Quentin Tarantino considers his Hans Landa from ‘Inglourious Basterds’ (Inglourious Basterds, 2009) the funniest character he has ever written and, speaking on Brian Koppelman’s ‘The Movement’ podcast this week, he discussed in detail the casting process for the character and what happened once found its Landa in Christoph Waltz. The actor was so amazing in the role that Tarantino decided to alter the way he groomed his actors during pre-production.
“They must not know who Landa is”
Many of the actors in the cast had no idea who Waltz was and Tarantino wanted to surprise them during filming:
“I met with Christoph before we got to the big script reading with the cast and said: I’m not doing this to make a wicked game … everyone is so curious who plays Hans Landa … No I want you to be bad at reading the script, but I want you to hold back a lot. I don’t want them to think they are getting a glimpse of who you really are going to be. On a scale of one to 10, make it six. Be good enough, just good enough I don’t want him to compete with anyone, and if he’s competing, lose. I don’t want them to know what you have or control Landa. “
Waltz agreed to Tarantino’s request, but the director didn’t stop there.
“Along the same lines, with the exception of the French farmer, I don’t want you to rehearse with the other actors before filming. I don’t want Diane Kruger or Brad Pitt to know their gun skills until the cameras are shooting. “
Waltz agreed, but still wanted to rehearse his dialogue before principal photography and asked Tarantino if he would help him. Tarantino agreed, and the two rehearsed the script together before filming. The only actor with whom Tarantino allowed Waltz to rehearse before his time was Denis Ménochet, who starred in the opening scene like French farmer Perrier LaPadite. The opening is an intense two-handed duel between Waltz and Ménochet, and Tarantino knew that rehearsals between the two characters would be essential to achieve maximum effect on the scene.
For his role as Hans Landa, Waltz won the Best Actor Award at Cannes and the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. Tarantino told Empire magazine last summer that Hans Landa presented a unique set of writing challenges:
“The moment he walks into a scene, he masters it. All the things he was supposed to be good at, he was sublime. I found that I had a really interesting situation with him that has been difficult to have with any other character. It was the fact that he was not just a bad guy, not just a Nazi, but a Nazi known as the Jew Hunter, who is finding Jews and sending them to the concentration camp, so when he shows up towards the end of the movie, a little by finding out what the Bastards are doing, the public wants me to do it (…) you don’t want me to let you down “.