You are sheltering enemies of the state, are you not?
Yes.
You're sheltering them underneath your floorboards,
aren't you?
Yes.
Point out to me the areas where they're hiding.
This is the opening scene of Inglourious Basterds
and it is, well, relatively terrifying.
What starts out as a sunny day on a French dairy farm,
quickly devolves into a paranoia drenched life or death
interrogation.
Culminating with the brutal murder
of a hidden Jewish family.
Tarantino is a master of using intriguing and almost
musical dialogue to drive tension.
This works in part because Tarantino is a perfectionist.
Brad Pitt went as far to say, after filming Inglourious
Basterds, that Tarantino's set places him as God,
and there is no blasphemy.
Perfectionism can be a blessing and a curse
when it comes to filmmaking, for sure.
Sometimes perfectionism can lead to a film's budget ballooning
from delays and reshoots, but on the other hand,
a director who believes in his project and his writing
so much as to settle for nothing less than his vision,
can result in pretty amazing pieces of cinema,
and that's kind of what we're looking at here.
The sixth film in Tarantino canon
was almost scrapped entirely for a variety of reasons.
One of those reasons was that the script had leaked online
a few years prior to release, but another huge reason
was that Tarantino was having trouble
finding an actor who could deliver
the performance necessary to make Hans Landa work.
For a while, it was actually Leonardo DiCaprio,
who was in line to play the film's primary antagonist.
For all intents and purposes, DiCaprio would have probably
been relatively fine.
He's fluent in German and could certainly, deliver
a powerful performance, but Tarantino is again,
a perfectionist.
The performance was going to be absolutely perfect
or the film wasn't going to happen at all.
Tarantino has even gone on record
as to say that he thought that the character might
be unplayable.
A day before he was about to scrap the project entirely,
he met Christoph Waltz and was gobsmacked with the perfection
and ease with which he approached the character.
He was actually instructed to hold back his performance
during rehearsals.
Tarantino didn't want the cast to know how good he actually
was.
So he instructed Waltz to give everyone a six instead of a 10
during that process.
Waltz was told that if he felt actors
begin to get competitive with him, that he was too loose.
And in turn, the only actor who actually
got to see a full blown, full effort
performance during pre-production
was the Denis Menochet, who played Perrier LaPadite,
in the film's opening sequence.
The decision to hold Walts back was
made so that the actors would have a more authentic reaction
to this, well, one of a kind performance.
This scene in general, is incredibly well-written.
It tells a complete story that can almost
act as a standalone short film in 19 minutes.
It opens on LaPadite chopping firewood on top of a hill.
There is this rhythmic quality to which
these chops take place.
Each one of these axe chops are about one second apart.
This is important because it sets a cadence.
We begin this scene with the sound
of what is essentially a ticking clock, as the camera pans
to a small fleet of German troops approaching this farm.
When Hans arrives, we know there is trouble afoot.
His uniform alone, could tell you that,
but the competence with which he enters the room,
gives us the feeling of a python entering a hamster cage.
The contrasting stature of these actors
tells you all you need to know immediately.
Despite the fact, that this farmer
could undoubtedly kill Hans very easily by hand
if he so desired.
Hans still sort of floats through the room
as if he owns the place.
While everyone else around him is
trying to contain sheer and utter terror.
It's all subtle and all, oh, so intimidating.
Now Waltz himself, could write a book
on how to be threatening and charming at the same time,
and Hans seems as cordial and polite as any houseguest could
possibly be, but it's the lack of warmth and pleasantries
shown against this sort of overt politeness
that really send a threatening message to the viewer.
And this is again done, not through Waltz alone, but also
through the writing.
He pauses a little longer than usual.
He holds eye contact for just a second too long,
and Tarantino directs a performance
that has that cadence we already discussed.
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
And adversely, the LaPadite family
can't and doesn't look at Hans for more than a brief moment.
One of the first things Hans does upon entering the home
is request a glass of milk.
It's not an unusual request, after all, this
is a dairy farm, but by doing this,
Hans puts himself in this position of status.
He's letting the family know that they are there
to serve him in this moment.
After excusing the family and reaffirming a spirit of trust
by bringing up the fact that he left his soldiers outside,
Hans and Perrier can finally get down to brass tax.
