Interviews
The making of ‘Inglourious Basterds’
Quentin Tarantino has never been one for subtlety. His over the top, explosive films have stirred up audiences and pushed the envelope for nearly two decades. With “Inglourious Basterds,” opening Aug. 21, Tarantino continues his legacy of genre smashing in an epic about Nazi-scalp-hunting, Jewish soldiers in World War II.
We caught up with Tarantino, and some of movie’s stars, Eli Roth, B.J. Novak, Diane Kruger and Christoph Waltz, to chat about propaganda, German movie stars, and the best ways to scalp.
Brad Pitt was probably busy babysitting
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Quentin Tarantino on his relationship to violence in movies…“Basically the violence that I like makes me laugh. In a particularly savage scene where a character takes another character that I don’t particularly like and bashes his head into the table five times, that totally cracks me up.”
Quentin Tarantino Reflects on Violence in his Films with Drew Tewksbury
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Christoph Waltz on the universality of the film…“You can transpose it to ancient Greece or the Thirty Year War, and it will perfectly hold up. These clashes of forces and these armies trying to undermine each other, and politics being played and vicious people trying to pull all their magic and stunts.”
Christoph Waltz Talks to Drew Tewksbury about seeing himself in a Nazi uniform
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Diane Kruger on seeing the film the first time…“I was surprised how funny it was. I knew that there were some funny moments in the script, but I truly laughed out loud at Cannes, and thought, ‘it’s so inappropriate to laugh right now.’”
Diane Kruger Talks about acting influences with Drew Tewksbury
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Quentin Tarantino on the origins of the script…“I started by wanting to make a movie about a bunch of guys going on a mission. But I want to go beyond it, I want to redefine it. It’s this big group of characters, these historical characters, who mix it up with my characters.”
“I did have a story but the story was too long, it could have been a 12 hour mini series. Then I had to go through these questions: Am I an artist too big for movies? I can never deal with that puny canvas the 3-hour movie… Then I had to get over myself.”
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Quentin Tarantino on Brad Pitt’s character Lt. Aldo Raine…“The whole idea was that this hillbilly is against the code of being a redneck. He’s truly against fascism. He was trying to be an Apache resistance against the Nazis. Where he’s coming from, he wants [Jewish] soldiers because he wants them to enact intense payback. He tells them, ‘we have to be warriors because we’re fighting a holy war against an enemy that wants to wipe your race of the face of the earth. So here we go.’”
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“Hostel” director Eli Roth on being directed by Tarantino…“I had done acting here and there, but it was always a bit part in my own movies or a joke. In ‘Death Proof,’ Quentin’s direction to me literally was ‘We have 2 minutes to lunch, don’t f-it up.’”
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Quentin Tarantino on his influences from war movies…“I got rid of the stuff I never really liked from war movies and kept the stuff I really liked. No tanks, no battle scenes. None of that. I was much more drawn to the cloak and dagger element where people were hiding in Nazi occupied countries and pulling stuff behind the scenes.”
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B.J. Novak on scalping…
“No one would expect me to know how to hold a gun or scalp anybody. That includes me. So when I got there, I tried to own the moment. I looked up ‘how to scalp’ online. I did my homework, and I proved myself as one of the better scalpers.”
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Quentin Tarantino on casting Diane Kruger…“She brought a genuine German movie star quality. You can buy that she starred in a whole bunch of German movies and was a big star. And that’s a big deal, because you don’t just find people on the street that look like old time movie stars.”
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Quentin Tarantino on staying true to history…“The movie is about propaganda and maybe my own movie is propaganda. They were rewriting history, and I am rewriting history.”
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from Metromix, August 21, 2009
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