Quentin Tarantino on his Inglourious Basterds

Brad Pitt in a scene from hardboiled WWII flick Inglourious Basterds. Photo / Supplied

Director Quentin Tarantino lets slip the (reservoir) dogs of war in his latest, hardboiled WWII flick Inglourious Basterds. He talks to Helen Barlow about the film which comes at a make-or-break point in his colourful, blood-spattered career..

Doing a Quentin Tarantino interview is like hearing a sermon from the mount. In the allotted 20 minutes, he delivers five or six raves, where you wonder if the fast-talking 46-year-old ever did underwater swimming, as he rarely comes up for air.

The prime thing he wants to get across today is how important his new World War II adventure film, Inglourious Basterds ("No it's not a typo, but I'm never going to explain the title")is to him. Initially he demonstrates uncharacteristic humility, when I ask if this is his magnum opus.

"I'm not trying to be cagey, but it's not really for the chicken to speak of his own soup," he replies in his highly entertaining vernacular. "That's more for you to decide."

The writer-director of films including Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill 1 and 2, says the most important thing for him is maintaining a high standard in his filmography.

"I've studied director's careers and most of them do not get better as they get older. I don't want some kid coming into a video store and picking the movie I did for hire, or the one I did to pay for my pool. I want all of my movies to be strong, but I also want them to have the youthful energy that Reservoir Dogs had. It can have maturity inside but I don't need to prove that any more. I've done that already with Jackie Brown. My third movie already had a maturity to it, all right? It's not something I have to grow into. Basically I don't like those old man movies."

Of course Jackie Brown, possibly Tarantino's most straightforward venture, was based on a novel by Elmore Leonard, so doesn't naturally sit happily among Tarantino's other works.

"The maturity of Jackie Brown doesn't make it better than the comic book pyrotechnics of Kill Bill : Volume 1," he argues, "it makes it different. Oddly enough Kill Bill was more personal to me because I wrote it. Part of my thing is to parallel my real life somehow and to disguise it inside a genre. It's not my job to tell you the details, though," he sniggers.

Knowing that his head was on the chopping block following the failure of Grindhouse, an intriguing concept combining the old drive-in experience into a modern movie (only the first half, Death Proof, was released here, while Robert Rodriguez's Planet Terror went straight to DVD), Tarantino was aware he had to come up with the goods in Inglourious Basterds. "I wanted to work with a big actor because I needed a big opening", he concedes of casting Brad Pitt. Yet he insists he wouldn't have cast Pitt if he wasn't the right actor for the role.

"Literally it was one of those situations where as I was writing the script I was thinking, 'Brad could be good in this'. I wrote a little bit more, 'Hey, Brad could be [expletive] awesome in this! Right, now I need Brad, but I'm [expletive] because he's a little hard to get hold of because he's in the south of France. I'd met him a few times but I didn't really know him."

Tarantino managed to contact Pitt as he had the same agent as his good friend Uma Thurman. Still, he was worried.

"I know that when Brad makes movie his wife doesn't make a movie so he may not have been available. Not only was I trying to get the most sought after movie star in the world, I was saying, 'I've gotta go now!' I couldn't wait for him. Sometimes the movie gods smile on you," Tarantino grins.

Even if he was the star of the film, Pitt also had to be prepared to go with the flow, a kind of compulsory element of working on a Tarantino movie. He was, and he was also prepared for the kind of cinematic education Tarantino dishes out, whether you want it or not.

A walking film encyclopedia, Tarantino ensured that his cast (mostly French and German actors who largely spoke their own language) and crew were well-versed in World War II movies.

"I watched a bunch of guys-on-a-mission movies as I was conceiving the idea," he explains. "Half the time when I watch World War II movies they're either macaroni combat movies done in the 70s or US propaganda movies made during the war, starring George Sanders [Michael Fassbender from Hunger plays that role here] and they're usually made by directors exiled from their countries. I marinate in it, but don't derive my inspiration there. Most of these movies play it straight and by the time I write my story and put my characters into the mix, I leave those movies behind."

Ultimately Inglorious Basterds has as much to do with Tarantino's previous movies as it does with history or film history. His vengeful, blond French-Jewish heroine (Melanie Laurent) harks back to Uma Thurman, while the Basterds themselves remind us of the director's reservoir dogs.

The plot is convoluted like Pulp Fiction. Pitt might be the tight-jawed American lieutenant in charge of the Basterds, a crack brigade of Jewish Nazi slayers who use Apache scalping and the burning of swastikas into Nazi foreheads as a form of retribution, yet a clever Nazi played by Christoph Waltz gets many of the good lines. The unknown actor, who took out the best actor prize in Cannes, is more lethal than any weapon the Basterds can conjure.

Well, for a while. Hitler, Goebbels and Churchill (played by Rod Taylor) all have cameos in what is essentially Tarantino's re-writing of history.

"I had no idea that was going to happen when I first sat down to write," Tarantino admits, diving into breathless mode. "I think one of the things I have to offer as a writer is my unbridled imagination - but that doesn't mean it's good, bad or indifferent. It's just unbridled; there is no bridle. I've always enjoyed the freedom to just follow my characters wherever they go, but here I hit a roadblock and that was history itself.

"I was prepared to respect that roadblock, then it hit me that my characters don't know they're part of history and my characters don't know how things are going to happen. My characters can change history and what happens in my movie didn't happen in real life because my characters didn't exist but if they had existed this very well could have happened."

Since Inglourious premiered in Cannes in May, Tarantino has re-edited the film. Its success or failure could make or break the film's beleaguered financiers, The Weinstein Company, who have long supported Tarantino's talent. Still, for some, the film's subtitling may also be a problem as 70 per cent of the film is in French and German. But Tarantino wasn't going to budge on that.

Certainly the one-time wunderkind has many more films to make. However, he has said in previous interviews he wants to retire at 60, to write and be a kind of Mark Twain.

"I do intend to stop directing at 60 - unless my last film is a fiasco. I may have to go to 62 to redeem myself," he laughs.

"I feel like I can be a novelist and that's a gift I intend to give myself in the latter phase of my career. I don't want to have to be worrying about schedules and timing when I'm older."

Perhaps he might live longer if he relaxed a little more, I suggest. Does he ever take time off and do nothing?

"Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's part of how I do my thing is I make a movie for a year - I don't have a family so I can literally let the whole world go to hell.

"But when that movie's over, I want a year of my life back in return. Then I sleep late, go travel and hang out with friends.

"I can't watch too many movies while making movies, so I fill up on that too."

LOWDOWN

Who: Quentin Tarantino

Born: 1963 in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Past films: Reservoir Dogs (1992), Pulp Fiction (1994), Jackie Brown (1997), Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003), Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004) Death Proof (2007).

Latest: Inglourious Basterds opens August 20