When he started writing Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino wanted to come up with a “bunch-of-guys-on-a-mission movie”. “It was a sub-genre of Second World War movies,” he says, “like The Guns Of Navarone. They hadn’t been made in a long time and I thought that would be a cool genre for me. Then when I started writing it, it became something else. The idea just came to me of a bunch of Jewish-American soldiers behind enemy lines doing an Apache resistance against the Nazis.”
“It’s not a straight-up fight,” he continues. “It’s not about being cool. They are hiding in trees and rocks, wiping out the Nazis, getting information from them and then desecrating their bodies so that other Nazis will come across them, see them and start telling their tale. And then they win a psychological war. I thought that was an exciting story that I hadn’t seen that I’d like to see.”
While obviously reference has been made to Enzo Castellari’s 1978 war picture The Inglorious Bastards from which he borrowed the title and The Dirty Dozen, Tarantino says that “no one movie was necessarily influential on this film. I wanted it to have more of a Spaghetti Western feel but using Second World War iconography.”
Basterds would become Tarantino’s biggest production to date, and he says he felt the pressure. “Kill Bill was a more enjoyable movie to make,” he says. “I loved shooting in Germany and a little bit in Paris, but there was a lot of pressure because we were really trying to keep to a clipped schedule. We would finish a big scene in three days, but we were back at it the next day, doing a scene in a week and a half that almost everyone else would do in two weeks. So it was like, ‘Until you’re done, you ain’t fucking done.’ It was a big weight.”
As to the flurry of rumours about the post-production period and supposed battles with The Weinstein Company and Universal, Tarantino reacts furiously. “There were rumours that they were trying to get me to take 20 minutes out of the movie,” he confirms, “but that was all bullshit. One, I am even offended that people think I can be bossed around like that. But the reality was that we tested it with an audience in Los Angeles after Cannes to see what worked and what didn’t work with a neutral audience. I didn’t consider Cannes a neutral audience. So we went back to the editing room after that. It was just the little nipping and pruning that goes on when you actually watch it with an audience.”
Tarantino admits to cutting scenes with Maggie Cheung and Cloris Leachman that did not contribute to the flow of the story, but those were decisions he made himself. “It’s just a normal thing that happens as you shoot some scenes that end up not being in the film,” he says.
Mike Goodridge
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