The following discourse takes place in a late night Green Room. Present is auteur film director Quentin Tarantino, dressed casually in vintage jeans and a stonewashed cotton pullover. Dr. Sigmund Freud, father of psychoanalysis, sits opposite him wearing a three-piece black suit. Tarantino’s signature scowl is deepened by his companion’s dank smell of cigars. The two men are comfortably seated in chairs left over from the set of Conan O’Brien’s recently canceled talk show.
QT: Sigmund, I’m told you just saw my latest movie. I can call you Sigmund, right?
SF: Only if I can call you Quentin T. and write about you later.
QT: Deal. Just don’t try and read too much into what I say.
SF: (crossing his legs impatiently) I can see you’re not familiar with my work.
QT: My mother always kept a copy of The Interpretation of Dreams in the bathroom, but I never needed any incentive. Well, let’s discuss the work of mine we’re both familiar with, Inglourious Basterds. Were you taken with the movie’s plot detailing the ultimate Jewish revenge fantasy?
SF: You know, as a Jew, and especially a Galician Jew in pre-war Austria, I had my own fantasies about retribution for the despicable manner in which my superior intelligence was dismissed by those in the golden kingdom of academia. Pishers. It’s clear their mothers let them sit in dirty diapers so long the befoulment beneath them retracted so far into their bodies it reached their brains.
QT: Okay, so you’re a fan?
SF: I rocked the scene where the theatre burned. All the Nazis and their pathetic hangers-on vaporized while watching their precious propaganda film. Genius.
QT: (smiling broadly) You’re too kind. That’s what the critics called me. And my grandmother always said, “If two people say you look sick, lay down.” So it must be true.
SF: (stroking his chin whiskers) You know, it’s very interesting that in this brief conversation we’re having, you’ve already mentioned your mother and your grandmother. In the dreams you’ve had of these two women closest to you, what were they wearing?
QT: Bear suits.
SF: And in light of that, do you find it significant that one of your characters, the Basterd who smashes Nazis’ heads with a baseball bat, is called The Bear Jew?
QT: You know, I wanted Adam Sandler for that role, but he had a conflict.
SF: Loved his Hanukkah Song. Such a kibitzer.
QT: Sweet guy. But actually, the backstory to The Bear Jew is that he was rumored by the Nazis to be a vengeful golem summoned by an angry rabbi. So it has nothing to do with me. Tarantino is an Italian name.
SF: Same thing. Meat balls, brisket, no difference. Let me ask you this: When the Basterds killed a bunch of Nazis, why scalp them? Was this a symbolic gesture regarding the brain, in other words, the big brain behind Nazism, Adolf Hitler?
QT: No, I just thought it was cool. I’m all about the blood, always uber blood, especially when you don’t expect it. I like to pair violence with a comical scene, so the audience is laughing but they don’t feel right about it because of all the blood. Also, if the Nazis got scalped it gave me a reason to give Brad Pitt a kickass name – Aldo the Apache. He was nuts for that, I’m telling you, nuts.
SF: Speaking of nuts, I’m glad you brought them up. When the Basterds encountered a company of Nazis, they would kill and scalp all of them except one. That one they would cut with a knife and let go so he could tell his superiors how ruthless they were. The first time Aldo raised his knife and told the Nazi, “I’m going to give you something so everyone will always know what you are,” I thought he was going to –
QT: Circumcise him? That’s what a lot of people thought. I try not to go for the easy joke. Besides, who would know he’s got a pecked pecker? Just the chicks he convinces to sleep with him. Isn’t it better to carve a swastika into his forehead? Then everyone knows. Anyway, that kind of humor is beneath me. It’s unsophisticated. I leave that stuff to Judd Apatow and the Superbad crew. What’s the word Jews use instead of pecker – you call it a schmeckel, right?
SF: I call it a penis and so should you. In your dreams, what do you call your mother’s genitals?
QT: In my dreams?? Christ, that’s no dream, that’s a nightmare. What do you call your mother’s genitals?
SF: Watch your filthy mouth and leave my mother out of it. The woman was a saint. You have no idea what a handful I was. I started smoking cigars at ten.
QT: Where does a ten-year-old get money for cigars?
SF: We lived on a busy street. Lots of men hanging out. Men with money.
QT: You worked the street? Jesus, I had no idea. Believe it or not, I try to be sensitive to people’s issues, people in the audience. Maybe you noticed there was absolutely no sex at all in Inglourious Basterds. The two main female characters were a double agent and a young woman who escaped the Nazi slaughter of her family. Noble women who fought for their beliefs with courage and strength.
SF: Excellent device, albeit unlikely. When they’re not hysterical, women are busy marrying men to fight for them in the hopes their wives will give them sex. This movie you’ve made, it’s fiction.
QT: Of course it’s fiction. Hitler wasn’t murdered in a burning theatre.
SF: He wasn’t? I wouldn’t know that. I died right before the Holocaust.
QT: It’s just as well, Sig. You went through enough.
SF: And so will you. Just wait for my next book.
Daughter’s Featured Fotos hover on a Higher Level
glo-cone
leftover
merging contours
the scaffold dance