Quentin Tarantino gets brutally honest in Jay Glennie’s new book, “The Making of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds,” about his decision to fire Mélanie Laurent and Isabelle Huppert before production began on his 2009 revisionist World War II film. Laurent ended up being rehired for the lead role of Shosanna Dreyfus, a French cinema owner seeking to take revenge on the Nazi officer who killed his family.
“Mélanie Laurent’s table read was terrible. It wasn’t good enough to be terrible,” Tarantino told the author (via People). “The most exciting day of pre-production for me is the table read. It’s the closest I’ll ever get to seeing the movie for the first time. Up until then, it was just me reading all the scenes to myself or a friend…so a table read with the whole cast is so exciting and so important to me. Well, Melanie was horrible, so I fired her.”
Laurent called Tarantino a few days after the table reading to get his job back. She told the director that she was not feeling well at the time and was planning to return to Germany herself and stay in a hotel in order to read to him again. Tarantino admired Laurent’s passion and agreed to “go back” and “go back to square one” with her on the condition that she was willing to spend three days of rehearsal with him. Whatever Laurent did during those fateful few days, impressed Tarantino enough to return the role of Shosanna to him.
“Let me put it on the record so everyone knows: I love Melanie,” Tarantino said. “The thing is, if we weren’t talking about the making of Inglourious Basterds, I would never think about this painting reread for the simple reason that Melanie is my Shosanna. She did a wonderful job. But we decided to dive deep into the making of the movie with this book, and it’s an important part of its story. You know, we agreed, warts and all. So if we hadn’t agreed to talk about the making of the movie, this would be out of my mind, and I would never think about it again.
Isabelle Huppert, however, was not so lucky. She was fired by Tarantino and her role as Madame Ada Mimieux, a woman who hosts Shosanna in Paris, went to iconic “In the Mood for Love” star Maggie Cheung. Huppert “didn’t show up” at the table read, Tarantino said. “So fuck it. I fired her. I mean, I love Isabelle Huppert – ‘Heaven’s Gate’ and all that – but there were problems with her contract. It kept stalling. And then I didn’t come to the table, I read it. Well, we cast Maggie instead.”
“It happens invariably,” the director continued. “As far as I’m concerned, if you’re selected and you’re not at this table, I don’t owe you anything! You can be fired, especially if I’m excited about what someone else did in your absence.”
Unfortunately, all scenes including Madame Ada Mimieux were cut from the film because Tarantino felt they explained things too much to the audience. As the director said: “Maggie was fantastic in the film, but you just didn’t need to know how Shosanna got the movie. All we needed was a title card saying ‘Four Years Later’ and Shosanna explaining that she inherited it from her aunt.”
“Inglourious Basterds” had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2009, where it won the best actor award for Christoph Waltz, and was then released theatrically in August, where it became a box office hit grossing $321 million worldwide. The film remains one of Laurent’s flagship roles.
“I have no moral compass when it comes to giving actors roles: They have to be right. They have to feel good about the world I’ve created,” Tarantino said of his freewheeling approach to hiring and firing actors. “I’ve fired actors in the past. If it’s not right, it’s not right. I don’t owe them anything. I owe my film the best actors I can find. Period.”
“The Making of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds” is now available for purchase.
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