The BAFTAs were held on Sunday (click here for the winners) evening in London, but the real festivities got underway on Friday night at Soho’s Groucho Club where Quentin Tarantino held a cocktail reception in honor of his Inglourious Basterds star Christoph Waltz.
Among the attendees at the intimate get-together were Tarantino, Waltz, Harvey Weinstein, Dustin Hoffman, Neve Campbell, Matthew Goode and, eventually, Mickey Rourke who turned up late and huddled on a banquette with QT.
Prior to the affair, I had a chance to speak with Weinstein about the now notorious Inglourious push he’s making to put Tarantino’s film in the front-runner slot for a Best Picture Oscar.
A bullish Weinstein told me that there is “tremendous momentum building” for the film. (Just ask Tom O’Neil among others.)
Reiterating comments he’s made elsewhere, Weinstein noted that the SAG ensemble award, which this year went to Basterds, is a good predictor of the eventual best picture winner – as was the case with his own Shakespeare in Love in 1999.
“I’m really confident because I think the actors lead the charge. There was this great story with the ex-husband vs. the ex-wife and I think that wore off and people are looking at the movies again,” he commented regarding the media-created battle between James Cameron and Kathryn Bigelow whose Avatar and The Hurt Locker have been the leaders in a supposed two-horse race.
“There were 450 Academy members at an Academy screening (of Basterds) a few days ago and usually you don’t get that many people to see films on the bigscreen,” Weinstein added. “The Academy are conscientious voters, they’re re-screening movies.”
Further, he said, “Quentin really considers this one of his best films and maybe his best and the feeling in Hollywood right now is that it’s time to reward the guy. None of his films has won best picture and just look at the body of the work!”
I noted that when the film originally premiered in Cannes in May, critics were divided and so I wondered if there’s a risk opening a movie so early in front of one of the world’s most unfriendly critical audiences.
Weinstein, noting that cuts and changes had been made since Cannes, said it wasn’t a risk because “Cannes is great. If you look at it, Pulp Fiction had its premiere there – and I think Quentin and I are pretty superstitious. We repeat the same formulas. I don’t think there’s a problem changing things after a festival but even then, the history of the film is amazing.”
He continued to tell the story of reading the original Basterds script on July 4 while attending a wedding in Wales: “I was reading the script before the ceremony and I called Quentin and said, ‘Let’s go.’ But he had one condition and that was we had to make it to Cannes. It was crazy because we were starting to shoot in September and had six weeks to edit the movie, but in this case Cannes was a blessing because we got another shot at it – it was all there though.”
So what happens, after all of his proclamations that Basterds will win best picture, if it doesn’t? “We’re gonna have a good time in any case. If we don’t win we’ll melt down the Oscars and make gold stars, little gold Jewish stars out of them.”
As for QT himself, I was able to chat with him for a few minutes on Friday night and we also revisited the fact that Basterds had opened in Cannes 10 months ago and was now being talked about as a serious best picture candidate. He confessed he had actually just been thinking the same thing and had made the calculation of how many months it had been since Cannes on his way in from the airport upon arriving in London.
I told him one of my favorite Cannes stories in which he is the star: On his first day as Cannes jury president in 2004, very, very early in the morning, I was sitting in the Carlton Hotel lobby when Tarantino came bounding through. He was beaming and saying hello to everyone he passed – which at that hour really only included hotel staff and myself – on his way to breakfast. Jury presidents are rarely seen or heard in Cannes, but here he was, out among us.
As is often the case, he looked like an eager kid in a giant candy store. So, I asked him, does he ever get tired? Does it ever get old this romp he’s been on for years? Firstly, he laughed, he was probably so jet-lagged that particular morning that he had no choice but to come down to breakfast at the break of dawn. But, he added he was also fueled by the fact that few things were more exciting than the prospect of watching and talking about movies for days on end.
Then, taking hold of my arm, he leaned in and confided that he does take a day off from being all boundless energy about every two weeks to just chill out – and eat pizza.
We were soon interrupted by a bearded man who said he was an actor friend of Basterds co-star Michael Fassbender. So, I got out of the way and went to chat with Christoph Waltz.
As is now trademark, the thesp – who went on to pick up the BAFTA on Sunday night for best supporting actor – waxed existential about his good fortune. I told him I hadn’t meant to get him thinking quite so seriously at such a relaxed Friday night event but, with all the sincerity in the world, he fixed me with an earnest gaze and said, “No, this really helps me. It helps me to think about these things so that I keep learning.”
With that, Fassbender’s bearded buddy came bustling over and edged me out of the way.
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