QUENTIN TARANTINO - TARANTINO AT CANNES HOW I WON THE WAR

TARANTINO AT CANNES HOW I WON THE WAR

At a time when the whole world is engaged in debate over the use of torture in wartime, Quentin Tarantino has brought his latest film, Inglourious Basterds to the Cannes Film Festival showing scenes in which U.S. soldiers mete out to German WWII officers and enlisted men such brutality that Abu Ghraib looks like a parental smack by comparison. The band of U.S. heroes in the movie club Germans to death for refusing to talk, carve swastikas in the foreheads of those who do, scalp the soldiers they kill, and conspire to assassinate German leaders in an incendiary attack that takes the lives of hundreds of civilians. The message appears to be that such unbridled brutality would have brought an early end to the war. "The way I look at it is this," Tarantino told a news conference at Cannes today (Wednesday), "my characters changed the outcome of the war. Now that didn't happen because my characters didn't exist." Asked why the title is spelled the way it is, "Tarantino replied, "I'm never going to explain that. You know, when you do an artistic flourish like that, to describe it, to explain it, is to take the p**s out of it and invalidate the whole stroke in the first place."

20/05/2009