BIG HOLLYWOOD INTERVIEW: Quentin Tarantino, a Glorious 'Basterd'

Editor’s Note: After the publication of this piece we made an internal discovery that this interview was not a one-on-one interview between our writer and Quentin Tarantino, and that some of the questions attributed to “Big Hollywood” were asked by other journalists in what was a roundtable interview.



Upon discovering this, we temporarily removed the piece from the site until all the facts were known and a proper correction could be added.

Quentin Tarantino exploded on the world film scene in 1992 with “Reservoir Dogs,” a brutally profane yet ingeniously plotted and often funny deconstruction of the heist-film genre. He took things to a whole other level in 1994 with “Pulp Fiction,” reviving the foundering careers of superstars John Travolta and Bruce Willis while launching the star careers of Samuel L. Jackson and Uma Thurman while winning a Best Screenplay Oscar himself.

Yet in the 15 years since that classic, Tarantino hasn’t been able to score quite as big an impact. 1997’s “Jackie Brown” made just $39 million, while the two “Kill Bill” films scored $70 million each yet were considered hyper-violent trifles compared to what he was really capable of. And he really bottomed out with 2007’s “Death Proof,” which made up half of “Grindhouse,” a three-hour homage to the trashy drive-in films of America’s past. Its 21st-century audience didn’t get the joke and largely ignored it, earning just $27 million at the US box office.

Tarantino knew it was time to dig deep if he was ever going to recover his relevance, and the result was this summer’s smash “Inglourious Basterds,” which radically re-imagines WWII history with its focus on Brad Pitt leading a team of the US military’s toughest Jews on a mission to kill and scalp as many Nazis as possible – before a series of ingenious plot twists give the team of Basterds a shot at taking down Hitler himself. The film has proved to be a smash hit with critics and audiences alike. Following a smash $38 million opening that was by far Tarantino’s biggest ever, it also proved to have legs, placing in the top 3 a full four weeks after its release – a staggeringly uncommon occurrence that has earned it nearly $110 million with no end in sight.

Sitting down for a Q&A at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills, Tarantino offered plenty of insights into the creative process behind “Basterds” and the rich sense of film history that permeates its multi-layered entertainment. Since the film is entering its 5th weekend in theatres, giving people plenty of chances to see the film already, I’m including some of the questions that feature minor spoiler details.

BIG HOLLYWOOD: It’ll surprise people how little the Basterds are actually in the film. Should we preserve that?

QUENTIN TARANTINO: If you consider the Basterds the six guys in the background of Pitt, yeah they become incidental to the mission itself once the story goes on. To me, the story has three leads: Aldo (Pitt’s character), Shoshanna (a Jewish woman who escapes a Nazi slaughter) and Landa (the most ruthless Nazi). The first 3 chapters are setting up these leads, and Chapters 4 and 5 are now the adventure begins. You can also say everyone in the movie is an inglourious basterd, not just the little group.

BH: This is a movie that shows a love for cinema…

QT: I would definitely say so. One thing that cracked me up when I was first writing the first scene between Zoller (a Nazi who tries to charm Soshanna) and Soshanna and they’re debating (classic film directors) Linder vs. Chaplin, or he’s debating and she’s listening, I thought ‘OK I go make my WWII movie and it becomes a love letter to cinema.’ I guess I cannot not have that love show.

BH: You’ve done wonders for epic film, can do 2 hours to tell a complex story. Should studios let others do that?

QT: I don’t see most movies holding to the traditional 90 minute format. Romantic comedies are 100 minutes these days. The new time frame now normally seems to be 2:10, 2:15, for any film trying to do something beyond a little comedy or horror film. But everything needs the time that it needs. I think that my movie is exactly the right length to tell my story and be entertaining. I can cut 20 minutes and make it seem longer because it becomes disjointed or abrupt, and you don’t feel as involved. But here you can say ‘wow that really flew by.’ When I went to Cannes, we hadn’t watched it with an audience. So we did, heard what didn’t work and then spent two days nipping it and it wound up a minute longer – but it feels 12 minutes shorter.

BH: How long did you work on this film?

QT: I put pen to paper on this at first in ’98, around the time of “Jackie Brown.” People said along the way that Schwarzenegger would be in it, but that was all rumors. I’m not against him, but some said Bruce Willis, Stallone – none of that ever came from me.

BH: When you started, was it a more traditional war movie?

QT: It changed, but what gets me to sit down and write something in the first place is something, usually a very thin idea. “Reservoir Dogs” was bam, sit down and write a heist movie. You don’t see the heist, but still it’s a heist movie. Then I hope I get beyond that and it becomes its own thing, but hopefully still developing the pleasures of the genre I’m dipping my toe into. Yet the whole idea is to expand beyond it. How this has changed from what I came up with then is I had a different storyline in mind way back when, I wrote the first two chapters to introduce the characters but the story I had was just too big. I had the opposite of writers’ block, I couldn’t stop writing. And like (his idol, Italian director) Sergio Leone, I couldn’t introduce a character without giving them a 20 minute scene. I had to go back to it, realizing I had to get over myself thinking I can’t work on that puny a canvas of 3 hours. So I did “Kill Bill Vol. 1 and 2,” then I came back with a new story, and the new story is one about (Nazi) Frederick Zoller being like a German Audie Murphy (a famed American soldier turned actor) character who gets a movie made about him, and the mission would be the blowing up of the actual premiere of the film.

