Christoph Waltz, the veteran Austrian television actor who plays the evil SS colonel Landa, walks away with the movie.
He’s one in a million. Landa is one of the best characters I’ve ever written. He comes from a long line of suave, charming Nazis. I tried to have the audience, almost against their will, invest in him being a detective. You want him to figure out what the basterds are doing just to see what he’ll do.
Kevin Scanlon
The face of Jewish vengeance?
Kevin Scanlon
Who loves ya, baby?
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To make him a closeted opportunist is a lovely twist. Mostly, one sees movie Nazis as so devoted to the cause. And you figured out that there are worse things you can do to a Nazi at the end of the war than kill him.
Yuh.
If you had cast Eli Roth, who plays one of the Jewish Apaches, in the lead instead of Brad Pitt, that would have truly set the cat among the pigeons. He actually looks Jewish.
I thought about that, but I had a whole history with Pitt’s character, Aldo. Aldo’s been fighting racism in the South; he was fighting the Klan before he ever got into World War II. And the fact that Aldo is part Indian is a very important aspect of my whole conception, even of turning the Jews into American Indians fighting the unfightable, losing cause. So that lead guy is legitimately an Indian. Also, the dichotomy of this Southern hillbilly and his verbiage bouncing off them is interesting. And Eli Roth does a great Boston accent.
In the 17 years since we last met, you’ve become this huge star. There has been criticism, including by me, about violence and juvenilia in your movies. Others think you’re a misogynist. I thought if you saw my review of Sin City, you might not agree to this interview.
That’s Robert’s [Rodriguez] movie. I only did one scene.
Was Death Proofyour answer to critics who find your work violent or misogynist?
I don’t think my work is misogynist. I had a lot of female friends in their mid- to late 20s and early 30s. For the last five or six years, they’ve been really important in my life and I hung around with a lot of different girl posses. So I’m the one guy with the four girls, and I got a really good sense of their dynamic, how they talk. So this was my girl movie, my way to write girls now, not me remembering what girls were like in college. It became my version of The Women. But I directed it like an exploitation film. Every other movie I’ve ever done, I’ve always been a gentleman about how I shot women. Not in that movie. I was a leering bastard in that one.
You’re 46 now; life must feel different to you than it did when you were 29. Does that change your attitude about the movies that you still want to make?
It definitely does. Yes, there’s stuff I’ve grown out of.
And what would that be?
Well. I don’t know if I have any specific examples.
Would you, for example, do the ear scene in Reservoir Dogsagain?
Oh, heavens to Betsy, yes. In fact, in Inglourious Basterds I don’t do it off-camera anymore, I get you a bit closer to the scalping. No, back then I was so gaga — “I want to do this, I want to do that, da da da da.” After Jackie Brown, I realized I’d gotten that kids stuff out of my system. For example, I had flirted with the idea of a Man From U.N.C.L.E. movie. But I grew out of it. Also, Pulp Fiction broke the mold of what I was expecting to happen with my career. What I mean by this is, normally, if you made a film like Reservoir Dogs for the studios, they’d say, “That guy’s pretty good, maybe if we match him with more commercial subject matter, that will take it to the next step.” So I do my little art thing, Pulp Fiction, in my little auteur way, and maybe it makes 30 to 35 million. “Okay, now we’re ready to bring him into the studio system for real. Let’s give him Dick Tracy or the Man From U.N.C.L.E. movie,” something like that. Well, that didn’t happen. I didn’t have to wrap my voice in some commercial project to get it across. My voice, me being me, became huge, so I never had to do that. I rise or fall by my ability.
True, but you also have to answer to the fact that the world is now full of would-be Taranteenies, not all of whom have your gifts.
I’ve heard that: a lot of guys in black suits. It just makes my stuff look all the better when you eventually see it again. Oh, well, I never want them to match me. I never want them to do a better movie than mine. Anyway, it’s dropped off now. I’m flattered by all those guys, but every time people start writing me off because of them, I come up with a new movie and they go, “Oh, that’s how it’s supposed to sound.” Actually, I like some of those movies. I got a big kick out of everything that happened after Pulp Fiction. It’s like, I love Sergio Leone so much and he made spaghetti Westerns — he re-created the Western genre and then made this subgenre that everybody followed. A case can be made that I re-created the gangster film and set forth the next higher subgenre that other directors followed, and there were some good films that came out. Love and a .45 was really good; it was very close to True Romance, Natural Born Killers and Reservoir Dogs combined. That might be the only film that guy ever made, but he had a gift for really funny dialogue. Lucky Number Slevin was pretty good. My least favorite was The Usual Suspects. But the ones I loved the most were from foreign countries — the Hong Kong gangster movies, [like] Johnnie To or Too Many Ways to Be Number 1.
