Tarantino - Inglourious Basterds: a screenplay

Copyright 2009 by Quentin Tarantino

Introduction copyright DLR, Inc.

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Inglourious Basterds is copublished by Weinstein Books and Little, Brown and Company.

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First eBook Edition: July 2009

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The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

ISBN: 978-0-316-08065-1

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Jackie Brown

Years back, I knew a kid like Quentin Tarantino. At eleven, Scott was a genius. His specialty wasnt imagery, dark humor, history, or anything human. He was a freak with machines. Id give the boy my worn-out electronics and broken boxes of technology. Hed hand me back an 8-track player flashlight. A cassette toaster. An LP turntable clock-radio.

I never questioned Scotts reasons for being a Dr. Moreau with a soldering gun. It seemed enough that he brought new things into the world. New trumped any specific use, and invention was its own rationale.

Likewise, throughout his film career, Quentin Tarantino has crafted things out of the quotidian never seen before. His appreciation of the cinema status quo has long been that of an inventor surveying a junkyard. Time and again hes picked the past apart, reassembled traditions and clichs alike into forms we recognize only in pieces. His movies burn in our eyes strange and familiar, all at once. Tarantino backs into the future.

Hes done it again with Inglourious Basterds. In this script, youll see a thought bubble cut straight out of comic books. A disembodied narrator who pipes up out of nowhere. Black-and-white imagery recalling venerable French films. A blood-red lens. Flashbacks. The title is even cribbedcomplete with misspellingfrom a 1978 Italian-made war film. The script remembers, too, the classic propaganda films of Leni Riefenstahl and Joseph Goebbels. It glimpses the faces of Hitler and Churchill and the interior of a wartime movie house in Paris, and zooms in on the horrors of close combat, the mania of vendetta. This is stronger stuff by far than what Scott melted together for me long ago. But Tarantino holds the same awe and reverence for the antecedents as that exuberant and extraordinary boy ever did.

Inglourious Basterds does not indulge in lampoonery or mere cobbling. It is reverently authentic as a war story, working the same tense, edge-of-the-seat magic as the best of the genre, book or movie. At the same time, its Tarantino, its own thing.

The setting is Paris, mid-June, 1944. The Americans and British are still on their Norman beachheads, slogging inland through heavily defended villages and hedgerows. The German army has not yet admitted to itself an imminent defeat. Theyve gone undisturbed in France for four years and have taken a liking to the place. Soldiers gallivant about Paris, take in the cinema, court those mademoiselles who will have them. But Tarantinos work always balances on an underlying bedlam. Desperation shows among the Nazis, who speed their efforts to eradicate the last Jews of Europe before the war turns. We sense the clock ticking for Germany in a film produced by Goebbels, meant to buck up the troops by touting a lone sniper who killed 300 Soviets on the Eastern Front. A small cadre of Jewish-American soldiers kills boldly behind enemy lines (Jews who take scalps, another blur from Tarantinos pen). A young woman plots a secret revenge against the Nazis for the killing of her family.

While the film itself brings Inglourious Basterds alive in all its color, movement, and dimension, the manuscript provides a separate joy the movie cannot. The raw script provides an unmatched intimacy with the interplay of Tarantinos dialogue, action, and locale when it is your inner voice delivering the lines, your own minds eye shooting the scenes. In addition, Tarantinos personal voice fills the script in his depictions of motivation (its all the way, baby, all the fucking way!), camera directions (we see all three guns pointed at the appropriate crotches), action (they BOTH TAKE and GIVE each other so many BULLETS its almost romantic when they collapse DEAD on the floor), and descriptions for characters (a young George Sanders type The Saint and Private Affairs of Bel Ami years) and sets (the auditorium resembles something out of Tinto Brasss Italian B-movie ripoffs of Viscontis The Damned.) Youll find no seats in any movie house for this wonderful show. Its theater of the mind, all the way, baby.

Interestingly, Inglourious Basterds, a World War II movie, contains less of a body count than many of Tarantinos previous films. While theres no shortage of mayhem and carnage, it seems the framework of actual historical violence has constrained his own tendencies to apply it so liberally. The script reads like the lives and deaths and terrible acts of real people. Tarantino evokes an actual world at war. It is plausible and terrific.

The first time I met Quentin Tarantino, we had dinner in a trendy Tribeca restaurant. Before long, he and I were both on our feet, performing Ya Got Trouble for the patrons around us. I was in Music Man in high school, so I have an explanation, if not an excuse. I dont believe Tarantino was ever in the play. The grinning fellow across the room from me tryin out Bevo, tryinout cubebs, tryin out Tailor Mades! was Americas greatest cineaste, so enamored with movies that hes committed to memory even the patter song from Music Man.

In the script to Inglourious Basterds, Tarantinos tastes and talents are on display as brightly as if they too were cast onto a big silver screen. You cant miss them for reading them. Hes in full control of all his material here, the bits from both past and present. This is vintage Tarantino, headed in a new direction.

To quote the last line of dialogue, delivered by Lt. Aldo Raine, the somewhat warped heroand its not a stretch to believe this is the writer/director himself talking to us off the pageI think this just might be my masterpiece.

The script concludes with a piece of stage direction for all of us:

They ghoulishly giggle.

David L. Robbins, author of The Betrayal Game,The Assassins Gallery, War of the Rats, Liberation Road,Last Citadel, Scorched Earth, The End of War, Souls to Keep, and the forthcoming Broken Jewel.

EXTDAIRY FARMDAY

The modest dairy farm in the countryside of Nancy, France (what the French call cow country).

We read a SUBTITLE in the sky above the farmhouse:

This SUBTITLE disappears and is replaced by another one:

1941
One year into the German occupation of France

The farm consists of a house, a small barn, and twelve cows spread about.

The owner of the property, a bull of a man, FRENCH FARMER, brings an ax up and down on a tree stump, blemishing his property. However, simply by sight, youd never know if hes been beating at this stump for the last year or just started today.