Quentin Tarantino & Christoph Waltz

When an artist in any medium achieves a certain degree of notoriety, the work they haven’t completed, haven’t released or are rumoured to be undertaking becomes almost as much of a talking point as the work that’s out there in the public eye. Take Quentin Tarantino, for example. Running parallel with the discussion about the movies the provocative filmmaker has written, directed, produced and overseen since his 1992 feature debut ‘’Reservoir Dogs’’ is the speculation about the other projects he is working up or said to be developing. And for a long time, one of the main Tarantino topics was his World War II epic known as ”Inglourious Basterds”.

Taking its title from a 1978 war movie directed by Italian exploitation maestro Enzo G. Castellari, ‘’Basterds’’ has been in the planning stages for a decade or so, with Tarantino tinkering with plotlines and characters over the years and fans feverishly trading gossip about the filmmaker’s casting choices (according to various rumours, the likes of Adam Sandler, Eddie Murphy, Bruce Willis, Sylvester Stallone and Reservoir Dogs star Michael Madsen were all attached to ‘’Inglourious Basterds’’ at one stage or another).

But when ‘’Inglourious Basterds’’ finally came together, it came together with a quickness. According to Tarantino, who was recently in Australia to present his movie at the Melbourne International Film Festival, it’s been just over a year since he completed his final version of the script, shot it in Europe, took a slightly longer version of the film to this year’s Cannes Film Festival, made some additional edits and completed his final cut. “I was already doing press when I got to the first-year anniversary,” he says with a laugh. “I put the pen down on the script July 2, 2008, so it feels like it’s been very fast for me.”

A sprawling, multi-character drama with a diverse line-up of protagonists and antagonists, ‘’Basterds’’ juggles a number of storylines and scenarios. The ‘basterds’ of the title are the eight Jewish-American soldiers under the command of Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), a ruthless squad of commandos using violence and intimidation to unsettle the Nazis. They’re drawn into a dangerous scheme spearheaded by British officer Archie Hicox (Michael Fassbender) and German movie star/undercover operative Bridget Von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger) to strike a significant blow against the Third Reich, unaware that their plan will bring them into contact with Shosanna Dreyfus (Melanie Laurent), a young woman whose burning desire for revenge against Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), the Nazi who killed her entire family, had led her to hatch a deadly plot of her own.

It was shortly after completing his 1997 movie ‘’Jackie Brown’’ that Tarantino started writing ‘’Inglourious Basterds’’. (Yes, the spelling is unusual. No, Tarantino won’t explain the meaning behind it.) “I came up with a lot of the characters you see in the film, and I had a story,” he says. “I wrote it and wrote it and it just kept getting bigger and bigger, and it realised at that stage it wasn’t a movie.” Briefly considering turning it into a novel or a TV miniseries, Tarantino shelved ‘’Basterds’’for a while, concentrating on other projects like ‘’Kill Bill’’ before returning to his WWII project.

Understanding that he would “never be able to tame” the original story he’d been working on, he scrapped it and shifted his focus to a men-on-a-mission idea that would revolve around blowing up a movie premiere attended by the most high-profile villains of the Third Reich. “And starting from that, that’s how I was able to get finished after all these years.”

Noted as much for his film-buff tendencies as his filmmaking prowess, Tarantino admits that while ‘’Inglourious Basterds’’ has him “telling my story the way I want to tell my story”, he would find himself paying homage to the traditions of the classic WWII movie. “Every once in a while, some staple of that kind of movie would rear its head,” he laughs. “And I’d have fun with that, and then I’d go back to the movie I was making.” So alongside scenes that seem directly lifted from a stiff-upper-lip British wartime saga (“with Mike Myers looking like Trevor Howard and Michael Fassbender talking like George Sanders”), there are chapters that “have the feel of a spaghetti Western, bit done with World War II iconography” or that “play like a French film”.

Tarantino’s casting – always one of the most interesting aspects of his films – reflects this international feel, with the American cast (led by Pitt and ‘’Hostel’’ director Eli Roth) frequently taking a backseat to the European actors. (And eagle-eyed Aussie viewers may see our very own Rod Taylor in a cameo as Winston Churchill!) The filmmaker admits he gets a kick out of reviving the careers of underused performers or introducing audiences to perhaps-unknown actors but adds “it’s not a gimmick – I cast someone because they’re literally the best person for the role”.

This was definitely the case with Austrian actor Waltz, who deservedly won the Best Actor award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for his seductive, multi-faceted performance as Landa, an urbane but ruthless Nazi nicknamed ‘The Jew Hunter’. “I’d never heard of Christoph before because he does German miniseries and they don’t show German miniseries in America,” admits Tarantino. “But he came in, read the opening scene and Lawrence [Bender, Tarantino’s long-time producer] and I just looked at each other: ‘We got our Landa!’”

52-year old Waltz, who was also in Australia to present and promote ‘’Inglourious Basterds’’, has a career spanning three decades but the majority of his work will be unfamiliar to audiences outside Europe (although he did have a lead role in the 1988 Australian miniseries The Alien Years, playing a German immigrant who relocates to the Barossa Valley). When first presented with the script for ‘’Inglourious Basterds’’, he felt a connection before he even turned to page one.

“Quentin did something I found fantastic, and still find fantastic,” says Waltz. “The cover page was hand-written: ‘Inglourious Basterds by Quentin Tarantino’. Immediately, before you even open the script, there’s already this personal rapport in a way. You start developing a relationship – you don’t know what it is yet – but you feel something personal going on. That’s the means by which you enter Quentin’s world, and it’s an incredible help. Jean-Luc Godard said about the great films that they leave enough space for the viewer to take a walk in. Well, Quentin’s script isn’t a park with walkways, it’s a world. And it’s my obligation to find paths in this world, a world that is often turned upside-down to the way we know things.”

Happily describing the experience of playing Landa and working with Tarantino as “like space travel”, Waltz was even happier upon seeing Inglourious Basterds for the first time. “It blew me away as a movie because I thought it was even stronger than the script,” he smiles. “And it gives so much opportunity to discover things that one viewing doesn’t do it. Like all of Quentin’s movies, you have to see it again and again. And it’ll not only hold up a year from now, it’ll hold up 10 years from now.”

– GUY DAVIS