Inglourious Basterds

• 1. Introduction

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  Inglourious Basterds begins with a conversation in English that ends in a massacre. In 1941, an Austrian SS colonel named Hans Landa questions a French farmer about a fugitive Jewish family. The family's youngest member, Shosanna, escapes. Landa has a clear shot and chooses not to take it. Instead he calls after her, "Au revoir, Shosanna!" That act of mercy launches Quentin Tarantino's 2009 war film, an alternate history in which the leaders of Nazi Germany gather in a Paris cinema. Why does Landa let her live? Why did the script defeat its own author for years? And how did a film with a deliberately misspelled title, loved by some critics and condemned by others, end up on lists of the best movies of its century?

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• 2. Two Plots Converge

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  Three years after that farmhouse, Lieutenant Aldo Raine, played by Brad Pitt, recruits Jewish-American soldiers into a black ops unit called the Basterds. Their job is to spread fear among Nazis in occupied France by killing and scalping them. The unit includes Sergeant Donny Donowitz, nicknamed "The Bear Jew", along with Smithson Utivich, Omar Ulmer, the rogue German sergeant Hugo Stiglitz, and the Austrian-born translator Wilhelm Wicki. Raine leaves a swastika mark on any German who survives, so that no one can hide a Nazi past after the war.

  In Paris, Shosanna runs a cinema under the false name Emmanuelle Mimieux. A famed German sniper, Fredrick Zoller, is about to star in a propaganda film called Stolz der Nation, or Nation's Pride. Zoller is infatuated with her and persuades Joseph Goebbels to hold the premiere at her cinema. Landa, who heads security for the event, interrogates Shosanna but never reveals whether he knows who she is. She and her lover and projectionist, Marcel, plan to burn the building down using her collection of highly flammable nitrate films.

  The Basterds have their own scheme, called Operation Kino. It relies on Lieutenant Archie Hicox, a British commando who was a film critic before the war and speaks fluent German. In an occupied town, Hicox, Stiglitz, and Wicki dress as German officers and meet Bridget von Hammersmark, a German film star who secretly works for the Allies. The tavern they chose is unexpectedly packed with German soldiers. The group sits down to play a card game called Wer bin ich?

  Hicox's unusual accent catches the ear of a Wehrmacht sergeant named Wilhelm and an SS major, Dieter Hellström. Hellström joins the table, and Hicox and von Hammersmark convince him they are genuine. Then Hicox gives himself away with a hand gesture that no German would use. The gunfight kills everyone except Wilhelm and a wounded von Hammersmark. Raine bargains with Wilhelm for her release until she shoots Wilhelm dead.

  Raine suspects she set up his men and tortures her. She persuades him of her loyalty and reveals that Adolf Hitler himself will attend the premiere. Raine decides to go ahead with Donowitz and Ulmer, posing as Italian filmmakers. Von Hammersmark doubts the plan but thinks the Germans will not question their Italian accents. Landa then investigates the tavern and finds her shoe, plus a napkin she had signed as a gift for Wilhelm's newborn son. Landa, it turns out, speaks fluent Italian.

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• 3. Premiere Night

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  At the premiere, the Basterds carry timed explosives into the cinema. Landa sees through their Italian disguises almost at once. He confronts von Hammersmark in private and strangles her to death. He then has Raine and Utivich arrested, while Ulmer and Donowitz remain inside the auditorium.

  Landa now makes an offer to Raine. He will let the attack proceed if Raine's OSS commanders guarantee his safety and promise him great riches after the war. Raine contacts those commanders, and Landa secures a generous deal for himself and his radio operator.

  Inside the projection booth, Zoller confronts Shosanna, and the two shoot each other dead. As Nation's Pride nears its climax, Shosanna's face appears on the screen. She tells the Nazi audience, in English, that they are about to be killed by a Jew. The line echoes the film's first scene. Marcel locks the auditorium and sets a pile of nitrate film ablaze behind the screen.

  Ulmer and Donowitz break into the opera box and fatally shoot Hitler and Goebbels. They then fire at random into the fleeing crowd. The timed explosives, which Landa had placed on the balcony, detonate. They kill Ulmer, Donowitz, and everyone else in the building.

  Landa and his radio operator drive Raine and Utivich to Allied territory, where they surrender to Raine. To Landa's shock, Raine shoots the radio operator. Raine then carves a swastika into Landa's forehead and declares it his masterpiece.

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• 4. A Script Too Big

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  Tarantino told the interviewer Charlie Rose that he became "too precious about the page" while writing this story. The more he wrote, the more the story grew. He spent just over a decade on the script, which he saw as a masterpiece in the making. He felt it had to be the best thing he had ever written. He had written a version in 1998 but could not solve the ending. His first idea was a "bunch-of-guys-on-a-mission" film, as he put it, "my Dirty Dozen or Where Eagles Dare or Guns of Navarone kind of thing".

  By 2002, Tarantino found the film bigger than he had planned, and he noticed that other directors were making World War II pictures. He had three nearly finished scripts. He called them "some of the best writing I've ever done. But I couldn't come up with an ending." So he directed the two-part Kill Bill instead, released in 2003-2004.

