Quentin Tarantino makes Cannes comeback
Hollywood’s most controversial director hopes to reignite his career through a return to the famous festival with Nazi epic starring Brad Pitt
Quentin Tarantino is to return to the film festival that made his name with a movie that is certain to be the most controversial of his career.
Next month, the brilliant and outrageous director will arrive in Cannes, where his 1994 film Pulp Fiction was such a hit, to relaunch a career that, by his high standards, has been in the doldrums.
The work he is taking to the world’s premier film festival is an ultra-violent take on the second world war and that most sacred of Hollywood movie subjects, the Holocaust.
The news that Tarantino was bringing his film, with the deliberately misspelt title Inglourious Basterds, set the movie world alight with speculation that Tarantino and his star, Brad Pitt, will dominate Cannes this year.
It is certainly a place where Tarantino has always felt at home. Pulp Fiction won the festival’s highest honour, the Palme d’Or, 15 years ago, catapulting the already controversial director of cult hit Reservoir Dogs to worldwide fame and acclaim. Since then he has served as president of the festival’s jury and also shown several other films there.
Pitt…, playing the leader of a group of Jewish American soldiers recruited to hunt down and kill Nazis in the most dramatic and brutal ways possible, inspiring panic in the Third Reich. In a trailer, Pitt’s character gives his squad a pre-mission pep talk: “We’re going to be doing one thing and one thing only: killing Nazis!” If the rest of the trailer – blood spattering on walls and violent shoot-outs – is anything to go by, Pitt’s men deliver.