Brad Pitt, Tarantino and a Bong Full of Hash: The Untold Origin Story of ‘Inglourious Basterds’

“Man, some scripts you remember reading for the first time, and, boy, do I remember reading this one, because it involved taking a piss!” recalled a laughing Brad Pitt. “What happened was, I was reading it for the first time, and at one point I looked down and I’m taking care of the bodily functions. I’m taking a piss, but I couldn’t stop reading, so I had the script in one hand and with my other hand I’m holding my member taking a whiz, and I suddenly think, ‘Oh man, I’m really into this one!’

“I loved that it read like a novel — you know, in the sense that there were these five distinct chapters. Quentin would go into detail like only he can, and then he would jump to another chapter while the other chapter is breathing, and then another big jump into another chapter. I was just intrigued that he made that work. Us Americans love a revenge story as well, so that appealed too!

“Well, I finally finished my reading, and I put it down and went, ‘Holy fuck, can you do that? Can you kill Hitler? Well, I guess you can, I enjoyed it, so . . . and it is his movie, so,well, I guess you can. I guess, right?’”

Hearing that Pitt loved his script was music to Quentin’s ears. It confirmed what he already knew: He wanted Pitt for Raine.

“We had met in the past—didn’t know each other too well but always got along,” Quentin recalled. “We let it be known that we wanted to work together for a while.”

“That’s right,” agreed Pitt. “We had crossed paths as far back as Reservoir Dogs, in a way. Harvey [Keitel], a hero of mine, was always a great supporter, very graciously invited me to read for Reservoir Dogs, but I was already on the Redford project A River Runs Through It, another hero of mine.

“I was in discussions for a minute for Natural Born Killers. I was in discussions with Tony [Scott] as to how to show up in True Romance and settled on Floyd, and Quentin and I met at the premiere of that. We had a lot in common. We were pretty much raised on the same television shows. We’d talk about Fantastic Voyage and The War of the Gargantuas, going to the drive-in theater, and Clint Eastwood. We were weaned on the same kinda movie magic.”

“But,” Quentin said, “the thing is, Brad’s agent, Bryan Lourd, was like, ‘I’m not letting you two guys near each other until you have something, Quentin, because you will get together and screw up concrete plans we have. So, only when you have something, Quentin. Until then, nada!’ So now I have Inglourious Basterds, and Bryan can tell that I’m ready, but I’m also ready for the bad news, you know, that he is booked up with movies back-to-back. But, as I said, there was good news. Brad likes to keep things loose, see who the hot ticket is, and what he fancies working on. Well, lo and behold, he was free. Like, free now!”

“Look, I’m not busy when Quentin calls,” Pitt said with a laugh. “Now, this one came with a big buildup—that he had been writing it for like eight years! It was going to be his World War II Spaghetti Western. I got word that he was finishing up, and it was going to come my way that summer.”

Quentin’s luck was holding: Not only was Pitt’s slate clear, but Quentin was also told that his Aldo was currently in the South of France. From Berlin, it is but a hop, skip, and a jump. The script was sent over, and Quentin made travel plans. “So, I fly down to meet him.” “Yeah, we’d just bought this place in France, and Quentin came down to spend some time,” recalled Pitt.

“Look,” followed up Quentin, “it is really important to say that we set up our deal for Inglourious Basterds without Brad. It was set up as a Quentin Tarantino movie. The deal was, ‘If you deliver a big star for Aldo Raine, we’ll give you $70 million to pay for the star. For $60 million, you can cast whoever you want.’

“So, it wasn’t as though, ‘Oh, I’ve got Brad.’ No, it was, ‘Deliver a star, and we’ll give you $10 million more, but for $60 million, you cast anybody you want. We are paying $60 million for a Quentin Tarantino movie.’ But I could not see past anybody else playing Aldo Raine other than Brad, which is why I wanted him in the movie, not for any other fucking reasons. He was right for Aldo, okay?

“Brad and I didn’t know each other that well back then, but as I said, we always got on well when we met. So, I’m flying into southern France hoping that a) he likes the screenplay, and b) he doesn’t have anything booked.”

Pitt welcomed Quentin with a bottle of wine in one hand and in his other hand one of the first copies of the screenplay.

“Hey, Quentin, what’s with the title?”

“It’s how you say it!” Quentin informed him. “Not ‘bastards’; you say it ‘basterds’ with an e because when you say it with relish, it sounds like it should have an e: ‘basterds.’ You dig, Brad? Raine has pulled together a ragtag crew—they’re not soldiers in fine fettle, and their new oath of allegiance is swearing vengeance against those who had vowed to ‘wipe them off the face of the earth.’ They’re inglourious!”

