From KCRW in Santa Monica, this is The Treatment.

Welcome to The Treatment.

I'm Elvis Mitchell.

You can also hear the show at KCRW.com.

Well, Jean-Luc God'Dar once famously said,

all you need to make a movie is a girl in a gun.

With Inglorious Bastards, Quentin Tarantino throws in the Nazi High Command,

Winston Churchill, Adolf Hitler, and a bunch of Nazi scalping American GIs.

So I think he's expanding the formula a little bit.

Quentin, first of all, welcome back.

Thanks for doing this. Good to be back. And it really is the most mythic of all the films you've done. I mean, it takes up a huge space in the kind of your mythos. And I wondered if you realize how much space it was going to take up in your canon as you were working on it. I guess I did. I guess that's what kind of like derailed me when I first started writing the piece.

Because it's about, you know... in your canon as you were working on it. I guess I did. I guess that's what kind of like derailed me when I first started writing the piece.

Because I started about 10 years ago in 1998 right after Jackie Brown.

And like the first two chapters that they're in the movie now, that's what I wrote then.

And a lot of the characters you see are there.

But part of the thing, though,

was it would have been my first original after pulp. So I was understandably really precious about it.

And I just had in my head to do this like, that good and the bad and the ugly of World War II movies.

And it just got so huge.

I had the opposite of writers' block.

I couldn't shut my brain off.

I couldn't stop writing.

...