Quentin Tarantino reveals why he fired one of his Inglourious Basterds stars and dropped another

Quentin Tarantino has revealed that he fired an actor from his movie Inglourious Basterds, and nearly dropped another.

The 2009 film follows a group of Jewish soldiers on an undercover mission to bring down Hitler and the Nazi government, and starred Brad Pitt, Christoph Waltz, Mélanie Laurent and Eli Roth.

According to the new book The Making of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds by Jay Glennie, Laurent – who played the French cinema owner Shosanna Dreyfus – almost lost her role, and French actor Isabelle Huppert was fired entirely.

The book is a deep exploration of Tarantino’s war epic, revealing several behind-the-scenes castings that never happened.

Tarantino, who is interviewed for the book, revealed that Huppert was cast as Madame Ada Mimieux, a woman who provides shelter to Shosanna in Paris, but lost out on the role because she missed the table read.

“She didn’t show up, so f*** it. I fired her,” Tarantino said, according to an excerpt published by People. “I mean, I love Isabelle Huppert — Heaven’s Gate and all that — but there were issues with her contract. It just kept stalling. And then not coming to the table read. Well, we cast Maggie Cheung instead.”

“That invariably happens. As far as I’m concerned, if you’re cast and you are not at that table, I don’t owe you jack s***! You can be fired, especially if I get excited by what somebody else did in your absence,” the director said.

Huppert’s role ultimately went to In The Mood For Love actor Maggie Cheung, but the sequence with the character was eventually cut from the movie.

“Maggie was fantastic in the movie, but you just didn’t need to know how Shosanna acquired the cinema. All we needed was a title card saying ‘Four Years Later’ and Shosanna explaining that she inherited it from her aunt,” Tarantino said of the final decision to cut her scenes.

The director also revealed that he briefly considered dropping Laurent as Shosanna because her table read was “terrible.”

“The most exciting day of preproduction is for me the table read,” he said. “That is the closest I get to seeing the movie for the first time. Up until then, it’s just been me reading all the scenes to myself or to a friend … so, a table read with the whole cast is so exciting and so important to me. Well, Mélanie was terrible, so I fired her.”

As Tarantino tells it, Laurent called him and asked for the role back, and explained that she wasn’t feeling well during the table read. He said she insisted that she would show up to set regardless of his decision.

The director was eventually convinced by Laurent to reconsider his decision, and “they would return to square one.”

Tarantino was ultimately happy with the decision, and Laurent went on to win acclaim for her role in the movie.

“Let me just go on the record for everybody to know: I love Mélanie,” the director said.

“The fact of the matter is, if we were not talking about the making of Inglourious Basterds, I would never think about the table read again for the simple reason Mélanie is my Shosanna,” he added.

“She did a wonderful job. But we have decided to dive deep into the making of the movie with this book, and this is an important part of its history. You know, we agreed, warts and all. So, if we had not agreed to talk about the shooting of the movie, it would be out of my mind, and I would never think about it again.”