Tarantino Talks 'Inglorious Bastards' and His Slave-Ghost Story That Didn't Make 'Grindhouse' Cut

by Ryan Stewart Feb 2nd 2008 // 12:32PM

Filed under: Critical Thought, Celebrities and Controversy, Fandom, Quentin Tarantino

In a new, in-depth interview with British magazine Sight & Sound, Quentin Tarantino, who I had the pleasure of meeting at this year's Sundance, goes into all his upcoming and most of his past projects, and gives a detailed update on exactly where he is with his next feature, a war movie called Inglorious Bastards. "I've got tons of material and a lot of stuff written but now I've figured out what to do, I gotta start from page one, square one," Tarantino says, seemingly putting to rest any notion that this thing will be going before the cameras in the next year or so. "I started just before I came on this trip and brought the stuff with me but I haven't had a chance to continue yet. But maybe on the flight back home I'll come back into it. I love writing in other countries." No further details about the plot or potential casting is given, just that quasi-confirmation that the film is in his cross-hairs at the moment.

Tarantino also talks at length about Grindhouse, admitting to being depressed and disappointed over how the film was received at the box office, but defending his longer, original cut of Death Proof as the definitive one and arguing that it stands on its own quite well. Tarantino also talks about the process of getting involved with the double feature in the first place, and reveals that he first wanted his contribution to be a Candyman-style horror film about the ghost of a slave that terrifies a group of white girls. "The first idea was a bunch of young college history students that were going through a tour of the plantations of the old South. And there's a ghost of an old slave that is part of negro folklore. Jody the Grinder actually went down and bested the devil, by f**king him. And so the devil put him on earth for all eternity to f**k white women."

So why didn't this idea make the cut? "I would probably have had Sam Jackson playing that part," Tarantino continues," and it was really good, but then I didn't have anywhere to go with it, because if you have a story about a killer slave with supermacho powers done in the style of a slasher film, then even if he's doing it today, and even if the white girls are innocent, how can you not be on the slave's side?" Tarantino goes into many other areas in the interview, talking about his writing process, the books he's reading, the British movies he'd like to make one day, and even his plans for eventual retirement.

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