Inglorious Bastards starts in Berlin on October 13 and QT is already in Germany making his final casting choices. Brad Pitt is already signed on. His character, Lieutenant Aldo Raine, leads a group of American Jewish soldiers who are dropped into Nazi-occupied Europe to wreak havic on the Germans and destroy!
Brad Pitt's Lieutenant Raine in a pep speech to his men [according to a leaked version of the script, the officer] says: "Every man under my command, owes me, one hundred Nazi scalps ... and all y'all will git me one hundred Nazi scalps, taken from the heads of one hundred dead Nazis or you will die trying."
But it is not just the scalping, or the carving of swastikas in foreheads, or the slow strangling scene — all shown with Tarantino's customary love of detail(BLOOD! BLOOD!) — that is likely to upset the nation and its critics. It is the whole idea of turning WWII into a pulp book adventure in which not a single German character has redeeming value. Tarantino's script basically says that the only good German is a dead one (with the suspense concentrated on the modalities of how he should die). For modern Germany that represents a regression to the days of the crudest anti-German war propaganda.
Tarantino says he doesn't want this movie to feel like a period piece but way more of a modern bloodbath!
After all, one of the ways that The Weinstein Co attracted investors was by hyping its creative connection to the Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill 1 & 2 writer/director who has long made a lot of money for a lot of people. But now only Harvey, and not his investors, could potentially profit from the connection? Unreal. And let's not forget that The Weinstein Co produced and financed Quentin's last pic Grindhouse/Death Proof that tanked at the box office because of Weinstein's own admission that he erred in releasing it in the U.S. market as half of a too-long 3-hour, 12-minute double-feature. QT and Harvey Weinstein lunched very visibly at Ago on Melrose today. Just in case anyone thought there was a rift. This latest Tarantino epic, originally for Miramax and originally set for 2001, has been so long in the works that some people thought it might never see the light of day. Tarantino himself has described it as a Spaghetti Western meets World II film that's an homage to 1967's The Dirty Dozen and its derivatives with a story about a group of soldiers on their way to be executed who get the chance of a reprieve.
