nazis did make propaganda movies at that time of the war. If that had happened, all the things that happened later in the movie are plausible. So that’s where I’m coming from on it.”
Anything is possible in the Quentin Tarantino universe, and there are a couple of now classic Tarantino moments in Inglourious Basterds. One takes place in a farmhouse, when Colonel Landa interrogates a French farming family who are hiding Shosanna and her family under their floorboards. Tarantino lingers on all the minutiae of the scene, and it’s excruciatingly tense. The other moment takes place in a bistro, when Diane Kruger’s German movie star, Bridget Von Hammersmark, entertains Nazis, and Allies pretending to be Nazis, at the same time. Both scenes tease the audience and unfold slowly to prolong the agony. You have no idea how it will play out. Both deliriously slow burning scenes are a delight to behold, and a reminder why Tarantino has become such a fevered favourite of film buffs. Inglourious Basterds is, however, a little different to the director’s previous work.

The most noticeable difference is that for a war film – and a Tarantino war film at that – there is very little gore and very little action. There is, however, lots and lots of talking, and lots and lots of scheming. Tarantino of course makes sure that the audience gets a feel for what the Basterds do, but it’s kept to a minimum, and the director instead lets your imagination fill in the blanks, much as the terrified Nazis do in the film. We see a couple of scalpings (which earns Brad Pitt’s commanding officer Aldo Raine the nickname of Aldo The Apache), and when he orders each man in his squad to bring him 100 Nazi scalps, they certainly embrace the task enthusiastically. The most brutal scene in the film comes when Eli Roth’s character, Donny Donowitz (who becomes a particular figure of horror for the Nazis, and is nicknamed The Bear Jew), bludgeons a captured German soldier to death with a baseball bat, which has become his signature killing move. “Being Jewish, this is definitely like Kosher porn for me,” Roth joked at Cannes. “It’s something that I’ve fantasised about since I was a very young child.”
Did Tarantino tone his normally audacious cinematic style down because he was dealing with much more sensitive subject matter than he’s used to? Did he forcefully rein in his Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill tendencies because he was worried about offending those who had survived the real thing? “No, not at all,” Tarantino says. “I gave the script to Jewish-American friends of mine, and they read it and went, ‘Yeah, wow, great. That’s a wonderful fantasy. I’ve thought about that forever.’ But the thing that surprised me was that when I started talking to Germans about it, they revealed that it was their fantasy too.” “And once you think about it, of course it is,” continues Tarantino. “They responded to that fantasy aspect, and that wishful thinking aspect, as much as anybody, if not more so. One of the things that they said to me – and this is getting off the point a little bit – was, ‘I don’t know if we could do this in Germany. I don’t know if we’re allowed to do it. You can get away with it, but this couldn’t or wouldn’t even occur to a German to do it. If it did occur, there would be this whole outcry of, ‘Well, you’d better be goddamn careful.’” Tarantino would only cast German actors to play Germans, and French to play French.
“I really appreciated the international cast,” Brad Pitt said at the film’s Cannes press conference. “To bring all these people together from different countries, and to have them being true to their respective languages, was great.” To add to the authenticity, both Eli Roth (a very occasional actor, a good of Tarantino’s, and the director of Cabin Fever and Hostel, which Tarantino produced) and French actress, Melanie Laurent (The Beat That My Heart Skipped), play Jewish characters, and are also Jewish in real life. “Well, my family was affected in the worst way in the war,” Laurent told FilmInk at Cannes. “So I didn’t really have to work on Shosanna, because it’s my story. We lost everybody. I only have my grandfather. He was the only one. When I received the script, I didn’t speak great English, but my little brother does. We were at my family’s country house, and the three of us read the script. At the end, my grandfather said, ‘Okay, you have to do this.’ I was like, ‘Yes, but I’m not sure that I’ll get the part.’ My grandfather said, ‘You have to do it.’ So I said ‘Okay, I’m going to try, and I’ll do my best.’ He dreamed of killing Hitler many, many times.”

