Quentin Tarantino said he fired French film stars Melanie Laurent and Isabelle Huppert from his 2009 revisionist war epic “Inglourious Basterds” ― but Laurent’s effort to get rehired won him over.
Excerpts reported by People this week from “The Making of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds” by Jay Glennie revisited the drama behind one of Tarantino’s most successful films.
The famed filmmaker told the author he canned Huppert because she didn’t show up to the table read.
“So fuck it. I fired her,” the filmmaker said in the book. “I mean, I love Isabelle Huppert — ‘Heaven’s Gate’ and all that — but there were issues with her contract. It just kept stalling. And then not coming to the table read. ... As far as I’m concerned, if you’re cast and you are not at that table, I don’t owe you jack shit!”
Maggie Cheung replaced her, but the role never made it past the cutting-room floor.
As for Laurent, Tarantino picked her for the plum part of Shosanna Dreyfus, a theater owner in Nazi-occupied France who sought revenge against a bloodthirsty German officer. But she tanked her table read, Tarantino recalled. “It wasn’t good enough to be terrible,” he said.
“The most exciting day of preproduction is for me the table read,” he told Glennie. “That is the closest I get to seeing the movie for the first time. Up until then, it’s just been me reading all the scenes to myself or to a friend … so a table read with the whole cast is so exciting and so important to me. Well, Mélanie was terrible, so I fired her.”
Laurent begged for another chance and told him, “I will fly myself to Germany and put myself up into a hotel. I know you’re busy, but I will wait until you see me again.”
Three days of rehearsals with her won him over.
“Let me just go on the record for everybody to know: I love Mélanie,” the director said.
Tarantino isn’t afraid of tension with actors.
Hollywood idol Brad Pitt, who also starred in “Basterds,” once cut the filming of a Tarantino scene on his own and got a tongue-lashing from the director on the set of 2019’s “Once Upon A Time ... In Hollywood,” according to actor Bruce Dern.
“Never again in your life will you ever cut a camera or you’ll be dead in this business. That’s my domain,” Tarantino snapped at Pitt, per Dern, who was acting in that scene.
No hard feelings, apparently. Pitt wrote the foreword for Glennie’s book, and he and Tarantino have reunited for a new Netflix movie featuring Pitt’s character from “Once Upon A Time,” stuntman Cliff Booth.
It’s called “The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth.” Tarantino wrote the screenplay and David Fincher directed.
