Sorry Mr Blonde, The Bride, Django, Jackie Brown, Jules & Vincent and, eh, whatever Samuel L Jackson’s name was in The Hateful Eight. Quentin Tarantino doesn’t think you’re worth shit.
Tarantino was recently given a lifetime achievement award at the Jerusalem Film Festival, where he spoke about which of the characters he has created he thinks is the best — and he picked Hans Landa, the devious yet perversely charming Nazi officer from Inglourious Basterds played by Christoph Waltz
Landa is the best character I’ve written and maybe the best I ever will write. I didn’t realize [when I was first writing him] that he was a linguistic genius. He’s probably one of the only Nazis in history who could speak perfect Yiddish.
Christoph Waltz was just an unknown Austrian TV actor when Tarantino picked him out of nowhere to star in his World War II film, after Leonardo DiCaprio turned down the role. The gamble paid off, and Waltz ended up winning a Best Supporting Actor Oscar. Tarantino continued:
I was getting worried. Unless I found the perfect Landa, I was going to pull the movie. I gave myself one more week and then I was going to pull the plug. Then Christoph Waltz came in and it was obvious that he was the guy; he could do everything. He was amazing, he gave us our movie back.
Landa is a pretty sick character — the way Tarantino depicts him as not just as two dimensional bad guy but instead a rounded, multi-faceted (yet no less evil) character is phenomenal. Yet if we’re picking QT’s GOAT characters, we’d also give props to Steve Buscemi’s weasily Mr Pink in Reservoir Dogs and Sam Jackson’s complex house slave Stephen in Django Unchained.
[via EW]
