QUENTIN TARANTINO is 46, but his childhood enthusiasm for movies has never deserted him, and he was gurgling with excitement when he met the international media at the Festival de Cannes yesterday.
Unlike most directors, who pop in and out of Cannes for a day or two when they have a screening, Tarantino has been here for a week already, checking out other people's films before attending the world premiere of his own Inglourious Basterdslast night.
The hottest ticket at Cannes this year, the film ensured that the festival’s largest auditorium, which seats 2,300, was full well before its 8.30am press screening began yesterday. An entertaining wartime adventure set in the early 1940s, it deliberately plays fast and loose with history, even devising a different demise for Adolf Hitler.
Tarantino rushed the film through the production process so that it would be ready for Cannes, where he won the Palme d'Or for Pulp Fictionin 1994.
“That was always the dream, to have the world premiere in Cannes,” he said at a press conference yesterday. “There’s no place on the face of the earth like Cannes for filmmakers. Cinema matters here. There’s so much passion here, even if they’re booing. And you have all the world’s film critics here, seeing the film at exactly the same time.”
At the press conference, he was flanked by eight actors from his film, all sipping champagne. They included Brad Pitt, who plays the leader of a US Jewish team of soldiers on a mission to kill – and scalp – Nazis; Diane Kruger, cast as a German actor doubling as an undercover agent; and Michael Fassbender, who plays a film critic serving with the British forces during the war.
Most of the questions were directed at Tarantino, who answered them eagerly – apart from explaining the peculiar spelling of the film's title, Inglourious Basterds. Pitt got him off the hook by joking that it was a "typo".
Tarantino was asked if his film was a Jewish revenge fantasy. “It works completely that way, but that’s not the section of the video store where I’d put it,” he replied.
“For me, more than anything else, it’s about these characters who changed the outcome of the war, even though they didn’t exist. I love those characters from this God perspective. I am God to them because I created them.”
Pitt described the concept of the film as “outrageous”, and added that he was game for that.
“When Quentin came to visit me with the script, we talked about movies until all hours of the night,” he said. “The next morning I noticed five empty wine bottles on the floor, so I must have agreed to do the film because I was on the set in my uniform six weeks later.”
He said he felt privileged to be in the film and to have worked with a director who loves film so much. “Me and Brad have been sniffing around each other for quite a while,” Tarantino added with a smile. “There were these knowing looks across the room and these little notes saying, ‘I like you. Do you like me?’.”
Pitt chipped in with a quote from another film: “He had me at hello.” Asked if he could speak German, Pitt replied, “ja”, and added, “merci beaucoup”.