Quentin Tarantino says his critically acclaimed film Inglourious Basterds was almost a miniseries. Tarantino's alternate-history movie was a box-office smash, grossing over $321 million worldwide to become the beloved filmmaker's then-highest-grossing release. The film received near-universal praise and would go on to earn eight Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay. Despite the movie's eventual success, however, the director had a few reservations before making it.
Tarantino first wrote Inglourious Basterds in 1998 after completing Jackie Brown, but was having trouble formulating an ending for it. He ended up shelving the script and turn his attention to working on both Kill Bill Vol. 1 and Kill Bill Vol. 2 instead. After those films, the director would work on and complete 2007's Death Proof, which would ultimately bomb at the box office, despite receiving praise from critics for its stunt sequences and tribute to exploitation cinema. Still, the film's poor financial performance led Tarantino to doubt his future in filmmaking, which prompted him to revisit Inglourious Basterds from a different angle than what was ultimately released.
Sitting down with fellow filmmaker Robert Rodriguez on his Director's Chair series for El Rey Network, Tarantino reveals he almost turned Inglourious Basterds into a miniseries. The director explains that, at the time, the project was too "big and unwieldy" for a feature-length movie. So much so, in fact, that a miniseries was at one point what he "was planning on doing." Check out Tarantino's quote below:
After Jackie Brown, I put Kill Bill off to the side, and I started writing Inglourious Basterds, and that became this never-ending process, because people thought I was going through writer's block, you know, I was going through the opposite. I couldn't stop writing. I'd have a 100-page script and no end in sight. So I was trying to keep taming it, and I couldn't. [...] My idea at the time, because it was just so big and so unwieldy, was to do it as a miniseries, and that really was what I was planning on doing.
Elsewhere in the interview, however, Tarantino recalls one particular dinner with The Fifth Element filmmaker Luc Besson that ended up changing his mind. During the dinner, Tarantino told Besson about his "big miniseries" called Inglourious Basterds, and the French director responded with "Eh, I don't know." Besson explained that Tarantino is one of the few filmmakers that made him want to leave his house, whereas for most others people could just "watch the DVD" or "see it on TV." Tarantino then recounts that he "couldn't unhear" Besson's response and it ultimately led him to take another stab at making Inglourious Basterds a feature film.
While Tarantino is best known for his features, he did recently turn an extended version one of his movies, The Hateful Eight, into a four-part miniseries for Netflix. Despite his original plan for Inglourious Basterds, he's unlikely to give that project the same treatment after-the-fact, as not everything he once had on the page became filmed material. Still, fans of Inglourious Basterds are surely thankful to Besson for his pep talk, as one of Tarantino's most acclaimed works wouldn't exist if he hadn't spoken up.
Source: El Rey Network