A shark versus a zombie: this memorable scene is in a 1979 film and Brad Pitt had never seen it. Thirty years later, Quentin Tarantino and Eli Roth introduced him to the feature film on the set of “Inglourious Basterds”.
Brad Pitt is preparing to reunite with Quentin Tarantino for his latest film The Movie Critic, and his role in Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood allowed him to win an Oscar, but it was in 2009 that the superstar worked for the first time with the director of Pulp Fiction.
Playing the Nazi hunter Aldo Raines in the memorable Inglourious Basterds, the American actor was also able to benefit from some movie recommendations from Tarantino, known for his insatiable appetite for film.
As told by actor and director Eli Roth (who played the formidable Sergeant Donnie Donowitz), during production, he and Tarantino extolled the merits of an atypical feature film to say the least to Brad Pitt : Zombie Hell, directed by Italian filmmaker Lucio Fulci, nicknamed “the godfather of gore”.
Shark VS zombie
Among other anthology moments, this film prohibited for children under 12 (and whose original title was Zombi 2, in order to insinuate a totally misleading link with Romero’s film) notably contained an underwater confrontation between a dead- alive and… a shark!
“While filming Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino and I described the scene to Brad Pitt, who had never seen it, so Quentin took his 35mm copy of the film and showed it to him.”told Eli Roth at the microphone of The Daily Beast.
Variety Film
“It’s one of the best scenes ever.”
During the same interview, the director of Hostel explained why the scene in question was exceptional:
“It’s a low-budget movie that was made for $250,000, and they really put the zombie and the girl in a tank with the shark. There was no cutting, it all happened in the same plan”declared Eli Roth.
“It’s one of the best scenes ever because the shark, which is a real shark, rips off a piece of the zombie, and then the zombie bites the shark, before leaving. “The guy in the zombie costume was the shark’s trainer, and they must have given that shark a huge dose of sedatives, because it really is a shark attacking a zombie.”
Directed in 1979 by Lucio Fulci, Zombie Hell tells the adventure of young Anne Bowles who goes to the island of Matu, in the West Indies, to investigate a strange proliferation of cannibal zombies.
(Re)discover the trailer for “Inglourious Basterds”…