HOLLYWOOD – When it came time to celebrate the release of Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds on DVD this week, the choice of venue was obvious for the successful director.
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Review: Nightmare Nazi Dominates Tarantino's Glorious BasterdsThe New Beverly Cinema on the southern outskirts of Hollywood is the last full-time revival movie house in Los Angeles – a privately owned island of classic films surrounded by towering multiplexes. The theater serves as the home for Los Angeles' monthly Grindhouse Film Festival, which serves up a double feature of meaty, often violent pulp movies from decades past.
Tarantino is a principal player in the old-fashioned cinema's operation and survival, giving moviegoers an ongoing opportunity to see the kind of films that inspired Inglourious Basterds.
During Monday's red-carpet event, which brought Tarantino and many of his cast members to the New Beverly to mark the movie's home release, Tarantino told Wired.com that the touchstones to those classic and gritty movies of yore are peppered throughout Basterds. (See video clips from the premiere party and from the Blu-ray and DVD releases on the Inglourious Basterds YouTube channel.)
"Obviously, the movie is primarily modeled on tough-guy World War II mission movies like The Dirty Dozen or Guns of Navarone," Tarantino said. "But anyone who knows my movies knows I love to include references to different genres. You can always pick them out of there."
Inglorious Basterds stars Brad Pitt as Lieutenant Aldo Raine (an obvious reference to roughneck star Aldo Ray of We're No Angels and The Green Berets). Raine leads a team of vengeful Jewish GIs out to torment Hitler by collecting hundreds of Nazi scalps.
Mixing gory violence and ironic humor, the film was widely received as a strong comeback for Tarantino after the struggles of his previous Grindhouse effort, Deathproof.
"At its heart, (Basterds) is a spaghetti Western, but with World War II trappings," Tarantino said. "It's deliberately told in the style of a Sergio Leone movie (A Fistful of Dollars, Once Upon a Time in the West), but it needed to distinguish itself from those films against the background of a World War II story."
Among other filmmakers Tarantino tapped into to help shape his vision for Basterds, the director listed foreign influences.
"Leone's movies were a jumping-off point, but I think there are touches of Georg Wilhelm Pabst, some Ernst Lubitsch – amongst others."
When asked how all those elements managed to blend together to make a film now nominated for a Best Drama Golden Globe, Tarantino said: "All I know is it's like Elvis. Three million Quentin Tarantino fans can't be wrong."
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