Those who’ve read this blog for awhile will know that I ♥ me some Quentin Tarantino, but I have to wonder what the fuck he is thinking with this Inglorious Bastards film of his. QT just recently finished the script (that spells the film’s title as Inglourious Basterds) and looks towards an October production and a May 2009 Cannes premiere. In other words, fast as hell for a WWII film.

What really freaks me out is the massive outpouring of information on this project thus far. Quentin is notoriously tight-lipped about his projects — to the point of writing his scripts in longhand — but somehow, copies of the script have miraculously landed at Latino Review and NY Mag, which describes the project as, “Kill Bill meets The Dirty Dozen meets Cinema Paradiso,” followed by this kicker: “If anyone is crazy enough to fund it, this movie is gonna be awesome.” Even scarier, Harvey Weinstein has already agreed to produce, but the projected budget is so presumably large that a third-party, Lawrence Bender, will do the financing with room for more. As audiences and filmmakers alike learned from Grindhouse, an awesome movie doesn’t necessarily rake in box-office dollars. Rumour also has it that Brad Pitt (who doesn’t come cheap) has been offered the role of Lt. Aldo:

My name is Lt. Aldo Raine, and I’m putting together a special team. And I need me eight soldiers. Eight — Jewish — American — Soldiers. Now y’all might have heard rumors about the armada happening soon. Well, we’ll be leavin a little earlier. We’re gonna be dropped into France, dressed as civilians. And once we’re in enemy territory, as a bushwackin’ guerilla army, we’re gonna be doin one thing, and thing only, Killin Nazi’s. …. Now I don’t know about y’all. But I sure as hell, didn’t come down from the goddamn smoky mountains, cross five thousand miles of water, fight my way through half Sicily, and then jump out of a fuckin air-o-plane, to teach the Nazi’s lessons in humanity. Nazi ain’t got no humanity. There the foot soldiers of a Jew hatin, mass murderin manic, and they need to be destroyed. That’s why any and every son-of-a-bitch we find wearin a Nazi uniform, there gonna die. We will be cruel to the Germans, and through our cruelty, they will know who we are. They will find the evidence of our cruelty, in the disemboweled, dismembered, and disfigured bodies of their brothers we leave behind us. And the German will not be able to help themselves from imagining the cruelty their brothers endured at our hands, and our boot heals, and the edge of our knives. And the Germans, will be sickened by us. And the Germans, will talk about us. And the Germans, will fear us. And when the Germans close their eyes at night, and their subconscious tortures them for the evil they’ve done, it will be with thoughts of us, that it tortures them with. But I got a word of warning to all would be warriors. When you join my command, you take on debit. A debit you owe me, personally. Every man under my command, owes me, one hundred Nazi scalps. And I want my scalps. And all y’all will git me, one hundred Nazi scalps, taken from the heads of one hundred Nazi’s or you will die trying.

It’s over the top, sure, but it’s different than QT’s usual excessiveness, which is usually found in the nooks and crannies of a film and have nothing to do with the vastness of a project. Quentin used to make some damn good films on fairly low budgets… and Inglourious Basterds will be a massively expensive production. It just doesn’t feel right to me, but I hope that I’m wrong on this one.