Los Angeles, Quentin Tarantino has revealed that he initially fired Melanie Laurent from ‘Inglourious Basterds’ as he was not impressed with her performance at the table read of the 2009 revisionist World War II drama.
“The most exciting day of preproduction is for me the table read. 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,” he recalled. “She didn’t show up, so….I fired her. 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.
“Let me just go on the record for everybody to know: I love Mélanie,” the filmmaker said, adding that he has erased the memory of the first table read from his mind because “Melanie is my Shosanna”. The “Pulp Fiction” director also recalled how Huppert, who was cast as Madame Ada Mimieux, did not make the cut in the film due to contractual issues. Well, we cast Maggie Cheung instead,” Tarantino said.
It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won Waltz the best actor award. He also won the best supporting actor Oscar for his role as Landa. Laurent as Shosanna Dreyfus, the only surviving member of a Jewish rural French family who were murdered by Christoph Waltz’s Colonel Hans Landa. She extracts her revenge at the end of the movie.
Her role then went to “In the Mood for Love” star Maggie Cheung, although those scenes were eventually cut from the final film.
