Cannes - It took five bottles of wine and some kind of smoking apparatus for US director Quentin Tarantino to convince Brad Pitt to take the leading role in a wartime drama about a group of Jewish-American soldiers seeking revenge on Nazis. "I woke up in the morning and I had agreed. Six weeks later I was in uniform", Pitt told a press conference marking the premiere of Inglourious Basterds at the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday.
"He had me at hello," Pitt said about his talks with Tarantino about a role in the film, which is set in Nazi-occupied France. "I had him at bonjour," said Tarantino.
The eight soldiers under the command of Pitt's character Lieutenant Aldo Raine are tasked with "killing Nazis," a mission they carry out with Tarantino's brand of violence.
"We will be cruel to the Germans," Raine tells his brigade before they head off to track down Nazi soldiers and collect their scalps.
"It was like kosher porn," said Pitt's co-star, US actor Eli Roth.
Referring to a scene where his character bludgeons to death a Nazi officer, Roth said: "I am Jewish and it is something I have fantasized about since I was a child."
Asked whether Inglourious Basterds was a Jewish revenge story with a little of comedy, Tarantino said it was possible but not completely right to describe the film in those terms.
"My characters change the outcome of the war," he said.
However, he added: "They didn't exist. But what happens later in the movie might have been plausible," as two plots emerge in the film to wipe out the top Nazi elite attending a movie screening celebrating National Socialism.
"It is the power of cinema that is going to bring down the Third Reich," Tarantino said. The shooting of Inglourious Basterds ended only three months ago.
The 46-year-old bad boy director who won Cannes' top award 15 years ago worked around the clock to have the Inglourious Basterds ready for Cannes.
The film is one of the more keenly awaited films in this years' Cannes line-up for top honours. When the opening credits for Inglourious Basterds began to roll at a press screening in Cannes, there was a round of applause.
Since winning the Palme d'Or for Pulp Fiction, Tarantino has also acted president of the jury in Cannes.
After his last feature film Death Proof received only a lukewarm critical response, Tarantino needed a new film success.
And he may just have found it with Inglourious Basterds. The film that took Tarantino eight years to write, takes its audience on a two-and-a-half hour roller coaster ride of violence and suspense.
The plot is peppered with what Tarantino says is a fair amount of humour, inn particular, jokes about the different European languages and accents playing a key role in the story as the tension builds.
Tarantino said he had nearly been forced to pull the plug on the movie because he had been unable to find an actor with the linguistic prowess that was need for one of its central characters, Colonel Hans Landa.
However, with the movie's prospects hanging in the balance, Tarantino came across Austrian-born Christoph Waltz, who moved effortless through four languages in the film.
For good measure, Tarantino threw in almost comic book versions of Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, Hermann Goering and Winston Churchill.
But the film also includes a who's who of the German and Austrian acting world - including Daniel Bruehl, August Diehl and Diane Kruger - with sterling performances that provide a key strength to the film.