Roth’s family was just as supportive. “This is a very, very personal role,” he told FilmInk. “I’m a Jewish guy from Boston, and my grandparents came from Austria, Kiev and Poland. Those family members who did not get out of Europe were killed in The Holocaust, and we grew up with a very strong Holocaust education in my family. I felt like I was doing the film on behalf of my family members who are not alive today. This is about the fantasy that we all have. We wish that we could go back in time and sacrifice ourselves to put an end to terror,” continues Roth. “It’s very much in the same way that a lot of Americans wish that they were on the September 11th planes so they could kill those fucking hijackers and crash them into the ground. That’s what this film is really about. Let’s kill these fucking people together, and lets move forward and let go of this burden. Lets learn from the past and stay vigilant to make sure that it never happens in the future. That’s the deep satisfaction that people feel when they see that final scene. They’re not outraged that history was changed. It’s something that they’re very satisfied about.” Given his family history, it must have been painful to relive this particular period in time though? “You have to really, really dredge up the most painful experiences of your life and remind yourself and make it feel like it happened an hour ago,” Roth says. “Even though Quentin was very happy that he got the shots at the end of the day, I was wrecked. I was really thinking about these real things that had happened in my family, and I was really upsetting myself. It took me weeks to come out of that, and then finally after shooting the beating scene, I could let it go a little bit.”
You have to wonder though, given Tarantino’s reputation and cinematic influences, if Roth was ever worried that the director would go too far and turn WW2 into something cartoonish and offensive? “Are you fucking kidding me,” says Roth. “This is why Quentin’s such a great artist. It’s such a myth that WW2 movies have to be this precious, holier-than-thou thing where it’s gotta have violin music and it’s gotta be in black-and-white. Obviously, I’m not making fun of Schindler’s List, but how about the fact that no fucking war movie has Germans speaking German? To a lot of people, that makes those movies quaint. That’s offensive. It’s offensive when you watch a WW2 movie that’s trying to tell me – a Jew – how my fucking family members were killed, and they’re talking with British accents! I’m supposed to think it’s serious just because there’s fucking violin music? Fuck you. This is a movie! It’s a work of art, and Quentin is the only one who actually has fucking respect enough for the audience members to say, ‘Yes, you’re smart. You can deal with Germans speaking German, and French speaking French.’ No other director in the fucking world in the history of cinema has ever had the fucking balls to do it. When they don’t do that, that is offensive. I wish every fucking body was like Tarantino.”
What did the German contingent think? “When I met Quentin, I said, ‘I’m really jealous about your fucking great idea,’” says German actor, Til Schweiger, who plays the Nazi-murdering psychopathic German soldier Sgt. Hugo Stiglitz, who is recruited by the Basterds. “I wish that I had the idea, because when I was learning everything about The Holocaust in school, I was lying in bed at night trying to figure out how I would kill the whole gang. It was a fantasy. So now Quentin comes along and he’s made a movie about this. It’s a very clever script, and on top of that, you make a fun movie about killing those motherfuckers. Everybody knows that it’s not true, but that’s why you do movies: to create your own world. It’s not a documentary. It’s a fantasy movie, and I personally love it.” Christoph Waltz agrees. “What we know about the WW2, we know from someone telling us,” the actor told FilmInk at Cannes. “We know narratives…whether it’s personal experience or not, it’s a narrative. So is this movie, and that’s why I say, ‘This movie is an alternative, and not a correction.’ That’s how it has been understood, as I see, especially in Germany and in Austria. It has not been understood as being careless and irresponsible with what really happened.”

Waltz – an actor with over thirty years of experience – truly deserved his Best Actor win at Cannes. His oily, menacing but strangely unctuous Col. Hans Landa might just go down as one of the most sublime baddies in cinematic history. Landa is the kind of man who can be enjoying a nice bowl of strawberries and cream one minute, and then wringing the neck of a beautiful woman the next. He’s malevolent and charming at the same time. It’s a tour-de-force performance, and for Tarantino, Landa is “the most important character in the movie.” If he hadn’t found the right actor, he wouldn’t have made the film – it’s as simple as that. “The situation was this,” says Tarantino. “I realised that I was writing a pretty impressive character fairly early on. One of the things about the character is the fact that he is a linguistic genius. It’s just simply one of the main aspects about the character, and I knew that whatever actor I cast to play this would have to be as much of a linguistic genius as Landa is, or else he would never come off the page. An actor could do the best job, but if they just didn’t have that in their real character, it just wouldn’t work.”
“I started casting actors in Germany, and I wasn’t finding anybody who had everything that I needed 100%,” continues Tarantino. “They could do the poetry in this language, but they couldn’t do it in that language. He had to be able to say the poetry in every language. I literally had a moment where I didn’t think I was going to find it. I called the producers and said, ‘Look, if we can’t find the right Landa, I’d rather just publish the script and do something else.’ Because I was financing the movie by then – we were going to get our cash flow money on Friday, and this was Monday – I knew that if I was going to pull the plug, I had to pull it during this week while it’s still only my money involved. So I said to the producers, ‘If we don’t find him, I’m pulling the plug on Thursday.’ They were very cool about it. They didn’t overreact. They said, ‘Well, here’s the deal: we’ll spend this week looking for Landa.’ Then Christoph Waltz came in, sat down, and read two scenes. I looked over to [producer] Lawrence Bender, who was sitting right next to me, and we both went, ‘We’re making a movie.’”

