CANNES, France — Quentin Tarantino and Brad Pitt have spun some revisionist history on how Second World War ended.
Their war saga Inglourious Basterds premiered Wednesday at the Cannes Film Festival, presenting a band of Jewish Allied soldiers led by Pitt who play a pivotal role in taking down the Third Reich with a strategic strike against the top Nazi brass.
“It was definitely outrageous, which I’m always game for,” Pitt said of Tarantino’s rewrite of the history books.
The band’s exploits culminate in a bloodbath at the premiere of a Nazi propaganda film in Paris as Pitt’s commandos exact savage revenge for Adolf Hitler’s genocide against the Jews.
“People have come up to me a lot and they’ve asked me, is it a fairy tale, is it a Jewish wish-fulfilment fantasy?” Tarantino said.
“My characters changed the outcome of the war. Now, that didn’t happen because my characters didn’t exist.”
Had they existed, though, the events that play out over Tarantino’s two-hour, 40-minute epic are entirely plausible, Tarantino said. The movie sets the stage for Tarantino’s revision of the war’s end with a fairy-tale opening that reads, “Once upon a time . . . in Nazi-occupied France.”
For Jewish filmmaker Eli Roth (Hostel), whom Tarantino cast as one of Pitt’s “Basterds,” wish-fulfillment was not a strong enough term for the vengeance they take.
“For me, it’s like kosher porn,” Roth said. “It’s something I have fantasized about since I was a very young child. And it really was like I performed a sex scene when I beat that guy to death and blood is spurting.”
Along with Pitt, the international cast of Inglourious Basterds includes Diane Kruger as a German movie star and Allied operative, Daniel Bruhl as a Nazi war hero, Michael Fassbender as a British film critic turned spy, Melanie Laurent as a French Jew hiding under an assumed identity, Martin Wuttke as Hitler and Sylvester Groth as his right hand man, Joseph Goebbels.
Christoph Waltz offers the film’s standout performance as a crackerjack German “Jew hunter,” a courteous yet gleefully merciless brute.
Canadian Mike Myers, who played super-spy Austin Powers, does an English accent again as a British intelligence officer orchestrating the Basterds’ climactic mission.
“My parents were born in Liverpool, England, and my father was in the Royal Engineers and my mother was in the Royal Air Force,” said Myers.
“You know, those ladies that had the big maps of England, and they would go, ‘Jerries over Norfolk. Scramble Biggin Hill.’ My mother was one of those ladies. And Second World War was talked about at the table constantly. So I got a call, ‘Would you like to play a British general?’ And I did a jig.”