  Afterward, Tarantino returned to his first draft and considered turning it into a mini-series. Luc Besson convinced him to finish it as a film. Tarantino trimmed the script and used his screenplay for Pulp Fiction, from 1994, as a guide to length. The revised premise followed soldiers who escape their executions and set out on a mission to help the Allies. He called them "not your normal hero types that are thrown into a big deal in the Second World War".

  Tarantino planned to start production in 2005. In November 2004, he put it off to act in Takashi Miike's Western Sukiyaki Western Django, released in 2007. He also meant to make a kung fu film entirely in Mandarin, but that project floundered. Next he directed Death Proof, part of the double feature Grindhouse, before coming back to the Basterds. The scene he wrote for the opening, Landa's questioning of the farmer, is the "favorite thing" he has "ever written". Someone had to play Landa.

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• 5. Casting Landa and Others

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  Tarantino originally wanted Leonardo DiCaprio for Hans Landa, then decided a native German speaker should play the part. The role went to the Austrian actor Christoph Waltz, who, in Tarantino's words, "gave me my movie". Tarantino had feared the part was "unplayable". Michael Fassbender first auditioned for Landa too, and in August 2008 began final negotiations to play Lieutenant Hicox instead.

  Brad Pitt and Tarantino had wanted to work together for years and were waiting for the right project. Halfway through the script, Tarantino sensed Pitt might suit Aldo Raine. When he finished writing, he thought Pitt "would be terrific" and phoned Pitt's agent to ask if he was free.

  Adam Sandler turned down the role of Donny Donowitz because of a scheduling clash with Funny People, from 2009. Eli Roth took the part instead, and he also directed the film-within-the-film, Nation's Pride, which used 300 extras. Simon Pegg was wanted as Hicox but had to withdraw because of The Adventures of Tintin, from 2011. B. J. Novak joined in August 2008 as Utivich. Tarantino talked with Nastassja Kinski about playing von Hammersmark and flew to Germany to meet her. No deal was reached, and Diane Kruger got the role.

  Rod Taylor had effectively retired and no longer had an agent when Tarantino offered him Winston Churchill. Taylor watched dozens of DVDs of Churchill footage to capture his posture, body language, and voice, including a lisp. He first suggested the British actor Albert Finney, but Tarantino's passion won him over. It was Taylor's last film appearance before he died on the 7th of January 2015. Mike Myers, a fan of Tarantino, asked to be involved because his parents had served in the British Armed Forces.

  Tarantino met Mélanie Laurent in three rounds. In the first he had her read every character, in the second he shared lines with her, and the third was a face-to-face dinner. At dinner he said he wanted to discover somebody, and that she was already famous in her own country. She replied, "No, no, no.... I'm not so famous." Four days later he called to give her the role of Shosanna.

  Samm Levine won the part of Private First Class Hirschberg because Tarantino loved Freaks and Geeks, the series in which Levine starred. Tom Tykwer, who translated some of the German dialogue, recommended Daniel Brühl after Tarantino saw him in Good Bye, Lenin!, from 2003. Tarantino declared, "That's my Fredrick Zoller right there."

  Isabelle Huppert was first cast as Madame Mimieux but was fired over creative differences. The character was eventually cut from the finished film for length, along with Mrs. Himmelstein.

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• 6. Fire on Set

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  In July 2008, Tarantino and the executive producers Harvey and Bob Weinstein set up an accelerated production schedule. The goal was to have the film ready for the Cannes Film Festival in 2009, where it would compete for the Palme d'Or. The Weinstein Company co-financed the film and handled United States distribution. Universal Pictures financed the rest and distributed it internationally. The production budget was $70 million.

  Germany and France were the planned locations, and principal photography began in Germany in October 2008. Shooting was scheduled to start on the 13th of October 2008. KNB EFX Group, working with Greg Nicotero, handled special effects. Much of the film was shot and edited at Babelsberg Studio in Potsdam, with other scenes filmed in Bad Schandau, a small spa town near the Czech border.

  The cinema fire nearly got out of hand. Eli Roth said the crew "almost got incinerated" because the blaze was projected to burn at 400 degrees Celsius but reached 1200. A swastika that was fastened with steel cables was never meant to fall, but the steel softened and snapped.

  On the BBC's The Graham Norton Show, on the 11th of January 2013, Tarantino said he strangled Diane Kruger himself for the strangulation scene. He used his bare hands and did it in a single take, to make it feel authentic.

  Tarantino first hoped Ennio Morricone would compose the score. Morricone could not do it because the sped-up schedule collided with his work on Baarìa, from 2009. Tarantino still used eight Morricone tracks, four of them on the CD. The opening theme is the ballad "The Green Leaves of Summer", written by Dimitri Tiomkin and Paul Francis Webster for the 1960 film The Alamo. Elsewhere the soundtrack mixes Spaghetti Western and R&B, and late in the film it uses David Bowie's theme from Cat People, from 1982. It was the first Tarantino soundtrack without dialogue excerpts, and it came out on the 18th of August 2009.

