At a certain point, I’m going to hire a programmer (yeah, right) to set up a Tarantino-crawl that will just have QT’s latest statements about Inglorious Bastards running continuously on our main page.
The guy spent the weekend out at the tip of Cape Code in sunny Provincetown, MA at the Provincetown Film Festival, where he was awarded the Filmmaker on the Edge (of Doing Almost Half of What He Promises) award, and of course he couldn’t help talking about Bastards. The script is complete, he said in a room where the BBC could overhear his secret communique. Check their piece for several reiterations of statements that have been made elsewhere, but QT did comment on the period tone he’s shooting for, and as usual just made things more confusing.
“I don’t want it to feel like a period film. I want it to feel current. I want it to feel right now. One of the things I have to battle against is 30 years of Nazi-occupation TV movies where we’ve all seen the big streets and the vintage cars and the Swastikas, and we’ve just seen that ad nauseum.
“This is a modern, in-your-face movie. This is not a TV movie period piece.”
That actually sounds lovely; Call of Duty and a lifetime of watching Dirty Dozen knock-offs (like *cough* Inglorious Bastards) have certainly tainted that classic WWII period tone. But it’s barely been a month since QT pushed the very existence of Inglorious Bastards at Cannes, and in that time he has supposedly finished the script. He might have cast the thing in the time it took me to write this article, in which case perhaps all these ideas might actually come to fruition.