“We just had to commit to doing it”: the technique Quentin Tarantino doesn’t like but ended a movie with anyway
As one of the very few auteurs in Hollywood who gets to make whatever kind of movie they want, whatever they want to make it, for as much money as they want it to cost, it stands to reason that Quentin Tarantino is never going to commit anything to film he isn’t completely invested in.
He develops his own stories, writes his own scripts, and calls the shots to an extent few in the industry can match, but on one occasion, he was forced to swallow his pride and end one of his features with a certain type of sequence he openly confessed would more often than not bore him to tears.
However, as a writer who tends to be dictated by the story spilling onto the page and not the other way around, he didn’t find himself with much choice. Having crafted a riveting World War II adventure with a heavy dose of historical revisionism, Tarantino upped the ante way past 11 when Inglourious Basterds reached its bonkers climax.
Mélanie Laurent’s Shoshana traps great swathes of high-ranking Nazis in the local theatre, lights the touchpaper, and begins burning them all to a crisp. Meanwhile, the titular group of ragtag soldiers mount their own mission, machine-gunning the hierarchy to death in a gratuitously overblown fashion.
The entire conclusion of Inglourious Basterds hinges on the raging fire engulfing Shoshana’s cinema, which forced Tarantino to confront his apathy to roaring flames. He’d never been a fan, but because it was so integral to what he wanted to accomplish, he was forced to accept the inevitable challenges.
“We just had to commit to doing it and piece it together,” he told Filmmaker Magazine. “And it was also weird going into this big fire sequence because I don’t really like fire sequences. I mean, you know, other than Mauritz Stiller’s Greta Garbo movie, Gösta Berling, which has a great fire sequence at the end, and maybe the burning of Atlanta, I think fire sequences are kind of boring.”
Even though he’s always been of the belief that fire sequences can be as dull as dishwater to sit through, Tarantino was well aware of the metatextuality that came from how “an audience in a movie theatre is going to be watching an audience in a movie theatre in a fire,” which he wanted to be “as traumatic as it should be to watch a plane crash movie on an aeroplane.”
While Inglourious Basterds wasn’t quite as traumatising as watching something like Society of the Snow when jetting off on holiday, it nonetheless continued Tarantino’s career-long theme of flirting with the fourth wall without breaking it. Not only that, but Once Upon a Time in Hollywood got a flamethrower scene, so maybe it changed his perception of fire sequences altogether.
Never Miss A Take
The Far Out Quentin Tarantino Newsletter
All the latest Quentin Tarantino content from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.