The scene takes place toward the end of Quentin Tarantino's rollicking World War II action-drama "Inglourious Basterds." As fire engulfs a Parisian movie theater packed with German military commanders, pandemonium ensues, diverting attention from the real action: a heart-pounding confrontation between a crack team of Nazi-terrorizing Jewish covert operatives (the so-called "Basterds") and the Third Reich's top brass.
It's vintage Tarantino, hyper-real ultra-violence that arrives as a kind of catharsis after more than two hours of intricate plot twists and baroque dialogue as the Basterds, led by Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), do their best to destabilize German forces in Nazi-occupied France through their unique brand of terrorism: collecting the scalps of Hitler's troops.
But for cast member Eli Roth -- who portrays a merciless, baseball-bat-wielding Nazi killer dubbed "the Bear Jew" by fear-stricken German soldiers in the film, which opens Friday -- the scene is memorable for a different reason.
"We almost got incinerated," Roth exclaimed during a recent outing to Hollywood's Amoeba Music, where he was riffling through racks of DVDs. "The fire comes up. They thought it was going to burn at 400 degrees centigrade and it burned at 1,200. That's like 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit! You see the swastika fall. It was not supposed to. It was fastened with steel cables; the steel liquefied."
He paused midstory, however, discovering used copies of "Hostel" and "Hostel: Part II," the films that were produced by his friend and biggest booster Tarantino and cemented Roth's reputation as one of horror moviedom's most extreme, successful (and reviled) auteurs. Roth's primary function is to make films, you see, not act in them (his output as a writer-director-producer even spawned its own sub-category in the genre: "torture porn"). His role in "Inglourious Basterds," however, is more than simply a glorified cameo. It represents a kind of creative apotheosis in his relationship with his mentor, Tarantino -- a culminant experience that drew upon Roth's skill set as a filmmaker, his hometown and his religion.
Marveling at his movies' price tags -- "12 bucks, what a deal!" -- Roth continued his on-set story, explaining that the actor who shared the scene with him, Omar Doom, "had to go to the hospital. I was on the ground, my feet were up, I had ice packs all over me. . . . The fire department said another 10 or 15 seconds, the structure would have collapsed."
