Glorious mess

Mélanie Laurent and Eli Roth discuss the
making of Quentin Tarantino’s schizophrenic
WWII pastiche Inglourious Basterds

TOUGH JEWS: Roth and Pitt

by MALCOLM FRASER

There are at least three different fonts in the opening credits of Inglourious Basterds, and somehow that speaks volumes about Quentin Tarantino—his obsession with vintage aesthetics, his indisposition to keeping things simple, his overwhelming preference for cool over cohesion. What follows is over two and a half hours of bravura filmmaking sure to maintain the director’s polarizing status, as it features some of the best work he’s ever done along with all the frustrating habits that compromise his talent.

Like much of the QT oeuvre, Basterds is essentially two films mashed into one, this time set in Europe during World War II. In one storyline, Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent) is a French Jewish girl who escapes her family’s massacre by an SS squad led by the charming, sadistic Colonel Landa (a riveting Christoph Waltz). A few years later, she runs a movie theatre in occupied Paris, and gets drawn back into the Nazi web when a celebrated German soldier (Daniel Brühl), who’s starring in a movie about his own war exploits, develops an attraction to the theatre and its owner.

The other story features Brad Pitt as the commander of a special squadron of Jewish American soldiers, who go behind enemy lines to strike fear into Nazi hearts by brutally killing and scalping their enemies. Despite its title billing, this story gets notably less screen time than its counterpart, and the contrast in atmosphere is striking. Where the Basterds thread is Tarantino in full fanboy mode, complete with over-the-top dialogue, cartoonish characters, nihilistic violence and overly clever self-reflexivity, the other storyline shows a surprising subtlety and restraint along with a masterful command of filmmaking style.

SLY CINÉASTE: Laurent

GAME CHANGER

Mélanie Laurent and Eli Roth (the Hostel director and Tarantino pal who appears as one of the Basterds) sat down with the Mirror in separate interviews to discuss this utterly unique film. According to Roth, Basterds was a conscious effort to step up Tarantino’s game. “In Death Proof,” Roth says candidly, “you could see the movie wasn’t as strong as the script, and there were certain scenes that felt like they went on more than they needed to. And with this, he was so disciplined with it, and really thinking about every line. Every line has to propel the story forward, and every scene has to ultimately serve the film. And if it didn’t, it was gone, no matter how great it was.”

This ruthless approach carried into the shooting. “You had to be on your game,” Roth recalls. “Right from the first day of rehearsal, there were people that weren’t prepared, and they were not there the next day. Their parts were changed, and they were gone. And that’s how it was.”

But, somehow appropriately given the radically divergent styles of the two storylines, Laurent has a different recollection of Tarantino’s directing style. “It was the best directing school in the world,” says the actress, who’s also directed short films of her own. “He has a very precise idea of what he wants. At the same time, he leaves us quite a few liberties as actors. He likes actors.” Tarantino also made the bold choice to shoot much of the film in historically accurate French and German. “He directs in English, and he knows exactly what we have to say,” Laurent explains. “He doesn’t speak French, but he has a certain melody in his head.”

Roth, who describes himself as a “Jewish technical advisor” on the film, credits bringing Tarantino to a Roth family Passover seder as a key point in Tarantino’s writing process. “He was asking me questions sort of like ‘How would the Jews feel about forgiveness,’ this or that. I said ‘We don’t forgive. Jews collect interest. We’re more mad about stuff from 2,000 years ago today than we were then.’”

The film plays out as a cathartic revenge fantasy against Nazis, threaded throughout with Tarantino’s trademark encyclopaedic references to film history. “Many people have dreamed of killing Hitler, or a dictator. The real strength of the film is that it’s a declaration of love to cinema,” says Laurent. “Nazis killed cinema, and in this film, cinema kills Nazis.”

The resulting pastiche will be lapped up by his fans—the guy throws more red meat to his base than Sarah Palin—and his detractors will find plenty to hate. If, like me, you find him an undeniably talented filmmaker hobbled by an Achilles’ heel of fanboy wanking, you too may come away with your love-hate relationship still simmering.

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS OPENS THIS
FRIDAY, AUG. 21