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By KRISTIN HOHENADEL
Published: May 6, 2009
PARIS
“THIS ain’t your daddy’s World War II movie,” Quentin Tarantino said with a grin, standing on a street corner here that had been scrubbed of 21st-century signposts to become the set of “Inglourious Basterds,” his new film about a band of Jewish-American soldiers on a scalp-hunting revenge quest against the Nazis.
Although it was mostly shot at Studio Babelsberg in Potsdam, Germany, the movie’s subtitle is “Once Upon a Time in Nazi-Occupied France.” So on a three-day sojourn in Paris in December, Mr. Tarantino and his bi-continental moviemaking coalition commandeered a 1904 bistro with peeling paint, Art Deco stained glass and a wall of windows overlooking an intersection of identifiably Parisian streets in the 18th Arrondissement.
“We had to have a scene to sell the audience that we’re in France,” Mr. Tarantino said. “This is it.”
“Inglourious Basterds,” which is to have its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival on May 20, is Mr. Tarantino’s first movie since “Death Proof,” half of “Grindhouse,” a double feature and box-office flop that he directed with Robert Rodriguez, and his first solo feature since “Kill Bill Vol. 2” in 2004.
Mr. Tarantino calls “Inglourious Basterds” his “bunch of guys on a mission movie.” Judging by the script, it should have the crackling dialogue, irreverent humor and stylized violence that are hallmarks of his work.
“You’ve got to make a movie about something, and I’m a film guy, so I think in terms of genres,” he said. “So you get a good idea, and it just moves forward and then usually by the time you’re finished, it doesn’t resemble anything of what might have been the inspiration. It’s simply the spark that starts the fire.”
The spark that led to “Inglourious Basterds,” starring Brad Pitt, Diane Kruger, Mike Myers, Eli Roth and a large international cast, can be traced to Mr. Tarantino’s storied days as a video-store clerk in Manhattan Beach, Calif. (The inspiration for “Reservoir Dogs,” “Jackie Brown” and other Tarantino movies can also be traced to that time.)
“The guys at Video Archives were like, ‘Quentin, maybe one of these days you’ll make your ‘Inglorious Bastards,’ ” Mr. Tarantino said, referring to the (conventionally spelled) 1978 Enzo G. Castellari film. “But they hadn’t even seen the movie. All right, it was just a great title. I love the movie, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not a remake,” he said, of his version.
“It will be in the original category at the Oscars,” he added optimistically.
Lawrence Bender, who has produced all but one Tarantino movie, said he was surprised when Mr. Tarantino called last summer to announce he had finalized the long-gestating “Basterds” script and wanted to finish the movie in time for Cannes. Mr. Tarantino won the top prize there, the Palme d’Or, in 1994 for “Pulp Fiction.”
“He’s read me all kinds of stuff over the years,” Mr. Bender said, “but I always assumed it was something he was going to have and never do.” (Mr. Tarantino is known for taking plenty of detours on the way from one movie to the next. He has directed episodes of television shows, including “CSI,” acted in and produced other people’s movies, and has been a guest judge and “mentor” on “American Idol.”)
A six-month research period for “Basterds” several years ago “paralyzed my writing for a while,” Mr. Tarantino said. He thought of making a World War II documentary or teaching a college course and even plotted out a 12-hour mini-series. Then in January 2008 he said he decided to “take one more crack at seeing if I could make this a movie,” he said. “I wasn’t out to teach a history lesson. You can turn on the History Channel — which might as well be called the Hitler Channel. I just wanted to tell my story and have the same freedom I would have telling any story. I want the act of writing to be so fulfilling that I have to question do I want to even make the movie.”
Mr. Tarantino’s unedited script was circulating online within days after he completed it. “This was so personal to me, misspellings and all,” he said, mentioning that he had typed it with one finger on the same 1987 Smith Corona word processor that he used to produce “Reservoir Dogs” and “Pulp Fiction.” “I mean I’ll proofread it when we publish it.”
