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Bunch of Guys on a Mission Movie

Posted on Wed, 05/20/2009 - 2:18am

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By KRISTIN HOHENADEL
Published: May 6, 2009
NY TImes

PARIS “This ain’t your daddy’s World War II movie,” Quentin Tarantino said with a grin, standing on a street corner here that had been scrubbed of 21st-century signposts to become the set of “Inglourious Basterds,” his new film about a band of Jewish-American soldiers on a scalp-hunting revenge quest against the Nazis.

Although it was mostly shot at Studio Babelsberg in Potsdam, Germany, the movie’s subtitle is “Once Upon a Time in Nazi-Occupied France.” So on a three-day sojourn in Paris in December, Mr. Tarantino and his bi-continental moviemaking coalition commandeered a 1904 bistro with peeling paint, Art Deco stained glass and a wall of windows overlooking an intersection of identifiably Parisian streets in the 18th Arrondissement.

“We had to have a scene to sell the audience that we’re in France,” Mr. Tarantino said. “This is it.”

Tarantino reflects on ‘Basterds’

Posted on Wed, 05/20/2009 - 1:06am

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Quentin Tarantino is so high on the Cannes experience that he worked at a breakneck pace to shoot and edit the 165-page epic-sized WWII drama “Inglourious Basterds” in eight months. And when the writer-director bows his film on Wednesday, he says, “I’m expecting this to be one of the high moments of my career.”

Reflecting on the pic over a hamburger at the Carlton Hotel, Tarantino said it was worth the struggle to debut his third film in competition. (Tarantino won the 1994 Palme D’Or for “Pulp Fiction” also brought “Death Proof”).

“This is the cinematic Olympics,” Tarantino said. “What an exciting year for auteurs this year, with four Palme d’Or winners. If you’ve done a movie you’re proud of, that you might be defined by, then to me the dream is not necessarily to be there at Oscar time. That’s wonderful. But my dream is to always go to present the film at Cannes.