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Inglourious Basterds has been on Tarantino fans’ radar for a while. Now it’s finally here and it might not be what you expect. We asked director Quentin Tarantino some of the questions we thought might be on most viewers minds either after they see the movie, or even as prep before.
Crave Online: How should we write about the movie? Can we say how little the Basterds are actually in?
Quentin Tarantino: If you consider the Basterds the six other guys in the background, yeah, they become incidental to the actual mission themselves once the story gets going on.
Crave Online: Even Brad Pitt and Eli Roth though.
Quentin Tarantino: Well, I disagree with that though because my feeling about it is this. To me the film has three leads. It has Aldo, Shoshanna and Landa. Even the structure of the movie, the first three chapters are setting up these leads. Then, chapter four and five is okay, now the adventure begins. The other aspect though is you can say that everybody in this movie is an inglourious basterd. Doesn’t just have to mean the one little group.
Crave Online: This movie shows a love for cinema.
Quentin Tarantino: I would definitely say so. That’s one of the things that cracked me up when I started writing it. When I had the first scene between Zoller and Shoshanna and they’re debating Linder vs. Chaplin, or he’s debating it and she’s listening. When that scene was over, I finished it and I was like, “Okay, great. I go to make my World War II movie and it becomes a love letter to cinema.” I guess I cannot not.
Crave Online: You can do a 2.5 hour movie because you’re Tarantino. Should other studios let filmmakers do it? Is the 90 minute format just not enough time for stories?
Quentin Tarantino: You know, I don’t see that many movies holding to the 90 minute format. Like a romantic comedy, most of them are like 100 minutes actually. It seems to me the new real time, whether it’s good or not for a movie, is like 2:10, 2:15. That really does seem to be like the normal running time now for anything that’s trying to do anything, other than just a little comedy or even a little horror film. The answer is every movie is different, every filmmaker is different, everything needs the time that it needs. It’s one of those things. Okay, I think that my movie is exactly the right length to tell my story and as far as it being entertaining is my opinion, all right. I could cut 20 minutes out of it and I could make the movie seem longer because it’s disjointed, it doesn’t have a rhythm, it’s abrupt, you’re not enveloped in it, all right? Then if you add those 20 minutes back, wow, that kinda flew by. Actually the case in point of that was when I went to Cannes with the film, I wasn’t really 100% finished. We hadn’t done our last little thing that me and my editor Sally do is just watch it with an audience. So we watched it with an audience and for two days we just did a little nipping and tucking and pruning and boom, it was done. All right, it was a minute longer. It’s a minute longer than the Cannes cut but it feels like 12 minutes shorter. I mean, it just has a rhythm that it didn’t have I Cannes.
Crave Online: How many years has this been the next project on your horizon?
Quentin Tarantino: About 10. I came up with the idea and started putting pen to paper in ’98, right after Jackie Brown.
Crave Online: And there was talk of hiring Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Quentin Tarantino: That was all rumors and stuff. That was just all internet rumors. Nothing against him, I’m just saying there was Bruce Willis, Sylvester Stallone, none of that ever came from me.
Crave Online: How did it change over the years?
Quentin Tarantino: Well, it did change but look, my whole thing is what gets me to sit down and write something in the first place is usually a very thin idea. It’s usually just like Reservoir Dogs was hey, I’m going to sit down and write a heist movie. And I did. It’s a little different, you don’t see the heist but that still doesn’t mean it’s not a heist movie. The idea is that’s what gets me to sit down and start writing and I’m hoping that I go beyond that and I expand it and it becomes it’s own thing, but hopefully still delivering the pleasures of whatever genre I’m thinking about dipping my big toe into. In this case, it would be the bunch of guys on a mission World War II subgenre. That happens but the whole idea is to expand it and to go my own way with it. Now, how it’s changed since then, so it’s not like oh wow, now it’s changed into something else. I’m planning for that to happen. That’s the goal. I don't know how it’s going to happen but I’m hoping that that will be the case. How this has changed from what I came up with then is I had a different storyline in mind way back when because I came up with most of the characters that you see and I wrote the first two chapters that introduce those characters way back then. But I had a different story and it was just too big. It was just too big. I had the opposite of writer’s block. I couldn’t stop writing. I couldn’t shut my brain off. I kept coming up with a new character or a new dramatic turn or new wrinkle or something. Sergio Leone-itis, I could not introduce a single character without giving him a 20 minute scene. Okay, I guess there’ll be no mission, all right? It’s the introduction movie. So when I came back to it, and also I even had to go through the whole thing, okay, so what does this mean? What, I’m too big for movies? I’m just such a great artist that I can’t work with that puny a canvas. Three hours? Pffff. Pushaw. So I had to get over myself, did Kill Bill Volume 1 and 2, then came back to it.