Not that he’ll change the title. “Basterds should be spelled with an e,” he said. “It sounds like it has an e.” He shouted, “Basterds! Basterds!” in what sounded like a Boston accent: more “BAS-tids” than “BAS-terds.” (As for the spelling of “Inglourious,” Mr. Tarantino said: “I can’t tell you stuff like that. It’s a movie thing.”)
A man with a walkie-talkie tugged on Mr. Tarantino’s arm. “Sorry, I’m getting the vaudeville hook,” he said, and went inside the bistro to shoot a scene in which Shosanna (the French actress Mélanie Laurent), a young Jewish woman in hiding and running a Paris cinema, sits across a café table from an unsuspecting Nazi soldier and matinee idol (the German actor Daniel Brühl) trying to win her affections. Mr. Tarantino watched the actors like a patron spying on a couple across the room, barely glancing at the nearby monitor.
“I’m looking through the viewfinder when I set up a shot,” he said between takes, “but I watch the performance and listen to it. Otherwise the monitor is directing the movie.”
Like 70 percent of “Inglourious Basterds” this scene was being performed in French and German, which is just one of the reasons this isn’t your daddy’s World War II movie. “When you see the Germans speaking English with a German accent or sounding like British thespians, it just seems very quaint,” Mr. Tarantino said. “That’s one thing I don’t want this film to have. If Spielberg hadn’t made ‘Schindler’s List’ yet, I joke, I like to think that after our movie he’d be shamed into doing it in German.”
(Executives at the Weinstein Company said the heavy use of subtitles did not give them pause. “Tarantino is a universal language,” said Tom Ortenberg, president of theatrical films.)
Mr. Brühl said it was the director’s non-sacred approach to Germany’s painful history that attracted him to the role.
“I’m curious to see how it’s going to be received in Germany,” Mr. Brühl, 30, said, placing the movie in the tradition of Ernst Lubitsch’s “To Be or Not To Be” (1942) and Charlie Chaplin’s “Great Dictator” (1940). “If a comedy is intelligent and has depth, it’s a very legitimate way to talk about Fascism in Nazi Germany, which was also a big show — and if you think about it, very ridiculous.”
The screenplay is loaded with movie references and jokes, and intrigues involving actors and film premieres. Hitler’s minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, is portrayed as a typical studio chief. (“People write about the horrible anti-Semitic films,” Mr. Tarantino said, “but most of the 800 movies he made were comedies and musicals.”) And it is safe to say, without spoiling the history-bending penultimate scene, that cinema saves the world.
The production designer David Wasco, who has worked on all but one of Mr. Tarantino’s films, said that while they had labored to reproduce the period using original photographs and documents, “pretty much 90 percent is based on movie references.”
“It’s a Quentin period world,” he added. “That’s what we’re helping him do here.”
Mr. Tarantino said: “All that movie stuff just kind of organically happens. It’s just what I am interested in.”
Late in the day bottles of Champagne appeared on the sidewalk, and Mr. Tarantino called for a toast to honor the 800th roll of film. He circulated, clinking plastic glasses as evening fell over the city, with a word and a smile for everyone.
The Basterds — the film’s Jewish soldiers, given their nickname by the Nazis — hadn’t made the trip to Paris, but their presence could be felt in the grown-out “basterd haircut” (short on the sides and in back, long on top) that Mr. Tarantino was sporting. “The Basterds don’t have the luxury of being soldiers,” he said. “They have the duty to be warriors, because they’re fighting an enemy that’s trying to wipe them off the face of the earth.”
Mr. Tarantino, who was born in Tennessee, said his childhood revenge fantasies centered more on the Ku Klux Klan. “But it’s all the same,” he said. “Once the Basterds get through with Europe, they could go to the South and do it to the Kluxers in the ’50s. That’s another story you could tell.”
Not to mention a shelved subplot about African-American soldiers stuck behind enemy lines. “I have a half-written prequel ready to go if this movie’s a smash,” he said.
C
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