7. Inglourious Basterds
Though Tarantino films are renowned for being completely bonkers, you might expect dollars and sense to have prevailed when it came to putting one together. Upon examination, however, at least one of them seems to be just as whimsically loose with reality as its plot. Of course I speak of the alternate history romp,
Inglorious Basterds, which opens upon a charming French farmhouse, the setting of our first encounter with the nefarious Colonel Landa, and actually a charming German farmhouse. The exterior of Shoshanna's Parisian cinema, Le Gamaar, was a set built at the appropriately named Babelsberg Studios near Berlin. The interiorthe setting of the film's infernal climaxwas actually constructed in a disused cement factory, the only place capable of standing such abuse! Hitler's office, in which Private Butz recounts his terrifying brush with The Basterds, was filmed in Germany sure enough, but ironically, within the Clay Headquarters Compound of the U.S. military, a former Luftwaffe command centre taken over as the U.S. command, post-war. Back to Paris (but not really), the cafe Zoller invites Shoshanna to, Chez Maurice, is in Berlina real cafe, and not only famous in its own right, but quite emphatically anti-Nazi by name: Cafe Einstein.