Tarantino upsets Germans with Brad Pitt Nazi film

The film director Quentin Tarantino has upset Germans with plans for his next film, about the Second World War, that will reportedly show Nazi soldiers having their brains smashed out with a baseball bat by an American soldier. Even by his standards, the new film, given the provisional title Inglorious Bastards, will be blood-curdling stuff.

According to a 167-page script leaked on the internet and believed to be genuine, Tarantino's lead character is an American officer to be played by Brad Pitt, who leads a group of American-Jewish soldiers dropped into Nazi-occupied Europe to wreak revenge. The officer tells his soldiers: "Every man under my command owes me one hundred Nazi scalps... and y'all will git me one hundred Nazi scalps taken from the heads of one hundred dead Nazis, or die trying..."

What allegedly follows is extreme carnage: Nazis are scalped, others have swastikas carved in their foreheads, their testicles are shot off and brains are splattered by baseball bats.

Germany has not taken well to the idea of their problematic history being turned into a comic-book adventure where the manner of death is all that appears to matter. "This is pop culture encountering Nazi Germany and the Holocaust with unprecedented force," says Tobias Kniebe in the German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung. "The effects of this collision are entirely unpredictable."

Kniebe anticipates a drubbing for the film. "All the German historians and critics... will be so shocked by Inglorious Bastards they will savage it on the spot."

Tarantino, in Berlin making preparations for shooting in October, has not commented on the leaked script. But he said in a recent interview: "I don't want it to feel like a period film. This is a modern, in-your-face movie."