A Waltz On The Wild Side

Tarantino’s most diabolical creation, or at least his alter ego, Christoph Waltz, fixes my gaze.

“Have you ever held a calabash?” asks the star of Inglourious Basterds.
Erm. No, sir.
“Oh, you must,” he gushes. “Such a wonderful object. It’s beautiful. The shank is a lovely, smooth, natural thing. In Inglourious Basterds there were times when I just stood aside and allowed the calabash to do the work.”
We are thrilled to report that both thespian and calabash acquit themselves with aplomb. That is just as well, really. For Tarantino Hounds, Inglourious Basterds is not merely the seventh movie by their favourite auteur, but the alpha and the omega. Indeed, wherever avatars named Zed234 and RedAppleSmoker are found to roam, the film’s epic gestation is already recorded in ballad and legend.
What began as a vague post-Pulp Fiction inkling, a desire to rework and revisit the red-blooded milieu of Robert Aldrich’s combat films, has long since spiralled into a vast adjunct to the Tarantino universe. For more than a decade there have been drafts and re-writes and near misses.
In 2004, an earlier variation, a picture Mr. Tarantino called his “Dirty Dozen or Where Eagles Dare or Guns of Navarone” was set to go into production with Michael Madsen in the lead role. But there was a snag. The writer-director couldn’t come up with a satisfactory ending and, instead, turned his attentions to the Kill Bill sequence.
By 2008, the final screenplay for Inglourious Basterds, by Tarantino’s account the best work he had ever done, had taken on the characteristics of a WW2-based spaghetti western. Again, there were complications. Tarantino, understandably precious about a work he considered his “ultimate masterpiece”, could not find an actor up to the task of playing Hans Landa, the film’s Jew hunting Nazi villain.
The director had already alerted his long time producer Lawrence Bender that production would have to be delayed when Christoph Waltz, a little-known Austrian-born actor, turned up for an audition. Waltz had read two sentences when Tarantino turned to Bender with the announcement, “We’re making the movie.”
It takes Waltz approximately one second of screen time for the viewer to understand Tarantino’s excited reaction. With Landa, the pair have co-created an iconic and perversely charming movie fiend. Inglourious Basterds may occupy an epic expanse – it is a film populated by Hitler, Goebels, Churchill and a renegade Jewish-American unit scalping Germans behind enemy lines – yet it is Waltz who towers over the picture, a fact acknowledged by the jury at Cannes; he was named Best Actor at that festival earlier this year.
“Until the jury has finished their session you know nothing,” Mr. Waltz tells me. “There are no campaigns, no nominations. That suits me. I find that side of the business very dubious. What exactly is a Best Actor? And who is the second best? And who is the worst? But Cannes doesn’t do it that way. They simply give a prize for innovation. That’s a lovely and cultured way of doing things. Of course, I’m still baffled that I won. Completely baffled.”
It’s the day of the London premiere – there’s nothing to quite match the messianic vibes around a Tarantino premiere - when I catch up with Waltz, who, it transpires, is a endearingly eccentric interviewee despite his unnerving onscreen presence. Before we sit down, I can hear Tarantino talking across the hall about Waltz and Kate Winslet; the filmmaker hasn’t worked with the latter but he believes they represent the very best in the business.
Mr. Waltz, in turn, is equally effusive about the director: “Quentin Tarantino is the actor’s director, the actor’s author,” says Waltz. “He writes great parts. These parts are very specific, very personal, very precise, very individual. Precision is what makes him great. That is pure bliss for me. To have someone that precise, that meticulous about details. Because I’m a little bit like that myself. A lot, really. Maybe exactly like that.”
Fans of the director’s milieu may enjoy playing spot the reference in a film that nods before everything from The Blue Angel to Enzo Castellari’s similarly titled 1978 war flick, Inglorious Bastards, but Waltz was keen to avoid potential contaminants. Besides, he says, a Tarantino film is far more than the mere sum of its parts.
“The process of making a Tarantino film does not finish with the actor or the wrap party,” says Waltz. “It continues with the viewer. That is the definition of a great piece of art. What he writes is bigger than any one actor. There is so much more to this part than my capacity. I do what I can. I occupy my mind. That’s what makes it so different from perhaps all other parts that I’ve been offered. There is no bottom to it.”
Born into a notably artistic Viennese family - they knew the Freuds, of course – Waltz is a fourth generation theatre actor. It shows. He takes his craft seriously, talks about his process, about translating from the page: “I’m not a method man or a research person,” he says. “It doesn’t do to attach too much mystique to these things. What would I do for this part? Watch every war movie? Or go out and hunt Jews?”
Unsurprisingly, Mr. Waltz, who has been based in London for almost two decades, has received plenty of offers to play Nazi roles before. Herr Landa is the first time he has said ‘yes’: “I’ve always turned them down,” he says. “Not because they were Nazis but because they were shitty, stereotypical parts and I don’t want to do shitty, stereotypical parts.”
He has, consequently, resisted all efforts to cast him as the guy who dies in the final reel of the latest installment of Die Hard in favour of European productions, including Thaddeus O’ Sullivan’s Ordinary Decent Criminal.
 “I was getting ready to move to Ireland when I was younger,” he tells me. “It was the story telling. I love that it’s an entire nation of storytellers. Maybe it’s a stereotypical view or a cliché but a small country does not end up with nine Nobel Prize winners in literature for no reason. Modern literature was invented in Dublin. It’s a fantastic place.”
For now, despite the hype around him, Mr. Waltz intends to keep with his European oeuvre: “I have decades of this behind me,” he says. “So I know that not everything is worth doing just because of the glitz. I’ve always been more concerned with how I make money, not just the money itself. That said, I enjoy the red carpet. Greatly. Ten flashlights are annoying but 500 flashlights is the greatest feeling in the world.”