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Topics: News, Film and TV, Quentin Tarantino
Charisa Bossinakis
Topics: News, Film and TV, Quentin Tarantino
Quentin Tarantino believes the best character he’s ever written is Hans Landa from Inglourious Basterds.
The filmmaker has been responsible for creating some incredible roles over his glittering career.
You can't go past The Bride in Kill Bill, Django in Django Unchained or Jules Winnfield in Pulp Fiction.
However, he reckons there is one that is the best of the best.
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Speaking at the Jerusalem Film Festival Frida back in 2016, he touched on his love of cinema and his impressive body of work.
The conversation then centered on the incredible 2009 film Inglourious Basterds.
The movie follows an alternate history story of two plots to assassinate Nazi Germany's leadership - one planned by Shosanna Dreyfus (Melanie Laurent), a young French Jewish cinema proprietor, and the latter conducted by a team of Jewish American soldiers led by First Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt).
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Christoph Waltz plays the chilling Hans Landa, an SS colonel in charge of tracking down Raine’s Nazi-killing squad.
“Landa is the best character I’ve written and maybe the best I ever will write,” Tarantino said, according to Screen Daily.
“I didn’t realize [when I was first writing him] that he was a linguistic genius.
"He’s probably one of the only Nazis in history who could speak perfect Yiddish.”
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It's worth point out that Tarantino said this back in 2016 and he's since released Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and will soon drop The Movie Critic, his final ever film.
Tarantino said that the exhausting audition process to find his Landa convinced him he had to halt the entire project.
That is, of course, until Waltz walked in.
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“I was getting worried. Unless I found the perfect Landa, I was going to pull the movie. I gave myself one more week and then I was going to pull the plug," he said.
Then Christoph Waltz came in and it was obvious that he was the guy; he could do everything. He was amazing, he gave us our movie back."
The role ultimately led the Austrian actor to win his first Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 2010.
Tarantino has also previously admitted that he didn’t want Waltz to rehearse with the other actors during pre-production.
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Many of the non-German actors in the cast had no idea who the Austrian was, and the iconic director wanted to shock them.
He even told the actor to hold back with the cast during their first table read.
“On a scale of one to 10, be a six. Be good enough, just good enough. I do not want you to be in a competition with anybody, and if you are in competition then lose. I don’t want them to know what you have or for them to have a handle on Landa,” Tarantino told Waltz, as Indie Wire.
'I don’t want you rehearsing with the other actors before filming. I don’t want Diane Kruger or Brad Pitt to know your gun-slinging abilities until the cameras are rolling," he continued.