Quentin Tarantino's latest film is already dividing critics and will surely divide audiences too. Inglourious Basterds looks like Brad Pitt in a World War II romp. Don't be surprised if you spend a lot of the time with two German characters played by actors you don't know.

"To me the film has three leads," Tarantino said. "It has Aldo, Shoshanna and Lando. Even the structure of the movie, the first three chapters are setting up these leads. Then, chapter four and five is okay, now the adventure begins. The other aspect though is you can say that everybody in this movie is an inglourious basterd. Doesn't just have to mean the one little group."

That said, the group of Jewish Nazi killers that Pitt leads are basically background players. "If you consider the Basterds the six other guys in the background, yeah, they become incidental to the actual mission themselves once the story gets going on."

The film also runs a typically Tarantino two and a half hours, with several scenes running over 20 minutes individually.

"I think that my movie is exactly the right length to tell my story and as far as it being entertaining is my opinion, all right. I could cut 20 minutes out of it and I could make the movie seem longer because it's disjointed, it doesn't have a rhythm, it's abrupt, you're not enveloped in it, all right? Then if you add those 20 minutes back, wow, that kinda flew by."

That actually did happen as Tarantino finalized his cut. "Actually the case in point of that was when I went to Cannes with the film, I wasn't really 100% finished. We hadn't done our last little thing that me and my editor Sally do is just watch it with an audience. So we watched it with an audience and for two days we just did a little nipping and tucking and pruning and boom, it was done. All right, it was a minute longer. It's a minute longer than the Cannes cut but it feels like 12 minutes shorter. I mean, it just has a rhythm that it didn't have I Cannes."

Inglourious Basterds opens Friday.



Story/Interview by Fred Topel

Starpulse contributing writer

(Starpulse in Hollywood): Every week, Hollywood's biggest stars are meeting in the hot spots and Starpulse is there.