The above photo, featuring the two most notorious of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, has been floating around online (in a much smaller resolution) for about a week now, but I like things, well, bigger. So, I just had to wait around for the print edition to hit newsstands, which just happened to occur within the April 24th issue of Entertainment Weekly. Among other delightful info (you gotta go buy it), the magazine has a chat with Quentin Tarantino himself. Here’s an excerpt:

EW You’ve worked with stars before, but never one on this scale…

QT Bruce Willis, he was doing me a favor. Robert De Niro was doing me a favor. Brad is the first time I’ve worked with a huge star at the height of his fame. And he’s not necessarily doing me a favor.

EW How close are you to being ready for Cannes?

QT Oh, we’re editing.

EW Which do you prefer, shooting or editing?

QT Editing. It goes back to the writing process. I’ve always considered the last draft of the script to be the first cut of the movie.

In addition, Eli “Killjoy” Roth has popped over to MTV and revealed some Basterds-oriented tidbits:

“This movie has the intensity of ‘Reservoir Dogs,’ the style of ‘Pulp Fiction,’ the violence of ‘Kill Bill,’ the adrenaline of ‘Death Proof’ and the characters of ‘Jackie Brown.’ It’s really the greatest of Quentin’s talents, all culminating in this film.”

. . . .

“There are a lot of scalpings,” Roth grinned wickedly. “He’s not going to skimp on the scalping, let me tell you. Quentin based what the Basterds do on what the Apache Indians did. They would do what’s known now as the Apache Resistance, where they would capture people and horribly mutilate them, scalp them, torture them, cut them up and leave one person alive. Then, [the survivor] would go back to the cavalry and describe what happened — and the psychological warfare got so strong that if the cavalry came across a bunch of Apache Indians, they would just take their guns and shoot themselves in the heads and shoot each other in the heads because of the horror of what had been described to them. … This is what the Jews are doing to the Nazis. We get these Nazis and we scalp them, and we beat them to death with a baseball bat.”

And to Roth, a Jewish filmmaker from Boston with a well-known taste for blood, there couldn’t have been a more welcoming environment to make his acting debut (after small cameos in various films over the years). “What’s funny is I expected [Tarantino] to cast a bunch of big dudes. I thought I’d be the smallest guy,” Roth marveled. “Instead, he basically cast my Hebrew school class.”

Damn, I can’t wait until August 21st, but them’s the breaks, eh? Go watch the rest of Roth’s interview over at MTV.