Quentin Tarantino is getting candid about his decision to fire Mélanie Laurent and Isabelle Huppert before production began for 2009’s Inglourious Basterds.
The Oscar-winning filmmaker opened up in Jay Glennie’s new book, The Making of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, about why he feels he doesn’t owe actors “shit,” but owes “my film the best actors I can find.”
The dark comedy war film, set in Nazi-occupied France during World War II, centers on a plan to assassinate Nazi leaders by a group of Jewish U.S. soldiers. However, the plan ends up coinciding with a theatre owner’s vengeful plans to do the same.
Though Laurent was eventually rehired for the leading role of Shosanna Dreyfus, the French cinema owner, Tarantino said her initial “table read was terrible,” so he let her go.
“It wasn’t good enough to be terrible,” Tarantino told Glennie. “The most exciting day of preproduction is for me the table read. That is the closest I get to seeing the movie for the first time. Up until then, it’s just been me reading all the scenes to myself or to a friend … so a table read with the whole cast is so exciting and so important to me. Well, Mélanie was terrible, so I fired her.”
Tarantino recalled Laurent calling him to get her job back, explaining she was feeling under the weather at the time of the table read. A persistent Laurent also planned to show up to set regardless of his decision. “I will fly myself to Germany and put myself up into a hotel. I know you’re busy, but I will wait until you see me again,” she told the filmmaker.
She eventually convinced Tarantino to give her another chance, saying he would “turn the clock back” and “they would return to square one.” However, he wouldn’t fully decide if “she was his Shosanna Dreyfus” until after three days of rehearsal.
Laurent ultimately won over Tarantino, going on to play the lead role. “Let me just go on the record for everybody to know: I love Mélanie,” the director told the author.
“The fact of the matter is, if we were not talking about the making of Inglourious Basterds, I would never think about the table read again for the simple reason Mélanie is my Shosanna,” he added. “She did a wonderful job. But we have decided to dive deep into the making of the movie with this book, and this is an important part of its history. You know, we agreed, warts and all. So, if we had not agreed to talk about the shooting of the movie, it would be out of my mind, and I would never think about it again.”
Huppert was a bit of a different story. After being cast as Madame Ada Mimieux, a woman who provides shelter to Shosanna in Paris, Tarantino fired her when she didn’t show up for the table read.
“She didn’t show up, so fuck it. I fired her,” he said. “I mean, I love Isabelle Huppert — Heaven’s Gate and all that — but there were issues with her contract. It just kept stalling. And then not coming to the table read. Well, we cast Maggie Cheung instead.”
“That invariably happens. As far as I’m concerned, if you’re cast and you are not at that table, I don’t owe you jack shit! You can be fired, especially if I get excited by what somebody else did in your absence,” Tarantino continued. He used Michael Parks being cast in two different roles in his Kill Bill films, replacing Ricardo Montalbán, as another example.
Despite Cheung taking on the role, Tarantino ultimately decided to cut those scenes with her character from the movie.
“Maggie was fantastic in the movie, but you just didn’t need to know how Shosanna acquired the cinema. All we needed was a title card saying Four Years Later and Shosanna explaining that she inherited it from her aunt,” Tarantino explained.
Following its release in 2009, Inglourious Basterds went on to gross more than $321 million worldwide. It also earned eight Academy Award nominations, with Christoph Waltz taking home the best supporting actor Oscar for his role as Col. Hans Landa.
“I have no moral compass when it comes to giving roles to actors: They have to be right. They have to feel like they are right for the world I have created,” Tarantino told Glennie about his approach to casting actors. “I have fired actors in the past. If it’s not right, it is not right. I don’t owe them shit. I owe my film the best actors I can find. Period.”
