Tarantino inspired by exiled directors
Quentin Tarantino has revealed that he was inspired by foreign filmmakers exiled to the US during World War II when making Inglourious Basterds.
The director told reporters at the press conference for the movie that while he initially thought about "guys on a mission" films like Where Eagles Dare and Dirty Dozen, his true inspiration came from the likes of Jean Renoir, Fritz Lang, Jules Dassin, Douglas Sirk, Leonide Moguy and Ernst Lubitsch.
Tarantino said: "What I found so inspirational when I was doing the movie was watching a lot of the movies made in the '40s that people disparagingly call American propaganda movies.
"I don't like that term, because I really like those movies. Most of them were really done by foreign directors who were living in Hollywood because they couldn't live in their home countries when the Nazis occupied them.
"These were movies made exactly at the time of World War II, when the Nazis weren't this theoretical evil boogieman from the past, but were actually a threat. This was actually going on on the planet Earth."
He added: "Not only that, many of these directors actually had personal experience with the Nazis. All of these directors had people they were concerned about back in their home countries. Yet these movies are entertaining, they can be thrilling, they're exciting. Many of them have quite a lot of humour in them.
"These are the movies that I got a tremendous amount of inspiration from. Not that I did anything stylistically that was like them - I didn't shoot them in black and white, I didn't try to recreate them. But those were the ones that I found myself very inspired by."
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