Did you teach Quentin anything about gore and how to make things look more gruesome?
Quentin knows everything about gore. We have the same effects guys. What I did teach Quentin about was, while he was writing it, I sort of became the Jewish technical advisor.
How so?
There were just certain psychological things that he would kind of gut check with me. Would a Jew do this? Or do you think this way? Before he wrote the last chapter, I came over in April of 2008 and said if you want real insight into Jewish psychology, you should come over to my Passover Seder at my house in Los Angeles. I’m not very religious, but my family celebrates Passover. He had never seen that side of me, because truthfully, I rarely let it out. So, he’s never really seen me as a Jew.
Wow. So how did Quentin do?
He did Great! My father is a psychoanalyst, and he really loves Quentin, and they really get along. It was my parents, my brothers, and very close friends. There was like 20 of us and Quentin. Half of it we were joking and doing it in our Boston accents, and half of it turned into this very intense philosophical discussion. After the Seder he was like, I’m gonna go home and finish the script.
Did Quentin read from the Haggadah?
Oh yeah, we all did. I make everyone read. They don’t have to read it in Hebrew. We do it in Boston accents, Jewish accents, we have fun with it. But it always turns into real serious discussions about the Holocaust. Quentin was talking about absolution and the concept of absolution, and I said to him, you know, absolution really is a Christian concept. So the Jews, I was like, we collect interest. We just get angrier about stuff over the years. We don’t just forgive, and we don’t forget anything. I was like, I would kill every one of these motherfuckers. I wouldn’t forgive any of them.
So in that spirit was it cathartic for you, as a Jew, to be able to beat shit out of fake Nazis?
What I realized was not only was it cathartic for me, it was cathartic for them [the German actors]. They’re this whole generation of people who have nothing to do with it. They are burdened by what their grandparents did—this horrible, unthinkable thing, and they’re getting stuck with the blame for it. So all of us wanted to kill it. And the guy playing Hitler, and girls, they were like let’s fucking kill these guys. Let’s just do it. Kill them. They all had fantasies about killing these guys. So they wanted the deaths to be as violent as possible. It was like, let’s go kill them together and make a great scene.
After reading this interview with Eli, you can see how much Quentin Tarantino cared to make sure that this movie was done right and respectfully. I admire that about him.
What I also thought was extremely interesting in his interview is when he said the German actors felt the same way he did about killing Nazis. That is something I never heard before. It really sounds like Inglourious Basterds is going to change the way that a lot of people feel in modern day towards some people for something that happened in the past. Really really interesting.
BTW Eli also talked to Black Book Magazine about his experience at Cannes during the premiere of the movie in May and you can really feel what a powerful moment it was for everyone involved with the film.
I seriously can’t wait until August 21st to see Inglourious Basterds!