BH: What would you like us to say about the alternate history of the film?

QT: I don’t want you to say who gets killed, but you can say there is a point in the movie where history went one way and we went another. My idea was my characters changed the course of the war. It didn’t happen because they didn’t exist, but if they had existed it would all be fairly plausible.

BH: You have a real passion for cinema and use touchstones from the past in your current films. Out of current films or the past 20 years, anything that inspires you?

QT: I just wrote down my top 20 movies of the past 17 years that I’ve been directing. I was happy to find it was hard to break it down to 20. There’s a lot of terrific filmmakers out now, like my contemporary Paul Thomas Anderson. I feel I’m Marlon Brando to his Montgomery Clift. But that was an interesting reality. Brando and Clift were better actors because they always knew the other was there. I remember something that when I met Brian DePalma, a hero of mine, he was talking about having a friendly rivalry with Scorsese. While he was doing “Scarface,” a big epic with Pacino, and on a day off went to see “Raging Bull.” And that opening shot of rain, slow-motion, Jake LaMotta dancing and he thought, “Ugh, there’s always Scorsese. No matter how good you are or what you do, he’s always looking back at you.” But in last couple decades, great directors would include Paul, Robert Rodriguez, Richard Linklater – not because we’re friends, but we’re friends because we respond to their aesthetic. I’m not friends with David Fincher but I love his work. To me, some of the best cinema on earth is coming out of Korea. They’re amazing. Just two guys have done five of the best 20 films of the past ten years.

BH: Are there any good B-movies left nowadays?

QT: I wanted to see “Get Snow,” that Norwegian Nazi zombie movie. Straight to video, there was something lost by losing the theatrical experience, but now films on DVD with no theatrical release in America will get them overseas.. Who thought overseas fans would all of a sudden get into the horror film in a big way like “High Tension.” Or these Spanish horrors released by Dimension Extreme. These are very extreme movies, very few of Japanese horrors play US theaters, you watch them on DVD. I actually have seen “Kurosawa’s Pulse” at theaters, but most find it on DVD. It’s different than when Roger Corman had Concorde and they just put out their films straight to video. Every month I read Video Watchdog to see if something cool has reared its head. Is there a “Lost Boys 4?”

BH: Where does (the main Nazi villain) Landa rank among your characters?

QT: When I wrote him, I knew not only is he one of the best characters I’ve ever written, he’s the best I ever will write. One of the things I felt happy about with that sequence at the opening, I always felt that there’s this weird aspect that my scenes a lot of times are meant to stand alone the way you would listen to a greatest hits album. And in that self-aggrandizing analogy, I’d say the Sicilian scene in “True Romance” [a verbal confrontation between Christopher Walken and Dennis Hopper] was my best work. I knew I’d come close, but never top that. But when I wrote the opening scene in this movie, with the Jew Hunter and the French farmer, I thought, ‘I did it!’ That’s up to you to decide of course, though.

BH: On a typical day, what’s your routine on set? What’s your ritual?

QT: The bar sequence (of “Basterds”) was like a little movie unto itself, or a one-act play – so much so that I had people do the whole sequence in one long run. By the third day of rehearsal we had that scene down. A scene like that, there’s a lot of dexterity going on, because you have one table with Bridget and our boys, and the other table with Nazis and they’re playing a game. It was like a one-act play, so much so that I asked in rehearsals if we could wind up doing it as one long run. The third day of rehearsal we had that thing down, and with one more week I could have taken it to the Berlin stage. What could very well happen is we’re preparing (actress Diane Kruger), working something special for her, but the whole time I’m filming the German soldiers’ game, then I move over to film what bartender is doing. Then I really get into the card game, and there’s so much dialogue in it. So I’d film it but I’d be like, “I’d like to do the other angle the next day.” A sequence like that took two weeks to shoot, it’s like its own little movie, there’s a lot of juggling elements, and when you’re figuring out the directing of it you’re figuring how to juggle and how to keep it going.

Anybody who’s a director and gets more than 5 hours sleep a night must not be passionate. If you can sleep well, you must not be doing the job right.

BH: In “Basterds” you bring back old actors like Rod Taylor, or reinvent someone like Mike Myers, yet sometimes you discover someone totally unexpected like Christophe Waltz (the main Nazi Landa, considered an Oscar shoo-in by most critics). Would you say this is your best casting yet?

QT: It was the toughest, a tough delivery but we had a beautiful baby. I was precious about my casting – that whoever I cast was perfect to play the different facets of a character. Every once in a while I cast an actor who’s not my type. Hopefully, you don’t notice that but I notice that. You have to be both physical and verbal, and obviously you have to have a facility with dialogue if you’re gonna do one of my movies. You’ve gotta be hungry for it – instead of saying “Awww, I gotta learn this three page thing,” but say “Yeah! I’m gonna OWN this! It’s MINE!” and you take it and make it your own. You also gotta be smart to do my stuff.

BH: In 17 years of doing this, what’s your biggest triumph and your biggest disappointment?

QT: I guess the career goal that I always go to is winning the Palme d’Or for “Pulp Fiction.” There’s only one list of filmmakers more prestigious than those who’ve won it, and that’s the directors who haven’t. I took it very hard when “Grindhouse” didn’t do well. I like the movie, I’m very happy with that and what we did, and when we had an audience it played like gangbusters. I never had that kind of a flop before and it hurt my feelings, but you get over it and I’m lucky that I’m in a position to follow my muse, and sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn’t.