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• 7. Title, Trailer, Release

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  In Poland, the film's title was translated loosely as Bękarty Wojny, meaning Bastards of War. The change left the artwork untouched and let Nazi iconography stylize the letter O. The spelling of the original title caused more argument than the translation. The title was inspired by Enzo G. Castellari's 1978 war film, The Inglorious Bastards, and one description of the misspelling calls it "a Basquiat-esque touch". Tarantino said he did not change the spelling to set his film apart from Castellari's. He first refused to explain it, saying only that "Basterds" was spelled that way because "that's just the way you say it".

  Castellari makes a cameo as a German at the premiere, the same kind of role he played in his own film but with a different rank and SS organization. Bo Svenson, who starred in the 1978 film, appears as a US colonel in the Nation's Pride film. Samuel L. Jackson narrates, Harvey Keitel voices the OSS commander, and Bela B plays an usher. Tarantino plays an American soldier in Nation's Pride and also a scalped German.

  When the final draft was finished, it leaked onto the Internet, and Tarantino fan sites began posting reviews and excerpts. The first full teaser trailer premiered on Entertainment Tonight on the 10th of February 2009. It reached US theaters a week later, attached to Friday the 13th. The trailer used the phrase Once Upon A Time In Nazi Occupied France, which had been considered as a title. It also used the line A Basterd's Work Is Never Done, which is not spoken in the finished film.

  The film premiered on the 20th of May 2009 at the 62nd Cannes Film Festival. Cannes had come quickly, so Tarantino said he would re-edit the film in June to finish several scenes. Release followed in August 2009. Germany saw it on the 20th of August, the United States on the 21st, and the United Kingdom and France on the 19th. Some European cinemas showed previews from the 15th.

  Universal adjusted publicity in Germany and Austria to comply with laws restricting Nazi iconography. The swastika was removed from the title lettering, and the steel helmet in the artwork got a bullet hole in place of the Nazi symbol. Wallpaper downloads showing the swastika were dropped from the website. German and Austrian law exempts works of art, so the film itself was not censored. The German version also runs 50 seconds longer, because only Germany kept the full tavern scene in its theatrical and disc releases.

  Home media came in December 2009. The DVD and Blu-ray reached the United States and Australia on the 15th of December, and the United Kingdom on the 7th. In its first week it ranked second behind The Hangover, selling an estimated 1,581,220 DVDs for $28,467,652 in the United States.

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• 8. Praise and Protest

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  On its opening Friday in North America, on 3,165 screens, Inglourious Basterds earned $14.3 million. The weekend total of $38 million was Tarantino's best opening yet and beat District 9 for the top spot. In its second weekend it slipped to second place behind The Final Destination with $20 million, for a 10-day total of $73.8 million. Abroad it opened at number one in 22 markets on 2,650 screens, taking $27.49 million. France led with $6.09 million on 500 screens, followed by the United Kingdom with $5.92 million, Germany with $4.20 million, and Australia with $2.56 million. Final grosses were $120.5 million in the United States and Canada and $200.9 million elsewhere, roughly $321 million against the $70 million budget. It stayed Tarantino's highest-grossing film until Django Unchained in 2012.

  Critics at Cannes were split. The film drew a standing ovation of eight to eleven minutes after its first screening there. The newspaper Le Monde dismissed it, saying "Tarantino gets lost in a fictional World War II". Anne Thompson of Variety called it "great fun to watch" but said it was not entirely engaging. Roger Ebert gave it four stars and called it "a big, bold, audacious war movie". James Berardinelli, also awarding four stars, said it was Tarantino's best movie since Pulp Fiction. Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian found it "exasperatingly awful and transcendentally disappointing". David Denby of The New Yorker praised Waltz but called the film "too silly to be enjoyed, even as a joke".

  Some of the sharpest objections concerned its treatment of the Holocaust. Daniel Mendelsohn was disturbed that Jewish soldiers imitate German atrocities, writing that Tarantino indulges vengeful violence "by turning Jews into Nazis". Liel Liebowitz of Tablet argued that the film offers a "magical and Manichaean world" where violence solves everything. Jonathan Rosenbaum compared its approach to Holocaust denial, arguing that it turns the Holocaust into a movie convention, so it loses its historical reality.

  The aggregate scores were warm. Rotten Tomatoes reports that 89% of 332 critics gave it a positive review, averaging 7.8 out of 10. Metacritic gives it 69 out of 100, based on 36 critics. Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave it an A-minus.

  Waltz won the Best Actor award at Cannes. Later he took the Golden Globe, the Screen Actors Guild Award, the BAFTA, and the Academy Award, all for Best Supporting Actor. The film earned eight Academy Award nominations in February 2010, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay. It also won the Screen Actors Guild award for Best Cast.

  The reputation has grown since. A BBC critics' poll ranked it number 62 among the greatest films since 2000. In 2021, the Writers Guild of America ranked its screenplay 8th among the 101 Greatest Screenplays of the 21st Century. In June 2025, The New York Times placed it number 14 on its list of the best movies of the century, and Rolling Stone put it at number 59 that July.

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