Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds was almost not a film. Due to the epic scale of the story and the amount of time the film covers throughout its narrative, Tarintino was considering making the film a miniseries. Like all things that end up on a production’s cutting room floor, this could have had some interesting ideas for the film.
Tarantino was set to make the story into a mini-series, but advice from a fellow director and friend caused the director to rethink how he wanted to present the alternate history narrative to the audience.
Inglourious Bastards has a storied development history
On numerous occasions, Tarantino has called Inglourious Basterds his masterpiece. The director started writing the film before he started production Kill Bill, and continued it for over a decade. Among the many iterations that the film went through, there was a time in the development process of the story when Tarantino conceived of the entire project as a mini-series.
The film takes its title from Enzo G. Casterllari’s The Inglourious Bastards, a 1978 war film. Tarantino deliberately misspelled the latter half of his title to add a little more personality to the film. Tarantino had to develop the script more intensely after a point because a lot of directors around him had begun to do World War 2 epics. It was Luc Besson who got Tarantino to come off the mini-series horse to develop the project as a film.
Luc Besson preferred theatres to DVDs when it came to Quentin Tarantino
Tarantino still holds the distinction of being one of the most visionary directors of our time, often spoken about in the same sentence as Martin Scorsese and Christopher Nolan. Therefore, it is no surprise that Tarantino’s fellow director and friend Luc Besson had some things to say to the Pulp Fiction director when he heard that he was working on a miniseries. Tarantino, with regards to what Benson told him, said:
“I am telling him about my big mini-series, Inglorious Basterds, that I am going to do. And Luc’s like “You one of the few filmmakers left out there who can make me want to leave my house and go to the cinema. Anybody else, I, like, watch the DVD. I can see it on TV. It’s fine. I’m good. You want to make me leave the house and go see cinema. “”
Upon hearing this, along with the fact that the time it would take to produce the miniseries might cause Besson to lose interest in the project, Tarantino decided to give the entire project one last shot, to make it work as a film. This last effort is what ended up being Inglourious Basterds as we know it.
