Quentin Tarantino
Quite simply, one of the most successful living auteurs in the film industry and, with Inglourious Basterds, he is back with a bang.

Quentin Tarantino is, quite simply, one of the most successful living auteurs in the film industry. His films have earned him Oscars, BAFTAs, Golden Globes and, the coveted P’alme d’Or. In recent times, his work has come under more criticism than ever before but, with Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino is back with a bang.

This project has been on and off for a very long time now in different forms, at one point you were even considering doing it as a miniseries. What was the eureka moment when you realised that the idea would work as a movie?

Quentin Tarantino: One thing about that is, when I decided to chuck the first storyline that I’d come up with, the one that was turning it into this miniseries idea as opposed to a movie, I was still nervous that I could make it work as a movie. I knew I didn’t want the movie to be any longer than Pulp Fiction, and the only way I could do that was just make sure the script wasn’t any longer. That was something I’d really got out of the habit of doing, starting with Jackie Brown, through to Kill Bill. I didn’t censor myself at all when it came to writing, that’s why you’ve got Kill Bill volume 1 and 2. So what I did was I actually had the script of Pulp Fiction just always right next to me. It’s the closest I’ve ever come to policing my work, but it was simply in an effort to stop the thing becoming elephantine. It wasn’t until I got into the third act that I realised that, ok, I think this is going to work, I think I can actually wrap this up in a movie form.

What movies did you draw inspiration from as you were making Inglourious Basterds?

QT: When I first sat down to write the film I was thinking of a guys-on-a-mission genre, and so all the films I thought about before I even wrote the thing were Where Eagles Dare, Dirty Dozen, The Devil’s Brigade, Dark of the Sun, movies like that. But, having said that, what I found so inspirational when I was actually making it were the movies made in the 40s. Most of them are actually done by foreign directors who were now living in Hollywood because they couldn’t live in their home countries because the Nazis had occupied them. In that case you’re talking about Jean Renoir with This Land is Mine, you’re talking about Fritz Lang with Man Hunt and Hangmen Also Die!, you’re talking about Jules Dassin with Nazi Agent and Reunion in France, you’re talking about Douglas Sirk with Hitler’s Madman, and, one of my favourites, a Rusian director who was working out of France named Léonide Moguy who did a film called Paris After Dark. An interesting thing about these movies is that almost all of them star George Sanders!

What in particular drew you to these movies, apart from George Sanders of course?

QT: The thing that was very interesting to me was that these are movies made exactly at the time of World War II, when the Nazis weren’t this theoretical, evil, boogyman from the past, but were actually a threat; this was actually going on. And not only that, but many of these directors actually had personal experience of the Nazis. These directors, all of them obviously had people they were concerned about back in their home countries, yet these movies are entertaining: they’re thrilling, they’re exciting, many of them have considerable amounts of humour in them, especially something like To Be or Not to Be by Ernst Lubitsch. Also they’re so literate, the dialogue in these movies is just so fantastic. I mean, any movie starring George Sanders is going to have great dialogue, right?

So you were inspired by the spirit of these movies rather than drawing inspiration from them stylistically?

QT: I didn’t do anything stylistically that was like them; I didn’t shoot it in black and white and try to recreate them. There’s nothing stylistically that you could link my movie with theirs other than hopefully entertainment value. One of the things I would say in that regard though is that I’ve always been a big fan of German cinema in the 20s and I wanted to do one of the chapters like a silent movie. Well, I got over that. I realised it would be too reflective and I shouldn’t do something like that, but I had a fun time exploring the idea.

You’ve referred to Inglourious Basterds as your men-on-a-mission movie. How machiavellian are you about your own career? Do you think about the stage of your career you’re at, and what film you’re going to make?

 

QT: It really is kind of a mix of the two, which is I guess how it should be. Whatever turns me on to write the story is what turns me on to write the story. I mean, you could say that if I was too machiavellian about it I wouldn’t have done Grindhouse with Robert [Rodriguez]. In that case I just wanted to do it because it seemed like a fun thing to do. But I am thinking about my career. Well, fuck the word ‘career’, I’m thinking about my filmography, that’s what I’m thinking about. I believe that a filmmaker lives or dies by their filmography. I admire directors that retire at a certain age so that they don’t just cheapen their filmography with four old man movies at the end of it. I am a student of cinema and I see where directors have gone wrong. I don’t want that to happen to me.

 

Would you consider this film to be your masterpiece?

 

QT: Not to be coy, but it’s really not for me to say. I mean, it’s not for the chicken to speak of his own soup!

Inglourious Basterds is very liberal with World War II history. Did you have any misgivings about making the movie so historically inaccurate?

QT: When you write there are many times when there are different roads that become available to you that the characters could go down. And in particular screen writers will have a habit of putting road blocks up, because they can’t afford to have their characters go down certain roads because they’re trying to sell a script or something like that. But I’ve never put that kind of imposition on my characters: wherever they go, I follow them. Now, when it came to writing this movie, naturally I came across some of those road blocks, and one of them in particular was history itself. I was more or less prepared to honour it until I came actually up against it and I thought: no, I refuse. I’ve never done that before and now’s not the time to start. And what I mean by that is this: my characters don’t know they’re part of history; they don’t know that there are things that they can and cannot do.

One of the characters in Inglourious Basterds, Archie Hicox, is a film critic. Did you take any pleasure in killing him off?

QT: Not at all! I don’t have any bone to pick with critics, in fact if I wasn’t a filmmaker I would probably be a film critic. My bone is that I would be a better film critic that most of the film critics I read! But no, I love Archie. Archie Hicox is awesome! And it’s not just a flight of fancy, I vaguely based the idea on Graham Greene, who was a film critic but also a commando in World War II.

Having lived with the movie for over ten years, what moments are you most proud of now it’s been made?

QT: Gosh, well… I could say more but I’ll boil it down to two scenes. Those would be the opening sequence, which is everything I could have ever hoped it would be. And that’s a three way collaboration, because, yeah, I definitely did my job, but it never would have been what it is without Christoph Waltz and Denis Menochet, I mean they were just…impeccable. The other moment in the movie that I’m probably the most cinematically satisfied with, that I almost can’t believe it got nailed to such a degree, is the sequence in the projection booth between Shosanna and Fredrick: the music, the slow-motion, the effect of the camera coming up and seeing this twisted Romeo and Juliet type of tableau on the floor as the film reel continues to go on… I’m sorry I don’t mean to get enraptured by my own work but that is the moment that I go “oh my God!”

Read the Pure Movies review of Quentin Tarantino’s latest film, Inglourious Basterds