Quentin on finishing Basterds

TRIUMPH OF HIS WILL
Only Quentin Tarantino could create ‘Inglourious Basterds,’ wherein Brad Pitt plays a redneck leading a band of tough Jews bent on going, well, medieval on Nazis. And that’s just one part of his new movie. Alex Pappademas follows the most ambitious director of his generation from Berlin to Cannes to Los Angeles as he struggles to finish what he hopes will be his new masterpiece

Quentin told me that all that fog-of-war-movie stuff was exaggerated. He wasn't lost. He just couldn't stop writing. He'd produced more story than a movie could hold. He thought about turning it into a novel. He came close to writing it up as a twelve-episode mini-series—his own gonzo Band of Brothers. He says director Luc Besson (La Femme Nikita) talked him out of that. "You're one of the only guys whose movies make me want to go out to a theater," Besson told him one night over drinks. This stuck with Quentin. In January 2008, he took one more shot at chopping his monster down to movie size.

He cut one major plotline—a story about a group of AWOL black soldiers making their way across occupied France, which he might turn into a Basterds sequel if this one does well. He focused in on the Basterds, a unit of Jewish American commandos using terrorist tactics against the Third Reich, and Shosanna Dreyfus, a French farm girl who flees to Paris and becomes the proprietress of a movie house after the Nazis murder her family. He wrote a new third act, bringing these two stories together, to bloody and historically inaccurate effect, at the gala premiere of ein film von Joseph Goebbels. He'd write all day; at night he'd listen to records or float in his pool, ruminating. He feels that the movie was really written between January and July of last year. "I've never written such a big thing so fast before," he says. "It just came tumbling out of me."

He finished the script on July 2 and sent it to his longtime producing partner, Lawrence Bender, the next day, telling him he wanted to shoot it in time for Cannes. "I was like, ‘Wow—really? You finished it? Shit!' " Bender says. "That was a wild moment." Tarantino flew to France to persuade Brad Pitt to play Lieutenant Aldo Raine, the leader of the Basterds. ("We talked about movies into the wee hours of the night," Pitt told reporters in May. "When I got up the next morning, I saw five empty bottles of wine lying on the floor—five!—and something that resembled a smoking apparatus.… And apparently I'd agreed to do the movie." When I ask Tarantino who supplied this apparatus, he says, "That was Brad. He did the fabrication. He can take a Coke can and make it—functional.")

When I ask Harvey Weinstein why Tarantino decided to make the movie on this scramble-the-fighters timetable, he brings up Grindhouse, the double-feature slasher-film tribute Tarantino co-directed with Robert Rodriguez in 2007. Weinstein doesn't believe that Grindhouse's poor box-office performance had anything to do with Quentin's decision to get moving on Basterds but believes Tarantino "wanted to get back in the saddle. He did his B movie, and I think it was time for him to go back and make his Quentin Tarantino movie."