It’s turning out to be quite an eventful month for Quentin Tarantino, even though seven years have passed since he last directed a movie. Tarantino still hasn’t announced his next directorial venture, which is expected to be his last, but he’s keeping himself occupied with a host of other projects. First up is The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth, on which he serves purely as a writer. Following the film’s release, he will begin working in earnest on his first project as a playwright, The Popinjay Cavalier. Tarantino is also the subject of the recently published book “The Making of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds,” in which he reveals a surprising fact about the revisionist World War II epic.
The book details how Brad Pitt came to star in the movie, thereby securing an additional $10 million for the budget. Pitt and Tarantino also discuss their first real meeting for the project, which lasted well into the night. However, one of the more surprising anecdotes revealed by Tarantino is that he fired one of the film’s leads after they performed poorly during the first table read. The actor was rehired, but only after auditioning for the part again.
One legendary star, Isabelle Huppert, was also let go after failing to show up at the table read, and was replaced by Maggie Cheung. The part eventually didn’t make it to the final cut, because Tarantino felt that it was veering into exposition territory. Tarantino said, “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.” The filmmaker also clarified that while he fired and rehired the lead, he doesn’t think negatively about their performance in the least. “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,” he said.
Collider Exclusive · 8 Questions · 2 Minutes Which Coen Brothers Movie Would You Thrive In? Lebowski · O Brother · Fargo · No Country
Nobody writes people like the Coen brothers. The decent ones. The talkers. The ones who stopped trying years ago. And the ones who can already see how bad this is going to get. Four films, four completely different ways of handling trouble. Eight questions decide which one you would actually walk out of.
🎳Lebowski(1998)
🎸O Brother(2000)
❄️Fargo(1996)
🪙No Country(2007)
01
A bag of money lands in your lap. What happens next? Every Coen film starts roughly here. It never goes smoothly.
02
Somebody is being completely unreasonable with you. How does it go? Coen dialogue is mostly people failing to understand each other.
03
What is your actual relationship with work? Everyone in these films is either working far too hard or not at all.
04
Long drive, bad weather, nobody else on the road. How are you? There is always a drive in these films. It is never a good drive.
05
You are offered a shortcut that is not quite legal. This is the moment where the Coens find out who you really are.
06
The plan has fallen apart completely. What is your move? In a Coen film the plan always falls apart. That is the genre.
07
Which of these sounds most like something you would say? Nobody writes a line quite like the Coens. Which one is yours?
08
How does your film end? Eight questions in, this is the one that decides your movie.
The Verdict Is In Your Coen Film Is…
Four films, four completely different ways of handling money, trouble
and other people. This is the one you would survive, why it suits you, and what it would cost you to
be there.
The Big Lebowski · 1998
The Big Lebowski
You have quietly arranged your life so that very little can get
to you, and a surprising number of people find that infuriating. You would be completely at
home here.
The Dude is the only person in the film with no ambition, and the only one who comes out
the other side undamaged. That is not an accident.
You do not chase things. You let situations arrive and you deal with them at your own
pace, which is a genuine skill however lazy it looks.
This is a full crime plot happening around a man who mostly wants his rug back, and that
is exactly the energy you would bring to it.
Everything goes wrong. You abide. The film ends.
O Brother, Where Art Thou? · 2000
O Brother
You talk your way through life and it works far more often than
it should. Give you a bad situation and an audience and you will find a way out of both at
once.
Everett never has a plan that survives contact with reality. He has something better,
which is the ability to keep talking until a new one turns up.
You are the optimist in the group, the one who makes a ridiculous idea sound reasonable
at two in the morning.
This is the warmest film the Coens have made. It is a chase, a comedy and a musical at
once, and nobody in it is quite beyond saving.
You would end up famous entirely by accident, and act like you planned it all along.
Fargo · 1996
Fargo
You would survive Fargo because you are the only kind of person
who does: patient, decent, and completely unimpressed by anybody trying to be clever.
Marge Gunderson solves the whole case by being polite, thorough and unhurried while
everybody around her panics. That is the entire argument of the film.
You do the boring parts of the job, which is precisely why you would notice the thing
everyone else walked straight past.
Fargo is about ordinary greed causing enormous damage, and about one person who simply
refuses to be corrupted by any of it.
You would go home at the end of it, have dinner, and sleep perfectly well.
No Country for Old Men · 2007
No Country
You do not expect the world to be fair and you stopped being
surprised about it a long time ago. That clear-eyed quality is exactly what this film asks
for.
No Country is the Coens at their coldest: a film where being smart, fast and careful
might still not be anywhere near enough.
You plan for the worst, you keep your own counsel, and some part of you is already
working out the exit.
Llewelyn Moss is competent, prepared and resourceful, and the film is honest about
whether any of that is ever sufficient.
You would see it coming. Whether that helps is the one question the film refuses to
answer.
Here’s Who Quentin Tarantino Fired from ‘Inglourious Basterds’
The actor he fired after the table read is none other than Mélanie Laurent, who plays the vengeful survivor Shosanna Dreyfus in the film. Tarantino said, “Mélanie Laurent’s table read was terrible. It wasn’t good enough to be terrible. 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.”
Laurent was eventually brought back as Shosanna after she reached out to Tarantino a few days later and explained why she wasn’t at the top of her game. Also featuring Diane Kruger, Michael Fassbender, Eli Roth, Daniel Brühl, and Christoph Waltz, Inglourious Basterds grossed more than $320 million worldwide against a reported budget of $70 million.
Inglourious Basterds is streaming now on Prime Video. Stay tuned to Collider for more updates.
