Over Quentin Tarantino’s illustrious 30 year career in film, the legendary filmmaker has created countless compelling characters. Vincent Vega in Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown in Jackie Brown, Mr. Blonde in Reservoir Dogs, The Bride in Kill Bill, just to name a few.
To date, the Hollywood icon has pumped out nine feature films, and plans on retiring after 10 in order to take on his next challenge: writing film criticism and writing books. Tarantino does say, however, that at age 75 “he might have another story to do.”
So, as the bulk of Tarantino’s film career is behind him, the 53-year-old told a sold out theater at the Jerusalem Film Festival on who tops his list as the favorite character he’s ever written.
His answer, per Screen Daily: Landa from the German-American war thriller Inglourious Basterds, played by Christoph Waltz.
“Landa is the best character I’ve ever written and maybe the best I ever will write,” he said. “I didn’t realise [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.”
Waltz was a heaven send for the film, seeing as Tarantino was just one week away from pulling the plug on the 2009 masterpiece because he could not find an actor talented enough to play Landa.
Via Indie Wire,
“I wanted Germans, playing Germans, speaking German. I was getting to be kinda worried. Unless I found the perfect Landa, I didn’t want to make the movie.”
But, in the final hour, Waltz waltzed in and gave his reading of the character, which blew away the entire production staff, Tarantino included.
“It was just obvious he was the guy. He could do everything we wanted. He was just amazing. We were ecstatic when he finished. We were just vomiting all over him: ‘Oh my god, you were amazing, you were fantastic. Oh my god. Thank you, thank you, thank you.'”
[h/t Uproxx]