FRANCE: Quentin Tarantino and Brad Pitt talk about their first collaboration, 'Inglourious Basterds'

Record ID: 475701

  • Title: FRANCE: Quentin Tarantino and Brad Pitt talk about their first collaboration, 'Inglourious Basterds'
  • Date: 21st May 2009
  • Summary: CANNES, FRANCE (MAY 20, 2009) (REUTERS) (SOUNDBITE) (English) CHRISTOPH WALTZ SAYING: "It was a ride above a dream. And Quentin is one of the most acute, astute and precise observers of everything, to to actually be in the hands of someone like that you can just do what you are supposed to do." WIDE OF NEWS CONFERENCE (SOUNDBITE) (English) ELI ROTH, SAYING: "I can just say, being Jewish, to me, this is like kosher porn. It's something I fantasized about since I was a very young child. It was like performing a sex scene beating that guy (the character of Adolf Hitler) to death, and the blood spurting, you get the idea." NEWS CONFERENCE (SOUNDBITE) (English) DIRECTOR QUENTIN TARANTINO, SAYING: "He (actor Daniel Bruehl) said you have to see Good Bye Lenin, and when I watched, I was like that's my (character of private) Zoeller, that's him right there, if Daniel's mother didn't meet his father I don't know if we'd ever had the right Zoeller, I mean, it was this guy stepping off the fucking page." DANIEL BRUHL KISSING TARANTINO CAMERA CREWS (SOUNDBITE) (English) DIRECTOR QUENTIN TARANTINO, SAYING: "And somewhere pretty quickly into the text of writing Aldo, I thought, this is the one for Brad. And then I started getting fucking nervous, because, alright, shit, if he doesn't do it, what the fuck am I going to do?" BRAD PITT SAYING "He had me at hello" WIDE OF NEWS CONFERENCE VARIOUS OF JOURNALISTS COMING OUT OF LUMIERE THEATRE AFTER SCREENING OF "INGLORIOUS BASTERDS" (SOUNDBITE) (English) VIEWER, NO NAME GIVEN, SAYING: "It was blood and guts, great action, funny, it had everything. He is back. He had lost it in his last few films, but I think with this one, he is back and he is back with a splash." PEOPLE COMING OUT OF THEATRE (SOUNDBITE) (English) VIEWER VITALY PILLBAUM FROM SWITZERLAND , SAYING: "Enjoying is not the right word. But it's an excellent movie, really passionate, but enjoy is not the word." PEOPLE COMING OUT OF CINEMA (SOUNDBITE) (English) VIEWER FRANK VORPAHL FROM GERMANY , SAYING: "You know what? I am German and my daughter is Jewish and I liked it very much. I liked it that somebody was able to do something against the Nazis, which never happened in reality but now it happened on the screen. I liked it very much." (SOUNDBITE) (English) VIEWER ADELAIDE DE CLAIRE-MONTAGNAIRE SAYING: "Yes, I did enjoy it. I mean it was really well done, it's surprisingly funny, it's extremely violent of course, but I guess he had this fantasy of revisiting history, making it the way he would have wanted it to be. You know, it's Jewish vengeance and it's quite well done, really." (SOUNDBITE) (English) VIEWER GEORGOIRE, SAYING: "It's a jubilation for me. I like Tarantino, the actors are perfect, Brad Pitt is stupid- very well done." PEOPLE WALKING OUT OF THEATRE
  • Embargoed: 5th June 2009 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: France
  • Country: France
  • Reuters ID: LVACWD311K2RF1NL6TWPUQUYTCID
  • Story Text: U.S. director Quentin Tarantino rolls a Western, gangster flick and wartime caper into one in 'Inglourious Basterds', his new film starring Brad Pitt as the leader of a ruthless gang of Nazi-slayers.
    So fearsome is the band of Jewish-American "bastards" that Adolf Hitler himself comes to hear of them, and the predictably violent and action-packed narrative weaves real life figures into a riotous plot that re-writes history.
    Most of the dialogue is in German and French and translated with subtitles, possibly limiting the film's box office potential in the United States.
    But at the Cannes film festival, where Tarantino's picture is in the main competition and has its world premiere on Wednesday, there was warm applause after a press screening. The 46-year-old, who won the Palme d'Or in Cannes in 1994 with "Pulp Fiction" told reporters he rushed to have his movie ready in time for the world's biggest film festival.
    The narrative opens in the first year of the German occupation of France, where character Shosanna Dreyfus witnesses the execution of her family at the hands of Nazi Colonel Hans Landa, flamboyantly played by Christoph Waltz.
    Elsewhere in Europe, Pitt's character Aldo Raine forms a group of Jewish-American soldiers charged with scalping their Nazi victims, and so successful are they that Hitler comes to fear them.
    Diane Kruger plays a famous German actress who is also an undercover agent on a mission to take down the leaders of the Third Reich -- the strands converge on a small Parisian cinema where history is turned on its head in an explosive climax.
    Much of the humour in Inglourious Basterds stems from language. Americans' reputations for speaking nothing other than English is a recurring theme, with Pitt's limited Italian comically exposed by the polyglot Landa.
    Tarantino said he and Pitt had wanted to work together on a movie for some time.
    Pitt said he agreed to play Raine after discussing the part with the director long into the night.
    "I got up the next morning and I saw five empty bottles of wine laying on the floor ... and something that resembled a smoking apparatus, I don't know what that was about," Pitt said. "And apparently I agreed to do the movie because six weeks later I was in uniform and I was Lieutenant Aldo Raine."
    Tarantino declined to explain why he inserted spelling mistakes into the title of his film, borrowed from Italian director Enzo Castellari's 1978 picture 'Inglorious Bastards'.
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