Due next week, the eagerly awaited new Tarantino film has divided opinion, but everyone agrees that Christoph Waltz's villainous and slightly camp Nazi is a classic baddie. The Austrian actor talks to DONALD CLARKE
In what condition – with apologies to Myles na Gopaleen's Catechism of Cliché– were the critics at this year's Cannes Film Festival when they came to consider Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds?
They were, of course, “divided”?
Quentin's long-awaited, postmodern war film delighted as many hacks (count me in) as it annoyed, but Christoph Waltz's performance as a sadistic German officer did generate some sort of positive consensus. You can rely on Tarantino to boost at least one experienced actor in every movie. Sometimes, as was the case with John Travolta in Pulp Fiction, the performer is a former superstar. Alternately, the lucky actor might be a middle-aged cult heroine (think Pam Grier in Jackie Brown) or a hard-working character actor (Robert Forster in the same film).
Waltz is, however, a different proposition altogether. Born in Austria 52 years ago, he has acted regularly on stage and in German television throughout his career. Far from being a straight-to-video exploitation star, Christoph is a distinguished travelling player. He’s the sort of fellow Ingmar Bergman might have written a drama around.
“I am fourth-generation theatre folk,” he agrees in predictably flawless English. “I was doomed and destined to go into this business. I did not want to have anything to do with it. But it happened anyway.”
What might those distinguished thespian grandparents and great-grandparents have made of his turn as Colonel Hans Landa in Inglourious Basterds? Urbane, witty and endlessly cunning, the officer – nicknamed The Jew Hunter – prides himself on his dedication to forwarding the Führer's appalling schemes. The arrival of the titular Basterds, a crack team of allied troops led by Brad Pitt, does nothing to quell his fanatical ardour.
Delivering dialogue in German, French, English and, briefly, Italian, Waltz serves up a performance of delicious eccentricity. At one point he delivers a swathe of dialogue while chewing his way greedily through a portion of apple strudel. My word, he must have got through a great deal of that popular Teutonic delicacy.
“Oh, I don’t know how much,” he laughs. “But I think it was about 27 pieces. At the end I had definitely had enough. They were smart. They made it in a way that it could be eaten over and over again – quite light. It was cooked by the best strudel maker they could find, so, by the end, I had just had enough, but I definitely wasn’t disgusted by it.”
With its deliberate weirdness and its distinct flavours of camp, Waltz’s performance might have easily escaped the notice of high-falutin’ festival panels. But the Cannes jury, headed by Isabelle Huppert, were sufficiently impressed to hand Waltz the award for best actor. The announcement was greeted with genuinely warm applause (though Ms Huppert appeared to wince theatrically when the actor praised Tarantino). Unlike the Oscars, Cannes has no shortlist for such awards, so one wonders how it happens that the winning actor is always in the auditorium.
“The screening was a big success,” he explains. “We did some press and I went home. It was perfect. How could it be more perfect? Then they called me back. Now, as an actor, you know why you might get called back to Cannes. But it’s like being a child when something wonderful happens. It feels magical. It doesn’t feel quite real.”
He really is a delightfully odd chap, this Christoph Waltz. Very prim and tidy, he delivers English with the sort of precision you only get from German speakers (or, possibly, poshies from the Indian subcontinent). Carrying on the Viennese tradition for high-brow thinking and amateur psychoanalysis, he can, if tempted, drift off into impressive intellectual reveries on the least promising of subjects. When, for example, I ask him if he was aware of the comic potential in Colonel Landa, he furrows his brow and launches into a characteristic lecture.
“You can’t know what will make people laugh,” he says. “The laugh is an ongoing quest. What makes a human laugh? Now we have decided that chimps laugh. You, the actor, cannot play the laugh. It is something that the audience has to find for itself.”
Fair enough. You get a real sense that Waltz is the kind of actor who thinks very deeply about the theoretical basis of his craft. This is, I suppose, not unexpected for somebody raised in a household of actors. As he tells it, he had to listen to theatrical anecdotes every day of his life and, unsurprisingly, soon developed a desire to flee the family business. Yet he now admits that he was always destined to live life on stage and before the camera.
“It just happened to me anyway. I think that the desire to become an actor in a young person is a developmental fixation. It’s like a character defect. I guess many people grow out of it. But by the time I grew out of it I was already working. It was too late.”
Some years into his career, Waltz moved his family to London. After all, if you, as a German-speaking actor, need to travel to Cologne, Vienna or Hamburg, it is as easy to get a plane from Heathrow as it is from Berlin. Several English-language roles followed, including a turn in Ordinary Decent Criminal, Thaddeus O'Sullivan's thinly disguised study of Dublin hoodlum Martin Cahill.
“Dublin was fabulous,” he says. “Thinking about it now, I can’t imagine what the pubs must be like without smoke. I don’t smoke, but it was lovely – that cloud that was hanging over the stories. I remember squeezing into the pub at six o’clock and if you squeezed past five people you’d hear five stories. It is no accident that Ireland has won five Nobel Prizes for literature.”
So, it seems to have been a good life so far. Still, it must have been exciting to secure such a juicy role in such a highly anticipated film as Inglourious Basterds. Tarantino and his regular producer, Lawrence Bender, were, apparently, at their wits' end trying to find an actor who could deliver dialogue effectively in three and a half languages. When Waltz opened his mouth they knew immediately they had their man. I wonder if actors know when they have had this sort of effect on a director. Maybe he thought he'd blown it.
“What I remember was that it was so easy-going and so light,” he says. “I had a great time and I usually don’t have a great time right from the beginning. But with that script I was just enjoying myself and not thinking about winning the job.”
Landa is, to some degree, deliberately constructed as a movie archetype. He is the sort of Nazi villain that, in previous years, might have been played by Hardy Krüger or Conrad Veidt. Knowing how promiscuously Tarantino likes to reference old movies, I naturally assume that he followed Christoph around with a stack of second World War DVDs. Presumably, if we scour the likes of Where Eagles Dareand The Guns of Navarone, we will find inspirations for Waltz's performance.
“No. Quentin really did none of those things,” he says. “Because if you open that script you see that it’s all there. It’s all created by Quentin Tarantino. He certainly didn’t make comparisons with any other performances when I was around.”
But surely Waltz must have been aware that the character was a comment on the classic Hollywood Nazi.
“I just see those characters as being rather tedious stereotypes,” he says, refusing to play ball. “They are cardboard. They are decorative. To be honest, I didn’t think about anything else but the character when I was preparing the part.”
There you have it then. Colonel Landa may cackle and hiss like a maniac. But he is for real.
** Inglourious Basterdsopens next week
