Interesting. Remember when Quentin Tarantino spoke about a potential “Inglourious Basterds” prequel, starring the African American subplot soldiers he cut out of the original script? Well, it sounded cool, but Tarantino likes to talk a lot and has basically come up with sequel ideas for every one of his films and characters (“The Vega Boys,” “Kill Bill 3”), but so far none of them have materialized and just feel like, fun, wouldn’t-it-be-cool, pie-in-the-sky ideas and scenarios. And we can understand why. Dude is excitable, enthusiastic and he loves his characters like children. However, Tarantino did say the script was already “half-written.”
And in a GQ interview with Harvey Weinstein, the project sounds like more than just a tiny idea. When discussing material from the script he read 7-8 years ago, the TWC chief said some of the elements from those early drafts were still in the final version and then hinted at some of it appearing in the prequel.
“Yeah, they were pieces [of that original script that] ended up in the film and then I’ve also read the stuff that’s part of the prequel. I’m not tellin’ you! [But] Brad wants to do Inglorious II. We all want to do it. And the movie hasn’t even come out yet! But unfortunately I cannot give away the plot. [pause] Unless you turned into Jacqueline Bisset when she was 27 years old. Under those circumstances, I would give it away.”
Tarantino always said the film could have been a long “Band of Brothers”-like mini-series saga and Weinstein echoes those old sentiments, practically a decade old now. “We were gonna do this as, like, 16 hours for Showtime or HBO. He had so much stuff mapped out, we could have done like 3 movies. It was just epic. We could do two movies, three movies. I was begging for the movies, but Quentin wanted to do the TV series, Bob [Weinstein] wanted to do the TV series, so it was like two against one, you know? And I was getting outvoted all over the place, so I just figured, ‘All right, forget it, I’m not gonna be a loser, I’ll jump to the winning side.’ And then Quentin turns it into one movie. Go figure.” [ed. ironic considering how much the final Basterds script would serve better as a series.]
Harvey also rips into the The Wrap’s story that said 40 minutes was going to be cut from the film and basically calls the report straight up bullshit (as we basically said as much and presumed).
“Those stories are all untrue. There’s no fucking way. Here, read my lips: That is nuts. Please don’t even write that, it’s insanity. There’s not even a question of that. Whatever you’re reading, it’s like some insane blogger… There’s no truth to any of this. He’s not gonna cut. What he’s doing is just reorganizing some scenes. I mean, the guy had six weeks to cut his movie ; most guys take six months. Most guys take a year. When I worked with Martin [Scorsese], we’d do eighteen months in post-production. Quentin Tarantino cuts a movie in six weeks? Come on, there’s shit on that cutting-room floor that’ll blow your brains out. I was telling Quentin the opposite—’You should put that shit back in the movie.’ There’s scenes with Brad Pitt and the Basterds, and I’m praying he puts that shit back in, ‘cause it’s un-fucking-believably great. Listen—this movie will be between two hours and twenty minutes and two hours and twenty-seven minutes. I don’t think it’s going to be shorter—it’s just a question of rearranging. I know he’s putting footage back into the movie. I know he’s got some cool shit that he didn’t get time to address.”
Good news for fans, but having read the script, c’mon Harvey, don’t exaggerate, there’s not that many scenes left unless he made up stuff on the fly which is entirely possible (and the ending was slightly changed), but at the speed he was shooting, we don’t expect to see anything dramatically different.