'History hasn't been written yet'
Anne Wollenberg was there when the always hyper uber-director Quentin Tarantino faced the London press to talk about his latest epic, Inglourious Basterds. And two of the film's stars – Christoph Waltz and Diane Kruger – plus producer Lawrence Bender were there, too – and even managed to get some words in.
“Some people have asked if this movie’s a fairytale,” says Quentin Tarantino. “Well, the first thing I wrote was: ‘Once upon a time in Nazi-occupied France…’”
He’s talking, of course, about Inglourious Basterds, his ensemble war-epic-meets-spaghetti-western. It screened at Cannes in May, where Austrian actor Christoph Waltz bagged the Best Actor award for his portrayal of Nazi Colonel Hans “The Jew Hunter” Landa. As you can tell from the name, Landa is quite the fluffy bunny. But is he pure evil? Waltz says not. “I leave my moral judgement in the cloakroom. Had you asked Heinrich Himmler if he considered himself an evil person, I’m 100% certain he would not have understood the question,” he says. “This movie is great because you’re being called on to employ your moral faculties.”
And don’t worry: while Tarantino tends to prize ultra-violence above authenticity, he has drawn the line at having Nazis speak English with overexaggerated German accents. “There was never a thought of ever doing it in English with accents,” says producer Lawrence Bender, who’s worked on every Tarantino movie apart from Death Proof. “A German person speaking English just wouldn’t make sense.” Historical accuracy still went out the window though, of course. “I think that was pretty clear from the opening page,” says Diane Kruger, who plays fictional German film siren Bridget von Hammersmark. “I never expected to see a World War II movie done by Tarantino that’s going to be a classic sob movie.”
“But history hasn’t been written yet,” insists Tarantino. Not for his characters, anyway. “My characters don’t know there are things they can’t do. They change the course of history – that didn’t really happen, because they didn’t exist. But if they *had* existed, everything that happens in the film is actually quite possible.” War-time scripts aren’t normally a novelty for Kruger. “Truth is, being German I probably get offered a World War II piece at least once a week, as you can imagine,” she says. “Which I don’t want to do, because I don’t just want to be associated with that part of my country’s history. And then this came along.”
Kruger says she enjoyed working with Tarantino because “Quentin just loves women. For once you get a director who loves women for what they can do. When I was being tortured, I felt I was taking it like a man. He is one of the most precise directors I have ever worked with – he sits and stares, which is very unsettling at first.”
Many have drawn comparisons between Inglourious Basterds and the likes of Where Eagles Dare and The Dirty Dozen. “I was thinking about the bunch of guys on a mission genre when I first sat down to write the film,” says Tarantino, “but what was inspiring at the beginning became very passe. What I found really inspirational was watching a lot of movies made in the 40s that people disparagingly call American propaganda movies. I don’t like that term. Most are done by foreign directors now living in Hollywood who couldn’t live in their home countries because the Nazis had occupied them.
“Jean Renoir with This Land is Mine, Fritz Lang with Man Hunt and Hangmen Also Die!, Jules Dassin with Nazi Agent and Reunion in France. One of my favourites is Léonide Moguy who did Paris After Dark about the French underground,” he says. The key draw, he explains, is the fact these movies were made when World War II was actually happening. “When the Nazis weren’t this theoretically evil boogeyman from the past but were actually a threat. This was actually going on. Not only that, many of these directors had personal experience of the Nazis. They had people they were concerned about back in their home countries. Yet these movies are entertaining, they can be thrilling, they’re exciting.”
Would he say the same of Inglourious Basterds? Is it his masterpiece? “That’s not for me to say,” he insists. “It’s not for the chicken to speak of its own soup.”