Brad bought into that. “I loved that he misspelled Inglourious Basterds and let it play.”

The pair got down to business to talk about the movie.

Pitt had questions.

“Ha! Absolutely, I did! One of my first questions for Quentin was, ‘Look, man, I like history and I’m in, so don’t worry about it, but I gotta ask about the ending—the whole history getting bastardized.’”

Quentin had all the answers. He knew each character’s backstory and the story he had created. He explained to Pitt how the inspiration had come to him and how he had slept on the idea, and how in the morning, killing Hitler had felt like a cool idea. History was a roadblock that he could navigate. Inglourious Basterds was crammed full of his characters, and his characters were going to change the outcome of the war.

“It gets to the heart of who Quentin is. The Quentin I know is hilarious and verbose and great to have conversations with, amazing energy,” said Pitt. “It’s almost like spring break with him, and you need a week to recover—the guy has got so much energy. But also there is a tenderness and sweetness to him. But fuck, he is just so original in his writing. Something like killing Hitler, you know, we accept this today, but it was actually really heretical back then, especially such a sensitive subject. Only Quentin would have thought it up and could have pulled it off.”

Pitt expressed his love for the opening scene. “We’ve gotta talk about that opening scene—it’s incredible. It’s so well-written and fraught with tension.”

This thrilled Quentin, who explained that he knew he had to find the right actor to play the Nazi detective and how the film hinged on finding the right actor to play Landa to face off against Pitt’s Raine.

Quentin also explained that he was thinking of international audiences, and he was going to let the languages fly. If they were supposed to be speaking in their native tongue, then the audience would hear it in their native tongue.

“Fuck me—right on, as it should be!” Pitt cheered.

“I loved hearing that. Everything up until that time was being looped, dubbed, or subtitled. We were told that you had to dub it for an American audience, for a German audience, for an Italian audience. You know, the thinking from studios was that audiences don’t follow subtitles—they don’t wanna know. Quentin was gonna let it play, and that was also heretical at that time. You just didn’t do it, you know? It just wasn’t done.

“But now you certainly see it on our streamers, because at the beginning, they’d dub everything, and that was really hurting performances—it was awful. But Quentin let it play and gave the movie credence and credibility, and I don’t think Quentin gets points for that, but I felt it was revolutionary.

“If you remember, the year before was Valkyrie, with Tom Cruise, which was a finely crafted movie, but he starts his voiceover in German and then blends into English, and it was just another way at that time of trying to get to English for an audience. Now, what Quentin wrote in that first scene is Hans Landa asks if he can switch to English because he has exhausted his French, which, of course, is bullshit because his French is flawless and beautiful. Now, this looks like a conceit to go to English for the audience, but then that clever motherfucker Quentin Tarantino uses it because Hans Landa knows the family, who are under the floorboards, cannot understand English. It’s just so fucking clever that the character uses it as a tool to seek the information he needs.”

Another bottle of wine was uncorked. Talk got around to their favorite movies and anything in between. As dusk settled, out came an extra friend.

“Yeah, out came this enormous block of hash,” revealed Pitt.

“That’s right. He had a big brick of hash. He whipped out a knife, like Jesse James, and cut me off a big sliver. I thought, ‘Oh, God, this should be in a movie,’” Quentin said.

Talk carried on into the wee hours of the morning. Quentin never made it to his bed—he flew straight back to Berlin. His host woke to the sight of five empty wine bottles and some form of smoking apparatus, which looked mysteriously like a homemade bong.

“That was Brad. He did the fabrication. He can take a Coke can and make it functional,” snitched Quentin.

“I don’t know what that was about,” countered Pitt. “But I did notice the big block of hash had teeth marks in it, as though somebody had taken a big ol’ apple bite outta it.” Pitt’s head was pounding. Struck with a hangover from the wine-and-hash cocktail, he realized that he had agreed to star as the lead in Inglourious Basterds. There was also a voice in his head, and it was the voice of Aldo Raine.

“I really remember that the voice in the film is the voice I heard from the first read. It has never happened to me before, and it came from the first speech, when he’s platooning up the Basterds. I could hear it, I knew the voice, I knew the area, and I knew the vicinity. There is a musicality to the way Quentin writes, and there was one line that I kept hearing: ‘They’re the foot soldiers of a Jew-hatin’, mass-murderin’ maniac, and they need to be dee-stroyed.’ I was off running from there. As I said, I’ve never had that experience before where I heard it from first read, like it was in his writing.

“I think that is why he thought of me, because I had that country vein in me. I’m from the Ozarks, man.”

With Pitt’s name above the title, the budget for Inglourious Basterds had just risen to $70 million.

Excerpt provided by Insight Editions, from Jay Glennie’s The Making of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, © 2026