Read Inglourious Basterds Online
Authors: Quentin Tarantino
Inglourious Basterds
Copyright © 2009 by Quentin Tarantino
Introduction copyright © DLR, Inc.
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced,
distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
Inglourious Basterds
is copublished by Weinstein Books and Little, Brown and Company.
Little, Brown and Company
Hachette Book Group
237 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10017
Visit our website at
www.HachetteBookGroup.com
First eBook Edition: July 2009
Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Little, Brown name and logo are trademarks of Hachette
Book Group, Inc.
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
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE: “ONCE UPON A TIME IN …NAZI-OCCUPIED FRANCE”
CHAPTER TWO: “INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS”
CHAPTER THREE: “GERMAN NIGHT IN PARIS”
CHAPTER FOUR: “OPERATION KINO”
CHAPTER FIVE: “REVENGE OF THE GIANT FACE”
Death Proof
Natural Born Killers
Pulp Fiction
Reservoir Dogs
True Romance
From Dusk Till Dawn
Jackie Brown
Years back, I knew a kid like Quentin Tarantino. At eleven, Scott was a genius. His specialty wasn’t imagery, dark humor,
history, or anything human. He was a freak with machines. I’d give the boy my worn-out electronics and broken boxes of technology.
He’d hand me back an 8-track player flashlight. A cassette toaster. An LP turntable clock-radio.
I never questioned Scott’s 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 he’s picked the past apart,
reassembled traditions and clichés 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.
He’s done it again with
Inglourious Basterds
. In this script, you’ll 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 cribbed—complete
with misspelling—from 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, it’s 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. They’ve 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 Tarantino’s 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
Tarantino’s 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 Tarantino’s dialogue, action, and locale when it is your inner voice
delivering the lines, your own mind’s eye shooting the scenes. In addition, Tarantino’s personal voice fills the script in
his depictions of motivation (
it’s 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 it’s 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 Brass’s Italian B-movie ripoffs of Visconti’s “The Damned”.
) You’ll find no seats in any movie house for this wonderful show. It’s 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 Tarantino’s previous films. While there’s 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 don’t believe Tarantino was ever in the play. The grinning
fellow across the room from me tryin’ out Bevo, tryin’out cubebs, tryin’ out Tailor Mades! was America’s greatest cineaste,
so enamored with movies that he’s committed to memory even the patter song from
Music Man
.
In the script to
Inglourious Basterds
, Tarantino’s tastes and talents are on display as brightly as if they too were cast onto a big silver screen. You can’t miss
them for reading them. He’s 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 hero—and it’s not a stretch to believe
this is the writer/director himself talking to us off the page—“I 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.
EXT—DAIRY FARM—DAY
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:
“ONCE UPON A TIME IN…NAZI-OCCUPIED FRANCE”
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, you’d never know if he’s been beating at this stump for the last year or just started today.
JULIE
one of his three pretty teenage daughters, is hanging laundry on the clothesline. As she hangs up a white bedsheet, she hears
a noise. Moving the sheet aside, she sees:
JULIE’S POV
A Nazi town car convertible, with two little Nazi flags attached to the hood, a NAZI SOLDIER behind the wheel, a NAZI OFFICER
alone in the backseat, following TWO OTHER NAZI SOLDIERS on motorcycles, coming up over the hill on the country road leading
to their farm.
Pappa.
The French farmer sinks his ax in the stump, looks over his shoulder, and sees the Germans approaching.
The FARMER’S WIFE, CHARLOTTE, comes to the doorway of their home, followed by her TWO OTHER TEENAGE DAUGHTERS, and sees the
Germans approaching.
The farmer yells to his family in FRENCH, SUBTITLED IN ENGLISH:
Go back inside and shut the door.
(to Julie)
Julie, get me some water from the pump to wash up with, then get inside with your mother.
The young lady runs to the water pump by the house. She picks up a basin and begins pumping. After a few pumps, water comes
out, splashing into the basin.
The French farmer sits down on the stump he was previously chopping away at, pulls a handkerchief from his pocket, wipes sweat
from his face, and waits for the Nazi convoy to arrive. After living for a year with the sword of Damocles suspended over
his head, this may very well be the end.
Julie finishes filling the water basin and places it on the windowsill.
Ready, Pappa.
Thank you, darling, now go inside and take care of your mother. Don’t run.
Julie walks inside the farmhouse and closes the door behind her.
As her father stands up from the stump and moves over to the windowsill with the water basin…
… The SOUND OF THE ENGINES of the two motorcycles and car get LOUDER.
The farmer SPLASHES water from the basin on his face and down his front. He takes a towel off a nail and wipes the excess
water from his face and chest, as he watches the two motorcycles, the one automobile, and the four representatives of the
National Socialist Party come to a halt on his property.
We don’t move into them but keep observing them from a distance, like the farmer.
The TWO NAZI MOTORCYCLISTS are off their bikes and standing at attention next to them.
The NAZI DRIVER has walked around the automobile and opened the door for his superior.
The NAZI OFFICER says to the driver in UNSUBTITLED GERMAN:
This is the property of Perrier LaPadite?
Yes, Herr Colonel.
The Nazi officer climbs out of the backseat of the vehicle, carrying in his left hand a black leather attaché case.
Herrman, until I summon you, I am to be left alone.
As you wish, Herr Colonel.
The S.S. colonel yells to the farmer in FRENCH, SUBTITLED IN ENGLISH:
Is this the property of Perrier LaPadite?
I am Perrier LaPadite.
The S.S. colonel crosses the distance between them with long strides and says, in French, with a smile on his face:
It is a pleasure to meet you, Monsieur LaPadite. I am Colonel Hans Landa of the S.S.
COL. HANS LANDA offers the French farmer, PERRIER LAPADITE, his hand. The Frenchman takes the German hand in his and shakes
it.
How may I help you?
I was hoping you could invite me inside your home and we may have a discussion.
INT—LAPADITE FARMHOUSE—DAY
The door to the farmhouse swings open, and the farmer gestures for the S.S. colonel to enter. Removing his gray S.S. cap,
the German steps inside the Frenchman’s home.
Col. Landa is immediately greeted with the sight of the farmer’s wife and three pretty daughters standing together in the
kitchen, smiling in his direction.
The farmer enters behind him, closing the door.
Colonel Landa, this is my family.
The S.S. colonel clicks his heels together and takes the hand of the French farmer’s wife…
Col. Hans Landa of the S.S., Madame, at your service.
He kisses her hand, then continues without letting go of his hostess’s hand…
Please excuse my rude intrusion on your routine.