This MTV interview with Eli Roth is pretty interesting. Both for those that know nothing about Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds” and for those that know every inch of the script (like us).
For those uninitiated with his character, Roth explains him in full (if you totally want to go in blind on this film, you should probably turn away now): “[Sgt.] Donnie Donowitz is a guy from Boston, and he’s a huge Red Sox baseball fan — and his plan is to take a baseball bat and get all the Jews in the neighborhood to sign it, and then he’s going to beat every Nazi to death with it. Any Nazi he can find he’s going to beat to death with the bat.”
And that’s basically the gist of his character. There’s truthfully not a whole lot more depth to him. There are also a lot more plot details that Roth gives away, so again you might not want to read the entire MTV article if you haven’t already read the script.
What is interesting for us is that Roth reveals that he was the one that offered Tarantino his directorial services for second unit “pickup shots” or whatever the director didn’t have time to shoot because he was racing to have the film ready for Cannes (where it was announced in competition today). With that offer in mind, the filmmaker thought about “Nation’s Pride,” the Nazi propaganda film within-the-film, and asked Roth to direct that. “I told Quentin, ‘I’m going to be in Berlin for six months and you’re trying to get this thing ready for Cannes, if you need anything shot let me know. I’m there, you have another director. I’ll pick up inserts, do a shot of a glass, I’m happy to do it. Uncredited and I’ll do it for free.’ “
Roth might be a bit of a choad, but the irony of being a Jewish person shooting a Nazi-sanctioned film thankfully wasn’t lost on him. “It was strange. I thought ‘god, I didn’t think I could be more offensive after ‘Hostel 2”… and there I was going, ‘More Swastikas! More Swastikas!” ” ‘Basterds’ is due in U.S. theaters on August 21, but will have its world premiere at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival.
