Hell to pay

Q: How did you meet Tarantino in the first place?

A: Six years ago, he came to see Cabin Fever at the L.A. Film Festival, and really loved it and invited me to his house to watch movies, and we just became really close friends. And we did the Hostel movies together.

Q: Inglourious Basterds is a mash-up of so many different styles: war epic, spaghetti western, revenge fantasy, with elements of comedy and terror thrown in. How do you describe it?

A: The only way to describe it is it’s Tarantino at a level that he’s never reached before. It’s vintage Tarantino. It’s impossible to describe and that’s what so great about it. I’d say it’s got the tension of Reservoir Dogs, the style of Pulp Fiction, the characters of Jackie Brown, the action of Kill Bill and the adrenaline of Death Proof. It’s the culmination of all of Quentin’s years as a director. I think it’s his masterpiece — and I don’t feel like I’m over-hyping it.

Q: What did playing this role mean to you personally, in terms of your family history?

Quentin Tarantino, left, and Roth arrive at the premiere of Inglourious Basterds in Hollywood. (Kevin Winter/Getty Images)

A: Oh, everything. Several things. On a very basic level, being Jewish and from Boston [like the character], I felt like I was representing my people. And Quentin wanted to cast authentic. It was very important to me to play the part, because my grandparents got out of Kiev, Poland and Austria. And all their relatives who didn’t get out were killed. There are entire branches of my family that were wiped out in the Holocaust. So, this character is fighting on behalf of all the Jews who can’t go over and fight, and the ones in the camps. I grew up with fantasies of killing Nazis, because we grew up with the knowledge of what my parents would say: “Count your blessings you were born here, because if you weren’t, we all would’ve been killed.” And I remember reading Elie Wiesel’s Night when I was 10, and trying to imagine why didn’t everybody fight back — I couldn’t understand it.

On another level, I hate bad Boston accents in movies. It tortures me. In Good Will Hunting, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, people who are from there, do it right. But in The Departed, other than Mark Wahlberg and Matt Damon, I can’t take it. And so I had these fantasies of correcting the Boston accent.

And being in a Tarantino film, I mean we dressed up as the Reservoir Dogs in college, and just to be a character in a Tarantino movie — which I got to do briefly in Death Proof — is a whole other level.

Q: Has your family seen the film?

A: Yeah, they saw it for the first time last night.

Q: What was their reaction?

A: They were in tears. My father was crying when I was wiping out the Nazis. It was so satisfying — they were so proud of me that I did this film. When you see the look on my face in the movie, it’s very real and it’s very personal. I allowed myself to tap into the most painful, upsetting experiences in my life. I was in anguish when I was shooting those scenes.

Q: I read that you became Tarantino’s unofficial advisor on Jewish matters. What did that involve?

A: Well, this is me as a friend, talking to Quentin, in the way he’d be an advisor when I’m writing a screenplay. He called me up and he’d ask, you know, “Would you be able to forgive the Nazis if it meant ending the war?” We’d have philosophical discussions. And my answer was, ‘No way, I’d kill all of them, there’s no questions asked. There’s no forgiveness. I said absolution is a Christian concept. Jews, we don’t forget anything. We collect interest, we get more angry about stuff. And I think if you want a good example of Jewish psychology, you should come to my family’s Passover seder.”

He’d never been to a seder. He came over and it was a really moving experience. We talked about the Jews who were enslaved, telling the story of how we were slaves in Egypt and how we never forget that. We always talk about the Holocaust. My father read letters from Holocaust survivors. My father was a psychoanalyst at Harvard, he’s recently retired. He gave papers in Israel about the Holocaust. I was trying to explain to Quentin that they tried to exterminate us. So, there’s no negotiating with people like that. They’ve lost their humanity. When there are people that are successfully wiping you out, you want to kill them. And that, I think, helped confirm certain creative instincts Quentin had about creating the ending.