INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS
A COUPLE OF basterds
It’s a marriage made in movie heaven: the hardcore film geekosity of Quentin Tarantino combined with the A-list magic of Brad Pitt. Miles Fielder talks to the director about their film Inglourious Basterds
T he sixth film by Quentin Tarantino has been a long time coming. Tarantino began writing his World War II men-on- a-mission adventure Inglourious Basterds more than a decade ago. Unable to finish it, he put the script aside and instead made the two-part revenge thriller Kill Bill Vol 1 and 2 and then the exploitation movie homage double feature Grindhouse, conceived with Robert Rodriguez. It wasn’t, Tarantino assures me, a writer’s block that was the cause of the delay.
‘I had the opposite of writer’s block,’ the director says. ‘I couldn’t stop writing. I kept coming up with new things, and that’s why I had to put it aside. When I went back to it I knew I didn’t want it to be longer than Pulp Fiction, and the only way I could do that was make sure the script wasn’t any longer. I’d really gotten out of the habit of doing this. I didn’t censor myself at all, thus Kill Bill 1 and 2. I didn’t want Basterds 1 and Basterds 2, so I forced a discipline upon myself. This is the closest I’ve ever come to policing my work.’ Tarantino’s efforts have paid off. Clocking in
at just shy of two-and-a-half hours and showcasing a series of extended set-pieces, Inglourious Basterds nevertheless feels tightly packed. Intertwining three storylines knotted together by a plot to assassinate the high command of the Third Reich at the premiere of a Nazi propaganda film at a cinema in occupied Paris, Tarantino’s latest has none of the indulgent longeurs that occasionally deflated Bills 1 and 2, nor does it suffer from the (admittedly purposely) uneven pacing that virtually ground his half of Grindhouse to a halt. In terms of style, tone and the punch it packs, Inglourious Basterds is closer to Tarantino’s more cohesive earlier films, Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown, which is doubly surprising given its prolonged scrappy development. And the reason for that, it turns out, lies in what ultimately inspired the film.
‘What was inspiring at the beginning became passé,’ Tarantino says, ‘and what I took true inspiration from was something I wouldn’t have thought about. Initially, I was thinking of the men-on-a-mission movies, Where Eagles Dare, The Dirty Dozen, Darker than the Sun, etc, but then it was a lot of the movies made in the 40s, which people disparagingly call propaganda movies. I really like those movies. Most of them were made by foreign directors living in America because they couldn’t live in their own countries because the Nazis had occupied them: Jean Renoir with This Land is Mine, Fritz Lang with Manhunt, Jules Dassin with Nazi Agent, Douglas Sirk with Hitler’s Henchmen, and a Russian director working out of France I’d never heard of, Léonide Moguy, who did a movie about the French underground, Paris After Dark.’ True to those films, Inglourious Basterds mixes dazzling dialogue with bursts of action and flips from serious to comic and back. And
like those wartime morale boosters, Basterds also plays fast and loose with history. Without giving the plot away, there’s one eye-opening scene late on in the film in particular that will have historians popping their sockets. ‘As you’re writing a scenario different roads become available to you,’ Tarantino says. ‘Screenwriters have a habit of putting roadblocks up, maybe because they can’t afford to have their characters go down that road, keeping the budget down. I’ve never put that kind of imposition on my characters: where they go, I follow. Now, when I wrote Inglourious Basterds I came across a roadblock: history itself. ‘[But] my characters didn’t know they were part of history; history had not been written yet. They didn’t know there were things they couldn’t do. There was only action and reaction. Now, is my movie a fairytale? Feel free to look at it that way, but the way I look at it is: my characters change the course of history. Not really, of course, because they don’t actually exist. But if they had, everything that happens in the movie is quite plausible.’
It feels like it was only a matter of time before Tarantino made a movie with Brad Pitt. Pitt’s collaborations with the Coen Brothers felt like they were framing him up to carry something like Inglourious Basterds for Tarantino. On the red carpet at the Cannes premiere, the pair gushed about each other like a couple of giddy school kids. Of Tarantino, Pitt said, ‘He’s one of the greatest directors in the world. He’s one of our auteurs; he’s got a very specific voice. There’s no one like him. He’s changed the game a few degrees and continues to do so.’ A game Pitt is well versed in, dancing between blockbusters and smaller pet projects, and a film with Tarantino falls squarely
FROM BRAD TO WORSE We plot just what we’ve loved or hated from the heavenly highs and ungodly lows of the screen career of William Bradley Pitt
1999
1991
1993 1995
1994 2000
Johnny Suede
The hair, the Elvis-isms
True Romance The hair, the accent, the munchies
Thelma & Louise
The torso, the cowboy
hat
8 THE LIST 20–27 Aug 2009
Se7en The
incredibly short fuse, the wife’s
head in a box
Twelve Monkeys
The madness!
Fight Club The sex, the violence
1998
Meet Joe Black
The tedium, the tedium
Snatch
The impenetrable accent, the hobo dress code
Interview with the
Vampire The decent
performance, a truly corny film