Tarantino Has An African-American Soldiers-Centered ‘Inglourious Basterds’ Prequel Half-Ready?

Director Also Says ‘Basterds’ Will Get An Oscar Original Screenplay Nod

Love him or hate him, one things certain, interviews with Quentin Tarantino tend to never have a dull moment.

First off, dude has a prequel for his 2 hour and 45 minute WWII saga “Inglourious Basterds” potentially waiting in the wings? According to an interview in the New York Times, he sure does.

“I have a half-written prequel ready to go if this movie’s a smash,” Tarantino said, the Times noting it’s an shelved, ‘Basterds’ subplot, that he cut about African-American soldiers stuck behind enemy lines (what would Spike Lee say about this? Hello, “Miracle At St. Anna“).

That’s all he says about it. A joke? Doubtful. Tarantino’s spoke in earnest about sequels and prequels to many of his films including “The Vega Brothers (actually titled “Double V Vega”) which proposed a prequel for Michael Madsen and John Travolta’s characters from “Reservoir Dogs” and “Pulp Fiction” respectively (he eventually abandoned the idea when the actors got too old) and a potential, “Kill Bill 3 & 4,” films which he brought up again a few months ago as a potential follow-up to ‘Basterds.’

In the interview, Tarantino says unlike the Jewish soldiers who reenact vengeance on the Germans in ‘Basterds,’ growing up in Tennessee, his own childhood revenge fantasies centered around payback on the Ku Klux Klan. “But it’s all the same,” he said of the similar fantasies. “Once the Basterds get through with Europe, they could go to the South and do it to the Kluxers in the ’50s. That’s another story you could tell,” he said.

That give us pause for a second. In a 2007 interview with the U.K. press right around the time “Deathproof” flopped in the U.S., Tarantino said he had an idea for a film after ‘Basterds’: a form of spaghetti western set in America’s Deep South which he calls “a southern.”

“I want to explore something that really hasn’t been done,” he said at the time. “I want to do movies that deal with America’s horrible past with slavery and stuff but do them like spaghetti westerns, not like big issue movies. I want to do them like they’re genre films, but they deal with everything that America has never dealt with because it’s ashamed of it, and other countries don’t really deal with because they don’t feel they have the right to.”

Since ‘Basterds’ has a Spaghetti Western feel in certain parts (at least on the page), could his ‘Inglourious’ prequel idea possibly have at least strains of this “America’s horrible past” or possibly was born out of idea he discussed in 2007? After all, he just told the Times that his ideas are constantly changing from inception to completion. “You get a good idea, and it just moves forward and then usually by the time you’re finished, it doesn’t resemble anything of what might have been the inspiration. It’s simply the spark that starts the fire,” he said.

In slightly different, but no characteristically different news, Tarantino cocksurely told the Gray Lady that ‘Basterds’ will earn itself a screenplay nomination at next year’s Academy Awards. “It will be in the original category at the Oscars,” he said assuredly. Notice he didn’t say, might or could. Heh, his brio is always amusing.

“Inglourious Basterds” has its world premiere on May 20 at the Cannes Film Festival in France.