Edgar Wright’s unsung contribution to Quentin Tarantino movie ‘Inglourious Basterds’
Sometimes, all it takes is a cult classic romantic comedy with zombies to kick down doors that actors or directors could have never imagined being unlocked, with Shaun of the Dead the gift that kept giving for Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg, and Nick Frost.
The trio had been lifelong cinephiles and genre aficionados, but it wasn’t until the first instalment in the Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy became a global favourite that they got the chance to live out their wildest dreams, which came at such a breakneck pace they could scarcely believe it.
Pegg famously said in the aftermath of Shaun on the Dead that even though Hollywood offers had started coming his way for the first time, it would be foolish to expect him to suddenly go from Spaced to Mission: Impossible III, comments that came back to haunt him when he made his blockbuster debut in that exact movie.
The trio got the chance to work with zombie maestro George A. Romero on Land of the Dead, they were being courted by industry heavyweights like Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson, and Marvel Studios, and Wright even ended up spending a year living at Quentin Tarantino’s house once he made the move to America.
“After Shaun of the Dead came out, the world suddenly got really small,” he admitted to The Guardian. “Just from that one film, I met about 80% of my heroes.” The screenplay for his Hot Fuzz follow-up Scott Pilgrim vs the World was penned while he maintained his residency at Tarantino’s abode, but it wasn’t an entirely one-sided relationship when they were sharing a property.
At the same time Wright was feverishly working on his comic book adaptation, Tarantino was refining the script for Inglourious Basterds. Seeking a sounding board for how to make his dialogue come across as more natural, the Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction creator would read Winston Churchill’s scenes aloud and quiz his houseguest on whether they sounded authentically English enough.
There’s something bizarre about Tarantino gauging a genuine Englishman on whether or not his version of Churchill sounded English enough, and not only because Inglorious Basterds was hardly beholden to retelling a period of World War II history that had actually happened in favour of the writer and director putting his own unique spin on the specifics of the conflict.
Churchill only makes a fleeting appearance in the film, where he was played by Australian actor Rod Taylor, and gives orders to a stiff upper-lipped general played by Canadian Mike Myers caked under heavy makeup, so realism wasn’t at the forefront of Tarantino’s thinking. Still, if anybody watched Inglourious Basterds and thought that the wartime prime minister sounded like the real deal, then Wright deserves at least a small share of the thanks.
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