We, at this point, have no idea what exactly is going on.
We just know that this family is likely in danger.
That's usually the case when you have
a period piece set in World War II and Germans are involved.
But Perrier is particularly on edge about something
that we haven't quite been able to comprehend yet.
The request to switch to the English language
might come off as a pandering to an American audience,
and by all means, it may very well be.
However, Tarantino spins this later
on in a somewhat brilliant way, but we'll
get to that in just a moment.
Hans quickly asserts his dominance
over the entire situation by forcing
Perrier to acknowledge that he knows who
Hans is by reputation alone.
Please tell me what you've heard.
I've heard that the Furher has put you
in charge of running out the Jews left in France.
There's a signal of submission to his authority.
And again, it is done through this wolf in sheep's clothing,
utterly disarming niceness.
Once the power dynamic has been established,
Perrier quickly shifts to more of a bartering phase
and out of nervousness, goes for his pipe to calm his nerves.
After some likely reassurances that this is just
a doubling of efforts in the spirit of thoroughness,
Hans brings up one specific Jewish family
that has been left unaccounted for while very carefully making
Perrier explain in detail, what he remembers about the missing
family.
Names, ages, descriptions, we think
he's just getting information, but Hans is really
interrogating Perrier.
Perrier is giving away everything
he knows, as the camera slowly pans around the table.
Tarantino's way of telling us that literally
and figuratively, the tables have in fact turned.
We get the full picture as the camera pans down
under the floorboards, and we see
the aforementioned Jewish family huddled in a crawlspace,
hiding their breathing, so as not to give away their secret.
They are almost being crushed by the weight of what
is transpiring above them.
This is an eye opening moment for the viewer,
as we now understand that an entire family's life is
at stake, and the stakes of the situation,
in general, are much graver than we initially anticipated.
So after they wrap up the details,
Hans asks for one final glass of milk,
making Perrier serve it to him is, again,
just another psychological twist of the knife
before making his final power play by forcing Perrier
to call him by his nickname.
Yeah, they call you the Jew Hunter.
Precisely.
From this point on, Hans plays out his winning hand one card
at a time.
He loves his moniker because he earned that moniker.
Hans asks if you might be able to smoke his pipe and boom.
Almost comical, as well, like a Looney Tunes gag,
a way for Hans to insult Perrier before going in
for the kill and a message to Perrier that the game is over.
Hans drops all the pleasantries and tells Perrier
that he knows everything.
The jig is up.
Facial expressions shift into something more monstrous
and Hans tells Perrier that he not only
knows that he is hiding Jews in his home,
but that they are under the floorboards
exactly where we've seen them before.
This is where Tarantino stroke of brilliance
with the languages comes into play.
From a filmmaking standpoint, switching
to English for the scene would likely
ease producers concerns of an American movie going
audiences ability to understand the film without being
confused.
But within the structure of this scene, Hans,
knowing that the family was under the floorboard
from the moment he walked into the room,
we now know he switched to English so that they couldn't
understand what was happening when Perrier
was forced to give them up.
Hans resumes his ruse and the family
is murdered in the dirt they were hiding in.
Shosanna running away is the final image
we have in the scene, and Hans allows her to live.
His final words feel like they are left unfinished.
Aur Revoir, Shosanna!
As if he was going to add, until we meet again.
He doesn't care if she lives or dies
because he views her as lesser, as a rodent,
nothing more, nothing less.
It just so happens though, that this moment gives this rodent
the resolve to lock every high ranking German official
in a crowded theater and burn them alive later in the film.
This 19-minute opening scene of Inglourious Basterds
is a masterpiece of not only storytelling
and writing, but also, acting.
It should come as no surprise that Christoph Waltz won
an Oscar for his performance in the film
because he was able to capture a variety of different emotions,
attitudes, and really, personalities
in ways that turn a human being, who by all accounts
in real life is very nice, into something
much more sinister and inhuman.
This may not be a case of casting the right actor
in the right role, it may very well
be a case of casting the only actor who could conceivably
play this role, with any level of believability.
The scene being a testament to how
keeping that perfection in your sights without compromise
can yield amazing results.
Well, guys.
This is it for today's episode of Nerdstalgic.
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