Inglourious Basterds
2009 film directed by Quentin Tarantino
Inglourious Basterds is a 2009 war film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. It stars an ensemble cast including Brad Pitt, Christoph Waltz, Michael Fassbender, Eli Roth, Diane Kruger, Daniel Brühl, Til Schweiger, and Mélanie Laurent. The film tells an alternate history story of two converging plots to assassinate Nazi Germany's leadership at a Paris cinema—one through a British operation largely carried out by a team of Jewish American soldiers led by First Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Pitt), and another by French Jewish cinema proprietor Shosanna Dreyfus (Laurent) who seeks to avenge her murdered family. Both are pitted against Hans Landa (Waltz), an SS colonel with a fearsome reputation.
The title (but not the story) was inspired by Italian director Enzo G. Castellari's 1978 Euro War film The Inglorious Bastards, but deliberately misspelled as "a Basquiat-esque touch". Tarantino wrote the script in 1998, but struggled with the ending and chose instead to direct the two-part film Kill Bill. After directing Death Proof in 2007, Tarantino returned to work on Inglourious Basterds. A co-production between the United States and Germany, the film began principal photography in October 2008 and was filmed in Germany and France with a $70 million production budget.
Inglourious Basterds premiered on May 20, 2009, at the 62nd Cannes Film Festival, and received a wide release in theaters in Germany on August 20, and in the United States on August 21. The Weinstein Company distributed the film in the United States, while Universal Pictures handled international distribution.
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Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q153723. VIAF identifies the subject as 214782036. The Library of Congress control number is n2010039175. 2 of 6 selected statements include explicit references; 3 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2009, 1978, 1998 and 2007.
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This entry incorporates text from “Inglourious Basterds” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.