Inglourious Basterds is a 2009 black comedy 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, Mélanie Laurent and Mike Myers. 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.
