With an August 21 opening looming on the horizon, the Inglourious Basterds publicity machine is just now beginning to gear up. This weekend saw the money-troubled Weinstein Co. pushing its messaging to bloodthirsty fans of Straight Dave's Steel-Cage Wrestling UFC 100, and now some of the long-lead magazine items are starting to show up. While Alex Pappademas of GQ wasn't able to convince director Quentin Tarantino to try on a pair of pumps or fondle Diane Kruger's feet, he did toss back a few mint juleps with the notoriously manic auteur at Los Angeles' Hamburger Hamlet. Over the course of a few hours, Quentin took on feeble film critics, talked about another potential Inglourious sequel, and spilled the beans on Brad Pitt's preferred method of smoking pot, all the while sweating profusely.

When Pappademas pressed Tarantino about the decidedly mixed reaction Inglourious received at Cannes, Quentin claimed the reception didn't bother him at all. "I respect criticism," he said, "But I know more about film than most of the people writing about me. Not only that, I'm a better writer than most of the people writing about me. And I can write film criticism better than most of the people writing about me." He went on to add that his primary goal was "to get the biggest standing ovation of the festival, and I got it [...] Sometimes it's your time to be Elvis, and that was my time." We would've liked it if there had been some follow-up questions that alluded to the Elvis figure that appeared in True Romance, but that's probably another story for another time.

At another point during the conversation, the talk turned to a potential sequel for Inglorious Basterds (we can only assume this interview took place before the prequel hype went into overdrive). You see, Quentin apparently excised a major plot point from his final draft of the film, one that saw "a group of AWOL black soldiers making their way across occupied France."

But all this pales in comparison to the details of the evening that Quentin Tarantino convinced Brad Pitt to join the cast of Inglourious Basterds. Pitt spilled the beans back in May that the two had tossed back five bottles of wine during the course of their conversation, but at some point another substance entered the mix. Pappademas asked Quentin for clarification on this point, and Tarantino took the bait: "That was Brad. He did the fabrication. He can take a Coke can and make it — functional." Funny, we would guess that Pitt would've broken out that Honey Bear water pipe from True Romance for an occasion like this. We can only assume Angelina made him throw it away.

TRIUMPH OF HIS WILL [GQ]