Inglourious Basterds (2009)
- To accurately portray their role in Inglourious Basterds, Brad Pitt spent weeks conducting hands-on research and rehearsing directly with director Quentin Tarantino.
- Inglourious Basterds utilized mostly practical sets and locations to ground the story, a specific choice insisted upon by Quentin Tarantino.
Inglourious Basterds is a 2009 war film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino that reimagines World War II through a wildly fictional lens. The film interweaves two plots to assassinate Nazi Germany's leadership: one follows a team of Jewish-American soldiers led by Lieutenant Aldo Raine, played by Brad Pitt, who are dropped behind enemy lines to spread terror among German troops through brutal guerrilla tactics; the other follows Shosanna Dreyfus, a young French-Jewish cinema owner played by Mélanie Laurent, who plots revenge against the Nazis who murdered her family. The two storylines converge at a Paris movie theater during a Nazi propaganda film premiere attended by Adolf Hitler himself.
Christoph Waltz's performance as SS Colonel Hans Landa — nicknamed "The Jew Hunter" — is widely regarded as one of the greatest villains in film history. Waltz, who was relatively unknown to international audiences before the film, delivered his multilingual performance in English, French, German, and Italian, and won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, the Palme d'Or for Best Actor at Cannes, and virtually every other major supporting actor prize that year. Tarantino had been developing the script for over a decade, at various points considering it as a potential novel or miniseries before committing to the film format.
The opening chapter, a 20-minute conversation between Landa and a French dairy farmer hiding a Jewish family beneath his floorboards, is frequently cited as one of the greatest scenes in modern cinema. The film earned $321 million worldwide.