What about Nazi poster boy and soldier-turned-movie-star, Fredrick Zoller? Wasn’t he equally as important? “He is, but I didn’t have to find an actor who was linguistically gifted,” Tarantino replies. “I just had to find an actor who was gifted. I was watching these different films starring different young German actors. I’ve become very good friends with [director] Tom Tykwer [Run Lola Run]. He’s not only my friend, but he actually translated the dialogue into German for me. I called him up to ask him if he could recommend a good translator for my dialogue. He said, ‘I’ll do it. I know what you want.’ He also said that I had to see Goodbye Lenin to see this young actor, Daniel Bruhl. When I watched it, I was like, ‘That’s my Zoller right there. If Daniel’s mother had never met Daniel’s father, I don’t know if we’d ever have the right Zoller. It was like, ‘This guy’s stepping off the fucking page.’”
Daniel Bruhl takes up the story. “I read in an article in a German newspaper that Quentin liked my work, and that if there was an opportunity one day, we would hopefully work together. It’s nice when you read something like that, but you don’t really believe it. Two years later, however, I did get a call from him. We met, and fortunately we had dinner before I had the audition. During the dinner, I tried to get him drunk so he would sign the contract! At the end, Quentin said, ‘Listen, it was a wonderful dinner, and I’d love to see you in the camp, but you still have to do the audition tomorrow.’”
“Anyway, I’d learned the wrong scenes and it was terrible,” Bruhl continues. “He wanted to see me act one scene in French, and they didn’t have the French version. I said, ‘Oh, I can translate it immediately.’ These two Americans, Quentin and Lawrence Bender, were really surprised. They said, ‘You can translate it?’ I said, ‘Oh yeah.’ The words that I didn’t know in French, I just said in Spanish, because I knew that they wouldn’t notice anyway [laughs]. That was the moment when Quentin thought, ‘Oh okay, I’m going to offer him the part.’”
Once cast in the film, Bruhl and Tarantino enjoyed several long dinners together, and the actor reveals that the director’s love of cinema informed much of their conversation. “Well, I was well prepared, because I’d seen a lot of German movies from the period depicted in the film,” Bruhl laughs. “I will never do that again! I will never try to make myself look smart in front of Quentin Tarantino by telling him something about movies. He’d seen them all, plus he’d seen five million more than me! Whenever I mentioned a German movie, he would say, ‘Oh yeah, that’s interesting, but do you know the one that this guy made before, from 1941?’ I just started swearing, and sometimes I just pretended. After the third glass of wine, I said, ‘Oh yeah, that was a good one.’”

Tarantino’s casting of Brad Pitt also involved a little alcoholic imbibing. “Quentin came to visit some time at the end of the summer,” Brad Pitt said at Cannes. “We talked about backstory, we talked about movies…I get up the next morning and see five empty bottles of wine right on the floor – five! – and something that resembles a smoking apparatus. I don’t know what that was about…but apparently I’d agreed to do this film.”
Quentin Tarantino’s love of movies is now legend, particularly how he learned about them while working in a video store in LA’s Manhattan Beach. “It’s funny, because to me, most cinema schools don’t teach you that much aesthetically,” he says. “You need to come to it with your own aesthetic. Part of becoming an artist is discovering your aesthetic. They might teach you how to sync soundtrack with picture, and they might teach you a few editing tricks, but part of becoming an artist is discovering your aesthetic.”
“I can say that the person that influenced me the most as far as my storytelling and my filmmaking was concerned was the film critic Pauline Kael,” Tarantino continues. “I didn’t go to film school, but I read her reviews, and I’m here to tell you that her reviews were better than any film school, and better than any professor. She taught me an aesthetic. I’m not saying that I agreed with her all the time. I could disagree with many of her reviews, but it was a way of looking and talking about cinema that affected me to this day.” Whether you’re a fan of Tarantino’s or not, it’s hard not to like the man himself. His passion for film is infectious. “Quentin turns the world on to movies,” says Eli Roth. In a way, he’s right. All the cast talk about how unique a Tarantino set is. “He’s a maniac,” laughs Daniel Bruhl. “He’s so passionate when he sees the scenes that he wrote come alive. He was very encouraging to us actors, and he did things that I didn’t expect, and that I wasn’t used to. He loves to play loud music to create a certain atmosphere. Before the shoot, he played Led Zeppelin. He’s also something of a purist, and he doesn’t like watching a monitor, which I’m not used to. All of the directors that I’ve worked with use the monitor. Quentin still looks directly to the actors. The problem is that he’s so tall and you can’t avoid seeing him, which made us pretty nervous. He also likes to laugh during the take, which drove me crazy! I’d thought, ‘That was going pretty well, and now you’ve laughed! You’ve ruined the sound!’ But it was a miracle, because I didn’t have to do any ADR [additional dialogue recording], so they managed to cut out Tarantino’s laughing. I’ve never been in the hands of a director who is so obsessed by what he does. Apart from cinema, I don’t know what else matters for Tarantino. He really has found his medium; he’s really found his art.”
Said Brad Pitt at the Inglourious Basterds premiere in Berlin: “Tarantino has become its own term in terms of cinema. He’s got his own voice, and to be a part of that was great. I’m glad that it worked out that way…that I fit into something that he was doing at the time.”

