Inglourious Basterds & Eli Roth Interviewed

Tarantino finally brings the World War II movie he started writing 10 years ago to the big screen and subsequently, a fictional film that Jews have wanted so badly, without even realizing. What did we think of “Inglourious Basterds”? We freakin loved it beyond any other movie this year! The cinematography was breath taking, the acting was , eh’, top notch. That crazy colonel should win a Grammy and Brad Pitt subtly wove humor into the story in a brilliant way. The truth is, our words can’t express how great of a job Tarantino did with this film. So, we will let this interview with Eli Roth (director of Cabin Fever & Hostel) as well as the actor who plays the infamous “Bear Jew”, the giant baseball bat wielding Boston Jew who beats his Nazi prey, do it justice.

Eli Roth – “We had scalping class. My character used a baseball bat. I’m the sergeant and in charge of them collecting scalps. I’m from Boston so it’s not too far from who I am! Quentin said to the guys in scalping class that whoever does the best job gets close-ups doing it. You can over scalp and scalp too fast and it’s a very delicate art to scalp it properly and make it look good.”
AB – The way Tarantino has shot the film, despite its brutal content, it’s a kind of feel-good movie that would warm the hearts of millions around the world.
ER – “The fictionalised story actually taps into something so real which is the human wish fulfilment of going back in time and sacrificing something to save thousands in this case millions of Jews. Like after 9/11 how I fantasised that I was on those planes and killing the hijackers. Something really, really real. It’s brilliant. It takes an artist like Quentin Tarantino to do it.”
AB – It’s like what they were attempting in Hogan’s Heroes, but didn’t accomplish.
ER –“I grew up in a very Jewish neighbourhood and no one watched, it was offensive, the Nazis were too funny. The whole idea of doing that was not funny in the Jewish neighbourhood. If you were born in Germany we would all be dead. My relatives were murdered in the holocaust. They couldn’t find it entertaining. I liked the Dirty Dozen, watching grenades drop on all those Nazis. Quentin is making a movie that takes the subject very seriously but it’s an entertaining film.”
AB – How would you compare horror and Holocaust films?
ER – “To me they are two different things. The Holocaust is the most horrific thing in human history and it happened so recently. These were normal, average citizens doing it; it was the culmination of thousands of years of anti-Semitism. You can trace it back to Martin Luther and his paper “The Jews and Their Lies”. And after WWII in Canada, there’s that book “None”, based on that quote “None is too many” when they asked (a politician) how many Jewish refugees we should let in from the camps. Nobody wanted the Jews after the Holocaust.
This is what we’ve been fighting our whole lives. If you let it fester they will wipe you out. It’s something we are very vigilant making sure it never happens again. That’s the real horror. So when I make a horror movie, it’s just a story, nothing to do with it.”
“Anti-Semitism is everywhere. That’s why I invited QT over to my Passover Seder because we were talking about the psychology and hypothetical situations. He said ‘Would a Jew ever forgive the Nazis? Or give absolution?” I told him these were Catholic concepts; I didn’t even know what absolution means. Come to my Seder and see how the Jews were slaves in Egypt and we always talk about the Holocaust and the world today. Humans and citizens of the planet have to be conscious to do our part to make sure to stop it never happens again.”

– Guy Emanuel

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