“I loved that it read like a novel–in the sense that there were these five distinct chapters. Quentin would go into detail like only he can, and then he would jump to another chapter while the other chapter is breathing, and then another big jump into another chapter. I was just intrigued that he made that work. We Americans love a revenge story as well, so that appealed too!

“I finally finished my reading, and I put it down and went, ‘Holy fuck, can you kill Hitler? Well, I guess you can, I enjoyed it, so . . . and it is his movie, so, well, I guess you can. I guess, right?’”

Hearing that Pitt loved his script confirmed what Tarantino already knew: He wanted Pitt for Raine.

“We had met in the past—didn’t know each other well but always got along,” Quentin recalled. “We let it be known that we wanted to work together for a while.”

“We had crossed paths as far back as Reservoir Dogs. Harvey [Keitel], a hero of mine, was always a great supporter, graciously invited me to read, but I was already on Redford project A River Runs Through It, another hero of mine.

“I’m not busy when Quentin calls,” Pitt said. “This one came with big buildup—he had been writing it for eight years! It was going to be his World War II Spaghetti Western. I got word that he was finishing up, and it was going to come my way that summer.”

Not only was Pitt’s slate clear, but Quentin was also told that he was in  South France. From Berlin, it is but a hop, skip, and jump. The script was sent over, and Quentin made travel plans. “So, I fly down to meet him.”

“We’d just bought this place in France, and Quentin came down to spend some time,” recalled Pitt.

“But I could not see past anybody else playing Aldo Raine other than Brad, which is why I wanted him in the movie.

Pitt welcomed Quentin with a bottle of wine in one hand and in his other hand a copy of the screenplay.

“Hey, what’s with the title?”

“It’s how you say it!” Quentin informed him. “Not ‘bastards’; you say it ‘basterds’ with an e because when you say it with relish, it sounds like it should have an e: ‘basterds.’ Raine has pulled together a ragtag crew—they’re not soldiers in fine fettle, and their new oath of allegiance is swearing vengeance against those who had vowed to ‘wipe them off the face of the earth.’ They’re inglourious!”

The pair got down to business to talk about the movie. Pitt had questions.

Quentin had answers. He knew each character’s backstory and the story he had created. He explained to Pitt how the inspiration had come to him and how he had slept on the idea, and how in the morning, killing Hitler had felt like a cool idea. History was roadblock that he could navigate.

Inglourious Basterds was full of characters, and they were going to change the outcome of the war.

“It gets to the heart of who Quentin is. He is hilarious and verbose and great to have conversations with, amazing energy,” said Pitt. “It’s almost like spring break with him, and you need a week to recover—the guy has got so much energy. But also there is a tenderness and sweetness to him. But fuck, he is just so original in his writing. Something like killing Hitler, you know, we accept this today, but it was actually really heretical back then, especially such a sensitive subject. Only Quentin would have thought it up and could have pulled it off.”

“We’ve gotta talk about that opening scene—it’s incredible. It’s so well-written and fraught with tension.”

Quentin explained that he was thinking of international audiences, and he was going to let the languages fly. If they were supposed to be speaking in their tongue, then the audience would hear it in their native tongue.

“I loved hearing that. Everything up until that time was being looped, dubbed, or subtitled. We were told that you had to dub it for an American audience, for a German audience, for an Italian audience. You know, the thinking from studios was that audiences don’t follow subtitles—they don’t wanna know. Quentin was gonna let it play, and that was also heretical at that time. You just didn’t do it, you know? It just wasn’t done.

“But now you certainly see it on our streamers, because at the beginning, they’d dub everything, and that was  hurting performances—it was awful. But Quentin let it play and gave the movie credence and credibility, and I don’t think he gets points for that, but I felt it was revolutionary.

“The year before was Valkyrie, with Tom Cruise, which was a finely crafted movie, but he starts his voiceover in German and then blends into English, and it was just another way of trying to get to English for an audience. Now, what Quentin wrote in that first scene is Hans Landa asks if he can switch to English because he has exhausted his French, which, of course, is bullshit because his French is flawless and beautiful. Now, this looks like a conceit to go to English for the audience, but then that clever motherfucker Quentin Tarantino uses it because Hans Landa knows the family, who are under the floorboards, cannot understand English. It’s just so fucking clever that the character uses it as a tool to seek the information he needs.”

“Out came this enormous block of hash,” revealed Pitt.

“He had a big brick of hash. He whipped out a knife, like Jesse James, and cut me off a big sliver. I thought, ‘Oh, God, this should be in a movie,’” Quentin said.

Quentin never made it to his bed—he flew straight back to Berlin. His host woke to the sight of five empty wine bottles and some form of smoking apparatus, which looked mysteriously like a homemade bong.

Countered Pitt. “But I did notice the big block of hash had teeth marks in it, as though somebody had taken a big ol’ apple bite outta it.” Pitt’s head was pounding. Struck with a hangover from the wine-and-hash cocktail, he realized that he had agreed to star as the lead in Inglourious Basterds. There was also a voice in his head, and it was the voice of Aldo Raine.

“I remember that the voice in the film is the voice I heard from the first read. It has never happened to me before, and it came from the first speech, when he’s platooning up the Basterds. I could hear it, I knew the voice, I knew the area, and I knew the vicinity. There is a musicality to the way Quentin writes, and there was one line that I kept hearing: ‘They’re the foot soldiers of a Jew-hatin’, mass-murderin’ maniac, and they need to be dee-stroyed.’ I was off running from there. As I said, I’ve never had that experience before where I heard it from first read, like it was in his writing.

With Pitt’s name above the title, the budget had risen to $70 million.

Excerpt provided by Insight Editions, from Jay Glennie’s The Making of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, © 2026