In short, Tarantino makes sure that his film shoots are a joyful experience. He also has a tradition on every set: Thursday night is film night. The cast and crew get together over beers and popcorn, and Tarantino screens a couple of his favourite films, maybe say, The Dirty Dozen or Once Upon A Time In America. He lives and breathes film, and he welcomes debate. Given his knowledge of cinema, you can’t help but wonder how he views his own films. Where do they fit in? What does he think when he hears the word “Tarantino-esque” being bandied about? Does it amuse him or irritate him? “I don’t know if it’s for me to say exactly what Tarantino-esque is,” the director replies. “That’s more for other people to tell me. It’s a hard question, because if you’re doing what you’re doing, you’re not really that conscious of how it is that you do what you do. You just do it. But just to give you a little something, there is a sense of humour in my movies that I’m trying to bring out. I’m trying to get you to laugh at things that aren’t funny. When I write my movies, I hear laughs. I’m not saying that it’s a riotous comedy, but there are laughs there. When I’m making the movie, I’m imagining laughs. When I’m editing it, I’m editing it knowing that there are going to be laughs there that are going to fill in things.” “When I finally see the movie with an audience for the first time, that’s the completion of it,” continues Tarantino. “It’s a recipe that needs the last ingredient to make the cake rise, and that doesn’t happen until I watch it with an audience. To hear their laughs, and to know that I got that, makes me say to myself, ‘Okay, now the movie’s done.’ Part of the method of that madness is the idea of getting you to laugh at things that you wouldn’t normally laugh at, and that you might even be questioning. Hopefully you’re saying, ‘Why am I laughing at this?’ But you are laughing, so it’s too bad – now you’re complicit.”
Audiences certainly were complicit in Inglourious Basterds. Despite the controversy around the film’s seemingly incongruous fantastical elements, Tarantino’s feverish war flick went on to become a big hit (its gross currently sits at an impressive $120,540,719), rating as his most financially successful since the game-changing Pulp Fiction. It received eight Oscar nominations (including Best Picture, Best Screenplay, and Best Director), with Christoph Waltz taking home the well-deserved Best Supporting Actor gong. Tarantino and Waltz have now become a formidable pair, with the actor scoring another Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his bravura turn in the director’s 2012 western, Django Unchained. “We’re on such firm ground with each other that I completely and blindly trust that if there is a part for me, Quentin will call me,” Waltz – who didn’t get a start in QT’s The Hateful Eight – told FilmInk in 2012. “And if he doesn’t call me, then there’s no part for me.”

Inglourious Basterds – like many of QT’s films – also generated its own “dream project”, with the director talking about making an ersatz sequel to the war film, and Brad Pitt imploring to make him a prequel (in which Aldo Raine would battle the KKK) during the film’s press rounds. One of the actual subplots for Inglourious Basterds that did not make it into the final shooting schedule was a segue about a group of black soldiers who go AWOL in 1944 after the invasion of Normandy. “My original idea for Inglourious Basterds way back when was that this would be a huge story that included the smaller story that you saw in the film, but also followed a bunch of black troops, and they had been fucked over by the American military and kind of go ape shit,” Tarantino told The Root in 2012. “They basically – like Lt Aldo Raine – go on an Apache warpath and kill a bunch of white soldiers and white officers on a military base and are just making a warpath to Switzerland. So that was always going to be part of it. And I was going to do it as a mini-series, and that was going to be one of the big storylines. When I decided to turn it into a movie, that was a section that I had to take out to help tame my material. I have most of that written. It’s ready to go; I just have to write the second half of it. It would be connected to Inglourious Basterds too, because Basterds are in it, but it’s about the soldiers. It would be called ‘Killer Crow’ or something like that.”
So, like all great Quentin Tarantino movies (think the oft-discussed twenty-years-later Kill Bill sequel, or The Vega Brothers spin-off from Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs), Inglourious Basterds has been elevated to legend status with its own mythology of lost projects and dreams of continuation…