Tarantino, Roth land in Toronto for Basterds’ premiere

The red hot carpet was rolled out at Scotiabank Theatre in Toronto Wednesday night for the Canadian premiere of Quentin Tarantino’s epic WWII flick Inglourious Basterds and the director himself, along with fellow Basterd Eli Roth, were on hand to talk about the much anticipated film.

Ostensibly called Tarantino’s love letter to cinema, the film follows the exploits of a rag-tag team of Jewish soldiers, led by a moustachioed Brad Pitt, who use rather intimidating means to send a clear message to the Third Reich: They’re in the Nazi-killing business, and business is a-booming. In typical Tarantino fashion, the tale of the Basterds is handily tied into a secondary storyline which finds a secretly Jewish cinema owner inadvertently caught up with a Nazi war hero. And how they come together will shock and delight you.

As Tarantino rewrites history in his own image, which he says “has its pleasures, to be sure” it’s the challenge of reinterpreting and redefining genres that kick starts his filmmaking process.

“I just like working in genres, that’s my thing,” he told Cineplex in that trademark manic tone. “When I come up with something, it’s literally like that’s the idea: ‘Let me do a war film, and then what sub-genre? Let me do a bunch of guys on a mission war movie. Then I come up with the characters and it grows from there. But just the initial thing, ‘Hey, I’d like to do a Western’ then that sets me down and then I start asking the questions.”

For Roth, better known as the director of the Hostel horror flicks than for his work in front of the camera, being in a WWII movie was a cathartic experience. And as the bat-slinging Basterd, who uses a serious swing to do away with Nazis, he drew on real-life family history to summon the required pain and rage.

“My grandparents got out of Austria and Russia and Poland but all of their relatives were killed in the Holocaust. So I thought about that…this is a very, very personal thing for me,” he said. “You just summon up the most painful experiences of your life. I put on 40 pounds of muscle so I looked like an animal…you had to have that crazy look in your eye.”

The Boston native also confesses that a rather surprising song really drove him to the edge of madness, which he used to great effect as the feral Sgt. Donny Donowitz.

“I put together a music mix that would remind me of really upsetting experiences and then my girlfriend, as a joke, put Hannah Montana on. And so I was listening, right before this scene: ‘Everybody makes mistakes, everybody has those days’ and I just got really upset,” he laughed. “I started thinking what if Brad Pitt catches me listening to Hannah Montana or what if Quentin saw? And then I just started going crazy and that became the song that took me to my psycho place.”

With a stellar cast, including European stars Christoph Waltz, Mélanie Laurent, Michael Fassbender and Daniel Brühl, alongside the likes of Diane Kruger, Pitt and even a cameo from Mike Myers, Tarantino has created an ambitious war film that maintains his stylistic flourishes while pushing himself even further.

“It’s like the ultimate Tarantino movie,” Roth enthused. “The tension of Reservoir Dogs, the style of Pulp Fiction, the characters of Jackie Brown, the action of Kill Bill, the adrenaline of Death Proof. It’s the culmination of everything Quentin Tarantino has ever done in his life but it’s a new level of Tarantino. It’s writing and directing that he has never achieved before.”

Tarantino, however, has more humble expectations when it comes to what audiences can expect from Basterds and he doesn’t even mind if you don’t like it - as long as it moved you.

“I think they can expect, hopefully, a very good time at the movies. And even if you don’t like it, you know you went to a movie that night, alright. It actually could even be more fun if you liked it and your partner didn’t and you go out and have a coffee and a piece of pie, or drink a Molson, and talk about it.”

Inglourious Basterds opens in Cineplex Theatres August 21.