Audio Interview: Quentin Tarantino (“Inglourious Basterds”)

This month, I’ll be posting an audio interview with a notable screenwriter each day. Today:Joel and Ethan Coen about their version of the movie True Grit from an interview on NPR’s “Fresh Air” with Terry Gross. You can hear it here. An excerpt:

GROSS: I love the new movie. So the movie starts with once upon a time in Nazi-occupied France, and that lets you know right away this is going to be, like, a fairy tale version, not a historically correct version, of World War II, and it’s also probably going to have references to Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in the West,” which it most certainly does, and so the film is a kind of hybrid of the spaghetti Western and war film. Why did you think of combining those two genres? 

Mr. TARANTINO: Well, you know, the thing is, I actually thought that the idea of doing a World War II movie in the guise of a spaghetti Western would just be an interesting way to tackle it. Just even the way that the spaghetti Westerns tackled the history of the Old West, I thought it could be a neat thing to do that with World War II, but just as opposed to using cowboy iconography, using World War II iconography as kind of the jumping-off point. And you know, some of the inspirations I had as far as following that story would be, like, say, “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly,” the way they use the Civil War in that, or even the idea that — the movie that Leone was going to do before he died was going to be a movie about the battle of Stalingrad. 

Now, he never shot any of that, but you have to imagine what that could have possibly have been like, and so that was kind of how I used that to — just as a jumping-off point. And I thought I was going to carry it through the whole movie, but I broke the movie down into a five-chapter structure, and I think that spaghetti-Western thing really only holds for the first two chapters. 

GROSS: Yeah. 

Mr. TARANTINO: Then it starts becoming, like, more of a — especially by chapter four it becomes a bunch of guys on a mission, kind of a take on, you know, that genre from, like, the ’60s. 

GROSS: Like “The Dirty Dozen” kind of movie. 

Mr. TARANTINO: Yeah, “Dirty Dozen,” “Devil’s Brigade,” “Guns of Navarone,” that kind of thing. Like in the beginning of chapter four is a scene with — Mike Myers plays a British general who sends another character on a mission, and it’s very much a character like that you’d see Trevor Howard play in a 1966 movie. He has a big room with a big map and he’s pointing at it, and in a world war — you know, in a bunch-of-guys-on-a-mission movie, that would be the first scene, right — it being a Quentin movie, it’s like the middle of the movie.

While we’re talking about interviews, don’t forget about these: 

Interviews — Video

Interviews — Written

Probably over 300 interviews there meaning a lot of great insight and wisdom into the craft — and it’s all free!