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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 started on his 2009
revisionist World War II movie. Laurent ended up being rehired for the leading role of Shosanna Dreyfus, a French cinema owner seeking revenge against the Nazi officer who killed her 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 preproduction is for me the table read. 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 called Tarantino days after the table read to get her job back. She told the director she was not feeling well at the time and that she planned to fly herself back to Germany and put herself up at a hotel in order to read for him again. Tarantino admired Laurent’s passion and agreed to “turn the clock back” and “return to square one” with her as long as she was willing to go through three days of rehearsal with him. Whatever Laurent did doing those fateful few days impressed Tarantino enough for him to give the role of Shosanna back to her.
“Let me just go on the record for everybody to know: I love Mélanie,” Tarantino said. “The fact of the matter is, if we were not talking about the making of ‘Inglourious Basterds,’ I would never think about the table read again for the simple reason Mélanie is my Shosanna. She did a wonderful job. But we have decided to dive deep into the making of the movie with this book, and this is an important part of its history. You know, we agreed, warts and all. So, if we had not agreed to talk about the shooting of the movie, it 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 of Madame Ada Mimieux, a woman who shelters Shosanna in Paris, was given to the iconic “In the Mood for Love” star Maggie Cheung. Huppert “didn’t show up” to 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 issues with her contract. It just kept stalling. And then not coming to the table read. Well, we cast Maggie instead.”
“That invariably happens,” the director continued. “As far as I’m concerned, if you’re cast and you are not at that table, I don’t owe you jack shit! You can be fired, especially if I get excited by what somebody else did in your absence.”
Unfortunately, all of the scenes that included Madame Ada Mimieux were cut out of the movie because Tarantino felt they over-explained things too much to the audience. As the director said: “Maggie was fantastic in the movie, but you just didn’t need to know how Shosanna acquired the cinema. All we needed was a title card saying ‘Four Years Later’ and Shosanna explaining that she inherited it from her aunt.”
“Inglourious Basterds” world premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2009, where it won best actor honors for Christoph Waltz, and then opened in theaters that August, where it became a box office hit with $321 million worldwide. The film remains one of Laurent’s signature roles.
“I have no moral compass when it comes to giving roles to actors: They have to be right. They have to feel like they are right for the world I have created,” Tarantino said about his freewheeling approach to hiring and firing actors. “I have fired actors in the past. If it’s not right, it is not right. I don’t owe them shit. I owe my film the best actors I can find. Period.”
“The Making of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds” is now available for purchase.
