Eli as:Donny “The Bear Jew” Donowitz
Cast: Brad Pitt, Diane Kruger, Christoph Waltz
Director: Quentin Tarantino
Genre: Drama, War
Written by: Quentin Tarantino
Production Status: Completed
Release Date: Augutst 21, 2009
Rated: R
Runtime: 153 min.
Plot Outline:

In Nazi-occupied France during World War II, a group of Jewish-American soldiers known as “The Basterds” are chosen specifically to spread fear throughout the Third Reich by scalping and brutally killing Nazis.

• Eli Roth and Omar Doom were nearly incinerated filming the fire sequence in the theater. During tests the flame temperatures reached 400 degrees centigrade, and during the take the set burned out of control and the temperature of the ceiling above them reached 1,200 degrees centigrade (2,000 degrees fahrenheit.) Quentin Tarantino was seated on a crane operating the camera in a fireproof suit, and none of them wanted to back down and ruin the shot. Fire marshalls said that another fifteen seconds of filming and the steel structure would have collapsed, incinerating the actors. Roth and Doom were treated for minor burns.
• Eli Roth put on 35 pounds of muscle to play Donnie Donowitz, “The Bear Jew”. Roth also learned to cut hair for the role from producer Pilar Savone’s father Umberto at his salon in Beverly Hills.
• Rumor had it that Harvey Weinstein was trying to force Quentin Tarantino to cut 40 minutes of the movie after the feedback from Cannes Film Festival (which ran 148 minutes). However, Harvey denied this rumor stating that Quentin was reorganizing some scenes since he didn’t have enough time to completely finish editing the film before sending it to Cannes since he was given only six weeks to edit whereas other directors are given normally six months to a year. In fact, the theatrical cut runs one minute longer than the cut that was premiered at Cannes.
• The name Wilhelm Wicki (played by Gedeon Burkhard) is an homage to directors Georg Wilhelm Pabst and Bernhard Wicki.
• The very first scalping shown in the film on a dead Nazi is a dummy of Quentin Tarantino.
• Before casting Eli Roth, Tarantino approached Adam Sandler to play Sgt. Donny Donowitz. But Sandler had to turn it down because the schedule conflicted with the filming of Funny People (2009).
• Quentin Tarantino worked on the script for almost a decade.
• Quentin Tarantino intended for this to be as much a war film as a spaghetti western, and considered titling the movie “Once Upon a Time in Nazi-Occupied France”. He gave that title instead to the first chapter of the film.
• On German advertisement materials, all swastikas were removed or covered up as it was unclear to the distributor if they violated German law (which prohibits the exhibition of Nazi symbols except for purposes such as historical accuracy).
• When asked about the misspelled title, director Quentin Tarantino gave the following answer: “Here’s the thing. I’m never going to explain that. You do an artistic flourish like that, and to explain it would just take the piss out of it and invalidate the whole stroke in the first place.”
• Eli Roth directed the film-within-the-film, “Nation’s Pride”. Quentin Tarantino asked Roth to direct the short, and Roth requested his brother Gabriel join him to direct behind a second camera, which Tarantino agreed to. In two days the brothers got 130 camera setups, and Tarantino was so pleased he gave Roth a third day that he was originally planning to shoot with actor Daniel Brühl. Roth got 50 more setups the third day, much to Tarantino’s delight. The total running time of the short is 5:30, and was always intended to feel like pieces of a longer film, not a coherent short.
• While gearing up for his “bashing Nazi brains baseball scene,” Eli Roth listened to the music of “Hannah Montana”.