“That’s what makes a true classic”: the movie Christoph Waltz would watch forever and how it changed him for good
You know you’ve witnessed a truly special acting performance when, for every year after it, if you see the actor in question, your mind instantly shoots back to that film, and your opinion of the person in question is irredeemably changed forever.
One of the best examples of that for me is Christoph Waltz in the opening scene of Inglourious Basterds, where the 20-minute interrogation that begins Quentin Tarantino’s 2009 war movie is a masterclass in tension and direction, of course, but Waltz’s portrayal of the SS Officer Hans Landa as he grills a French dairy farmer on the whereabouts of a Jewish family hiding under the floor is just something else. It is likely to be looked back on and studied in decades to come as a generational moment in acting history.
It made me both hate and fear Waltz for good, no matter what he does, no matter whether or not he’s a nice guy in real life (apparently he is), because that scene was so unbelievably well played that the viciousness and the callousness and the fake smiling on show are burned into my brain for eternity.
Even when I saw him in Frankenstein, that was all I could think about, and the same happened when he was Blofeld in two Bond movies, Spectre and No Time to Die. The only things in my mind were the creaking of his leather boots, his drinking the milk, and his stupid fucking pipe, hoping in vain that he might get shot dead within the first five minutes.
All of this is a compliment, of course. You don’t win, as Waltz did, two ‘Best Supporting Actor’ Oscars in two consecutive Tarantino movies without being a unique talent. And Waltz is undeniably that, a student of stage and screen whose career stretches back as far as 1976. After spending most of his time working in Germany, he began to appear in some British and American productions at the start of the 2000s, but it was undeniably Tarantino who handed him his breakthrough roles while he was in his 50s.
In looking back over his career with CGTN, Walz suitably picked an Italian film in which the great Federico Fellini did much the same, namely 8 ½, the 1963 fantasy comedy starring Marcello Mastroianni in which Fellini went meta by writing and directing the story of a filmmaker suffering from writer’s block while trying to make an epic science fiction movie, reflecting on how his past life and loves have led him to that point.
Waltz said, “That movie I’ve seen, I don’t know, 20, 30 times… The moment that you watch the movie, it makes the movie unique, even though it is recorded, and what is being projected is the same movie with the same thing every time. But you are not the same person, so you see a different movie every time, and that’s what makes a true classic.”
8 ½ was immediately heralded as a critical masterpiece, not just in Fellini’s native Italy but globally too, winning the Academy Award for ‘Best Foreign Language Film’ and now regularly appearing in lists of the greatest films ever made.
Waltz, meanwhile, has several interesting projects in the works, hopefully one of which will erase the memory of Hans Landa.
One of those is a TV miniseries about the Cold War named Reagan and Gorbachev, while another is Wilder & Me, a true-life movie about a young musician working for another of the greatest directors of all time, Billy Wilder.
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