Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds will be released by Weinstein Company/Universal on August 21.

With little time to prepare, costume designer Anna Sheppard, production designer David Wasco and special effects makeup artist Greg Nicotero spent the weeks prior to production testing, building and creating quickly. 

 

Wasco relished the chance to do a period movie with Tarantino.  “We tried to make a few of his other projects kind of nebulous period movies. For “Reservoir Dogs,” we evoked the 1970s and the same with “Pulp Fiction,” so that they would be pretty timeless.  This one is late 1930s, early 1940s and we set out to be very accurate,” Wasco says.

 

The WWII fable actioner “Inglourious Basterds,” written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, world-premiered in May at the 2009 Cannes Film Fest, where it won the Best Actor prize for Christophe Waltz.  The Weinstein Co. and Universal will release the picture in the U.S. on August 21.

 

The film’s long gestation is best recounted via anecdotes shared by writer-director Quentin Tarantino’s friends and colleagues.  Pieces of the story and elements from the script would pop up in casual conversations between Tarantino and his friends. 

 

Lynn Shelton, whose third feature, Humpday, has played with great success at Sundance, Seattle, and Cannes Festivals, says she’s “always been interested in the boundaries of sexual identity and on how fluid or rigid those boundaries might be.” Magonlia will release this serio comedy July 10.

 

The dramatic tension—and squeamish humor—in Humpday comes from the fact that, as wild and open as they would like themselves to be, the two main characters are both so heavily invested in being straight that when they push the boundaries of their heterosexuality, it shakes them to the very core.