Quentin Tarantino is back on form

Aug 24 2009 By Andy Welch

Quentin Tarantino's latest film Inglourious Basterds which was released in cinemas on Wednesday August 19. The director talks about diving into his vinyl collection to make his legendary film soundtracks and how he played fast and loose with history in his latest film.

His much-hyped new movie Inglourious Basterds, set in Nazi-occupied France, does just that and the director/screenwriter admits he had no qualms about it.

"The way I write, there's different roads the characters could go down and when I was writing this movie, naturally I came across some roadblocks, and one of those was history itself," he says, with a high-pitched giggle.

"I was more or less prepared to honour that until I came up against it and I go, 'No, I refuse!' My character's don't know they're part of history, history has not been written yet, they don't know there's things they can't do, there's only action and reaction."

It's ballsy stuff from the guy whose last effort Death Proof was widely agreed to be underwhelming. He readily admits that project became "derailed", but he's still all too aware of his power in Hollywood.

"If you're an important artist, people may not like you, but they have to deal with you," he says, with characteristic enthusiasm.

Considering Tarantino's knack for penning whip-smart, cool, concise dialogue - the phrase 'Tarantino-esque' hasn't entered the lexicon of film critique for nothing - it's interesting that he doesn't employ such brevity in real life.

When we meet at a London hotel, he's nothing if not passionate, becoming more and more animated as he explains the most minute details of his latest movie.

There's something different about Inglourious Basterds, however. He started writing the screenplay more than a decade ago, but knew it would require something of a superhuman effort to get his sprawling, intricate vision to the screen.

Instead of hacking away pages of dialogue, the Tennessee-native decided to work on other things, namely Kill Bill and the Grindhouse double-header with Robert Rodriguez instead.

When Inglourious Basterds was shown at the Cannes Festival earlier this year, he was unsurprisingly proud to finally see his hard work on screen.

The story kicks off in Nazi-occupied France, where we're introduced to the suave, charismatic, yet ultimately evil German Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), referred to as The Jew Hunter for obvious reasons.

Don't be surprised to see relative unknown Waltz troubling each and every award ceremony come the new year. His performance is simply outstanding.

The Basterds of the title are a rag bag assortment of Jewish American soldiers - not counting infamous German deserter Hugo Stiglitz who defects to their cause - who have only have one thing on their mind: killing Nazis.

Lieutenant Aldo Raine, played brilliantly by Brad Pitt, leads the titular fighting unit, demanding nothing from his men other than inflicting terror and torture on the opposing forces. Oh, and 100 Nazi scalps from each of his men.

Meanwhile in Paris, while the Basterds move across France carrying out their mission like a cross between The Dirty Dozen and The Wild Bunch, Shosanna, a survivor of an earlier attack by Landa's men, plots her bloody revenge, at the same time ignoring the advances of Nazi hero Frederick Zoller.

Being a Tarantino film, several storylines cross over one another, culminating in an all-consuming finale.

Anyone who's seen one of his earlier films will know he's a fan of liberal violence, and Basterds is no different. His other trademarks are also here, most notably of all, the soundtrack, which juxtaposes the action of World War II with the Ennio Morricone-composed score of the Spaghetti Western classics.

"It's full of Morricone stuff, there are about eight tracks of his in there," explains the 46-year-old.

"I never had any hesitation about putting it in at all, that was part of my plan to create the Spaghetti Western landscape."

Few directors understand soundtrack as well as Tarantino - and it's no surprise to hear he has his own vinyl record room. His classic scenes all involve music which compliments or grates against the images on screen.

Think of the diner dance in Pulp Fiction, which sees Mia and Vince groove along to Chuck Berry's You Never Can Tell, or Mr Blonde torturing a policeman in Reservoir Dogs, while menacingly enjoying Stuck In The Middle With You by Stealers Wheel.

"Usually I actually find there's a bit of a dichotomy between the music being played and the image on the screen," he asserts.

"That's one of the ways it can work best, not something weird and dumb, just as long as it works. With Basterds, I think it works on two different levels; on one level, I didn't want the film to have this Spaghetti Western 'feel' about it, but Spaghetti Western done with World War II iconography, so in that regard, it became appropriate for setting the stage and the mood.

"But there's also something else going on, in two of the pieces, particularly. There's the opening credit music, The Green Leaves Of Summer, which is from The Alamo, and there's another track from an Italian Western you hear when Frederick Zoller is walking away from Shosanna at the theatre.

"That just sounds like it's from The Alamo. With those connotations, that music gets you thinking 'What happens in The Alamo?' and then what happens at the end of my movie?"

Whether the average film-goer will spot such references is another thing entirely. Even the most ardent movie fan won't have seen or have knowledge of as many films as Tarantino.

After dropping out of high school aged 15, and later studying acting, 22-year-old Tarantino got a job in a video rental store, where he and fellow worker Roger Avary would spend all day watching, discussing and recommending films. The pair would later go on to write Pulp Fiction together.

This rich knowledge has allowed Tarantino to tip his hat to many films and genres throughout his career. Jackie Brown, for example, was his homage to the blaxploitation flicks of the Seventies, while Kill Bill was a love letter to martial arts films such as Lady Snowblood, Shogun Assassin and Bruce Lee's final work Game Of Death.

Tarantino's inspirations for Inglourious Basterds are, on the surface, obvious, but as he explains the more he got into the project, the more they slipped away.

"When I first sat down to write the film I was thinking about the bunch-of-guys-on-a-mission genre, so all the touchstones - Where Eagles Dare, The Dirty Dozen, Devil's Brigade, movies like that, but then that became almost passe, and I started watching a lot of the movies made in the Forties, what people disparagingly call propaganda movies.

"I'm talking Jean Renoir's This Land Is Mine, Fritz Lang's Hangmen Also Die! and Jules Dassin's Reunion In France.

"The thing that was very interesting to me was these were movies made exactly at the time of World War II when the Nazis weren't theoretical evil bogeymen from the past, but were actually a threat.

"And not only that, many of these directors actually had personal experience with the Nazis and were now living in exile. They all had people that they were concerned about back in their home countries, yet these movies are entertaining, they can be thrilling, they're exciting and humorous."

With all his characteristic elements in place, Inglourious Basterds is widely deemed a return to form for the director. The final line of the film has one character saying, 'I think this could be my masterpiece'. Surely Tarantino wouldn't be that literal?

Naturally, he believes some of Basterds' scenes are among his finest, but he's not getting carried away.

"I didn't have that line until it came time to it," he says. "That's just the line he says.

"As for my masterpiece, not to be coy, but it's not for me to say, and if I were to have that opinion, that opinion wouldn't be valid until at least three years from now.

"It's not for the chicken to speak of his own soup."

Quentin Tarantino - Extra time

Quentin Tarantino was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, on March 27, 1963.

His mother Connie was a nurse, while his father Tony was an actor and musician.

His first screenplay My Best Friend's Birthday was written in 1987, but was almost totally destroyed in a fire. It later formed the basis of 1993 film True Romance.

Quentin often casts himself in small roles in his films, appearing in Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Death Proof. He once played an Elvis impersonator in an episode of The Golden Girls.

Tarantino frequently uses the same actors in his films. Samuel L Jackson has appeared in five of his movies.