In mid-July, filmmaker Quentin Tarantino was the special guest at the Jerusalem Film Festival where he received a lifetime achievement award before a special screening of his 1994 film Pulp Fiction. During the Q&A following the screening, Tarantino admitted something that film lovers are now buzzing over: “Landa is the best character I’ve ever written and maybe the best I ever will write.”
Tarantino at the Jerusalem Film Festival
Hans Landa, played by acclaimed Austrian-German actor and IWC ambassador Christoph Waltz, is the main antagonist of Tarantino’s 2009 film Inglorious Basterds. The part garnered Waltz an Academy Award for best supporting actor with resounding praise for the actor who was then mostly unknown.
The character of Hans Landa is complicated in the way that every good character should be. He is poised, elegant and often charming, but his inevitable evilness becomes obvious in his actions. Tarantino explains there is a certain discomfort one should feel watching this character; you can’t help but like him, regardless of his major misdeeds.
Waltz as Hans Landa
According to Tarantino, there was a worry they’d have to abandon the film unless they found the right actor to play the most important character of the film. “Then Christoph Waltz came in” stated Tarantino, “and it was obvious that he was the guy; he could do everything. He was amazing. He gave us our movie back. The character was so vivid on the page […] if you had to wait for an actor to learn (the) stuff, he would never be the Landa that was on the page. There’d be a hesitancy on the screen.” Waltz did not disappoint.
While Tarantino wrote the character, Christoph Waltz breathed life into Landa, particularly with his astounding knowledge of language. According to Tarantino, “when I wrote the scene in the opening, in the farmhouse, I didn’t know yet that Colonel Landa was a linguistic genius, but during the course of writing the script, he became a linguistic genius. No matter what character came in the room, he could kick it to them in their language and speak it really well. He’s not shown doing it, but he’s probably one of the only Nazis in cinema history who could speak Yiddish, perfectly.” Waltz speaks German, English and French fluently, and also put his Italian to practice as Hans Landa.
Waltz at IWC Event
Christoph Waltz has gone on to gain major popularity and acclaim since his role as Tarantino’s favorite character, including roles in Django Unchained, the newest addition to the 007 film franchise Spectre and his most recent role in Disney’s The Legend of Tarzan.
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Tag Heuer, with ambassadors such as Chris Hemsworth and Patrick Dempsey
Breitling, with ambassador John Travolta
Baume and Mercier, with ambassador Richard Gere