Tarantino Inglourious Basterds Firings: Laurent and Huppert Axed
Quentin Tarantino says he fired Mélanie Laurent after a poor table read and dropped Isabelle Huppert for missing it, before filming began on Inglourious Basterds. The claims appear in Jay Glennie's new book on the 2009 war film.
Quentin Tarantino fired Mélanie Laurent and Isabelle Huppert before production began on his 2009 war film Inglourious Basterds, according to a new book on the movie. The director axed two actors over the cast table read, he says in Jay Glennie's "The Making of Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds."
Laurent got her job back. Huppert did not.
The table read that went wrong
Tarantino told Glennie the table read, where the full cast reads the script aloud, is the most exciting day of preproduction for him. "That is the closest I get to seeing the movie for the first time," he said.
Laurent's reading did not impress him. "Mélanie Laurent's table read was terrible," Tarantino said. "Well, Mélanie was terrible, so I fired her."
How Laurent won the role back
Laurent called him days later and asked for another chance. She told Tarantino she had not been feeling well, and offered to fly herself back to Germany and pay for a hotel to read again.
Tarantino admired her passion. He agreed to "turn the clock back" and "return to square one," on the condition that she complete three days of rehearsal with him.
Whatever happened in those days worked. Laurent played Shosanna Dreyfus, a French cinema owner who seeks revenge on the Nazi officer who killed her family.
"Let me just go on the record for everybody to know: I love Mélanie," Tarantino said. "Mélanie is my Shosanna. She did a wonderful job."
Huppert replaced by Maggie Cheung
Huppert's exit had a different cause. Tarantino said she did not show up to the table read, and that her contract negotiations had been stalling.
"I mean, I love Isabelle Huppert," he said, but he fired her anyway. The part of Madame Ada Mimieux, a woman who shelters Shosanna in Paris, went to Maggie Cheung.
Tarantino defended the decision as standard practice. "You can be fired, especially if I get excited by what somebody else did in your absence," he said.
Cheung's work did not survive the edit. Tarantino cut every scene featuring Madame Ada Mimieux because he felt they over-explained things to the audience.
"Maggie was fantastic in the movie, but you just didn't need to know how Shosanna acquired the cinema," he said. A title card reading "Four Years Later" and a line about inheriting the cinema from her aunt replaced the Paris storyline.
