Several months after its summer premiere, Inglourious Basterds is still in the news cycle after its December 15 DVD release and pre-awards season, starting with the Golden Globes on January 17. Quentin Tarantino’s “macaroni” war flick (essentially a spaghetti western with a WWII aesthetic) was the movie of choice for almost everyone we know over the winter holidays. Is it any wonder, with murmurs of best film, best director, best supporting actor (for deranged Nazi “Jew Hunter” Christoph Waltz), and best screenplay? After the jump, some additional trivia, a six-minute clip of film-within-a-film Nation’s Pride, and a Tarantino career-arcing sight-‘n’-sound spectacular.
The National Post has a side-by-side analysis of Tarantino’s latest versus the spoof-worthy war film it was based on, Enzo Castellari’s Inglorious Bastards from 1978. (Tagline: “If you’re a kraut, he’ll take you out.”) Some trivia gleaned from the Post article and other Basterds-related media coverage:
— Tarantino started working on the script for Inglourious Basterds more than a decade ago.
— He created an “elaborate history” for Mélanie Laurent’s character Shoshanna Dreyfus, which had to be cut to keep the film at its already-long running time of 152 minutes.
— Lieutenant Aldo Raine is from Maynardville, a one-horse town outside of Knoxville, Tennessee, where Tarantino himself was born.
— The first scalping shown in the film on a dead Nazi is a dummy of the director.
— Harvey Keitel voices the army superior negotiating with Colonel Landa on the wireless radio.
— Tarantino claims that if he couldn’t have used the title Inglourious Basterds, he “probably would have called the movie Once Upon A Time in Nazi-Occupied France.”
Peep the full six-minute clip of Nation’s Pride, directed by co-star Eli Roth.
Bonus: The Tarantino Mixtape, a mashup of Tarantino’s oeuvre by design studio Eclectic Method. Makes us nostalgic for the days of Say What Again typography.
For a behind-the-scenes look at Inglourious Basterds, check out our interview and photo tour with design duo David Wasco and Sandy Reynolds-Wasco.