Quentin Tarantino 2009 Iconic Movie Almost Killed Its Cast in Most Epic Scene
The director probably took the fictional drama way too seriously.
Having launched his career in the early 1990s, Quentin Tarantino has always been a master of action-packed and often pretty violent drama, no matter what is actually happening in a movie. The director’s obsession with gut-wrenching sequences reached a whole new level when his sixth thrilling masterpiece titled Inglourious Basterds was released back in 2009.
The movie that was quick to get a cult status came as yet another example of Tarantino’s unhinged directing style with an even harsher storyline that follows Jewish US soldiers’ ambitious plan to annihilate Nazi leaders. However, in this case the proclaimed director’s hunt for a realistic-looking picture almost led to a real-life tragedy on set.
In one of his interviews from several years ago, one of Inglourious Basterds’ leading actors, Eli Roth, revealed that filming that epic scene which wrapped the whole movie up was actually likely to become the last moment not only for those characters who were supposed to die in there, but also for some members of the cast.
The sequence finds a bunch of Nazis locked up in a Parisian theater by its owner, the Jewish woman Shosanna Dreyfus, portrayed by Mélanie Laurent, who previously had a miraculous escape from Nazis’ hands which would eventually brutally kill her like millions of Jews before. In the scene, Shosanna sets the theater on fire, leaving all the propagandists inside with no chance to survive, and eventually dies as well.
Talking about the filming process of the most shocking sequence in the movie, Eli Roth revealed that everything in there was so real-life-coded that at some point the fire could have reached the actors who had to quickly wrap the scene up and run away.
As the actor explained, “they said if we were in there another 15 seconds, the stage we were on would have collapsed and we all would have been killed.” According to Roth, the stage was made of and decorated with easily flammable items like flags, so the fire burning it all down was a matter of several seconds, but the actor, accompanied by co-star Omar Doom, still managed to get out safe and sound.
Fair to say, it may have indeed added a bigger portion of realism to Tarantino’s flick, even given pretty serious dangers on set.
Source: HuffPost