Christoph Waltz is one of the
Inglourious Basterds and he is so glorious in the film that comes out this Friday, August 21st. Waltz recently won the Best Actor Award at Cannes for his role of Colonel Hans Landa aka The Jew Hunter in the movie and once you see him in the WWII epic you will see why he deserved it hands down. They say the winner of this Cannes honor will go on to at least get an Oscar nom and I hope it stays true for him. In the last few decades I can only think of a handful of winners who really deserved their win like Hilary Swank in Boys Don’t Cry, Adrien Brody in The Pianist and Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump, and hopefully when Christoph brings home the statuette in March, I can say the same about him. His portrayal in this masterpiece blew me away. He takes every scene he is no matter who he works with. He plays it so perfectly that when he comes on the screen you cringe because you hate him so much. If you are going to get cast in a movie about Nazis in the year 2009 and play a character nicknamed The Jew Hunter, you better be someone that the audience just wants to despise every time they are on the big screen and he really does just that. But I must add, in person you just have to love him because he is so humble and charming and sincerely enjoys his craft. He has been doing this for 30 years and yet most of us have never heard of him and he told us at The Weinstein Company roundtable day that he was OK with that.
It turned everything on its head. Not so much personally, because personally I’ve been doing this for quite some time. I would recommend for every actor to wait 30 years until something like that happens. Because, I think as a 25-year-old, I could not handle it. You have to fly off the handle somehow sooner or later.
You can tell by listening to him he was ready for this happen and it happened in the right role for him. I cannot express to you just how powerful he is in the movie. IB is a movie that mixes the seriousness of Nazi-occupied France with humor and he captures both. The Austrian born actor speaks every language that is used in the movie in real life, English, French and German. And it was his linguistics in the first awesome chapter of the movie that amazed me. The scene starts out with him talking to a French farmer, who is hiding out Shoshana’s (Melanie Laurent) family under his floorboards, in French. As the conversation goes on he says to the farmer, “This being your house, I ask your permission to switch to English for the remainder of the conversation.” It makes sense why he says this, but it was in that moment that I knew Inglourious Basterds was going to be a kick a$$ movie and that Christoph Waltz deserved his accolade at Cannes.
On the Cannes’ note I have used this quote before from him and I am going to use it again because I love it so much. When I asked him how he feels about the new found International interest in him he told me in our roundtable room.
I said this after Cannes. Ten flashbulbs bother you; 10,000 are fantastic! Thanks a lot. All the best!
Christoph enjoy all those flashing bulbs because you so richly deserved to be blinded by them because your future is just that bright!!! Sincerely I can’t think of any actor that could’ve played the role as well as him and I highly suggest seeing Inglourious Basterds on Friday to watch his sheer brilliance as Colonel Hans Landa aka The Jew Hunter.
