Fox News’ Pop Tarts talked to Brad Pitt at the premiere of Inglourious Basterds, and they’ve just got around to writing up his comments now. Brad doesn’t really come across as some brilliant artist as he pontificates on the joys of “kicking ass”. He also claims that after this role, he walks with “a little more swagger”. Brad jokes about the paparazzi, but the sarcasm is sort of lost and I took him seriously for a second when he started in about how the paparazzi are “kind, generous” people. Pop Tarts also got Diane Kruger and Quentin Tarantino to talk about the history of that WWII period, and whether present-day Germany still feels it:

Brad Pitt may have turned into a humanitarian hottie since hooking up with Angelina Jolie, however the star of Quentin Tarantino’s WWII flick “Inglourious Basterds” still gets a kick of it kicking others. Literally.

“I just like kicking ass, period. Didn’t have to be Nazi, I can beat any ass. Any ass I like kicking. I just kick it,” Pitt enthused at last week’s Hollywood premiere, adding that since playing an American commando out to demoralize the Nazi regime he has become “a little tougher” and now walks with “a little more swagger”.

But oddly enough, the pesky paps actually aren’t on Pitt’s hit list.

“Paparazzi are my friends, they take good care of me,” he said with a smile. “They are really kind and generous and thoughtful people who make the world a better place.”

On a somewhat more serious note, Pitt’s German-raised co-star Diane Kruger said that educational procedures have been put in place to avoid any more Hitleresque dynasties from coming to fruition, although she feels no guilt over the historic tragedy.

“Every kid has to go to a concentration camp and it’s definitely part of making sure it never happens again,” Kruger said. “It’s been 60 years, so my generation or younger, we really don’t have any reference or any guilt feelings in that sense to our ancestors. It’s funny because it’s come up so much, how is Germany going to react? But the truth is, we don’t like to hang on to dear old Adolf any more than the rest of the world and if anything, we would have liked to kill him ourselves.”

In fact, Tarantino said that so far it’s the Germans who have given the flick the warmest reception.

“They already love the piece because we made it there. With the possible exception of Jews, if there’s anybody that’s had fantasies of bringing down the 3rd Reich, it’s the last few generations of Germans that have had to live under this shadow,” Tarantino told Tarts. “A lot of the German actors in my movie, this isn’t the first time they’ve put on Nazi uniforms, it’s just this thing that hovers over them culturally. They’ve thought about it a lot so when they read the script and when they see the movie, they’re like ‘hell yeah!’”

[From Fox News]

I found Diane’s comments the most interesting. There really aren’t that many German artists who have reached a certain level of success in America, so I think we Americans look at someone like Diane and think “If she says it’s okay, it’s probably okay.” And really, why would present-day Germany be upset with Tarantino and the film? He brought the film production to Germany, he hired a ton of German actors and extras, and he many Germans are probably happy with the added industry. There are still many questions about how Taratnino treated the era as far as historical accuracy – but I tend to think that Tarantino wasn’t really trying to make a historial film, only a bloody, kick-ass revenge film that happened to be set during WWII.

Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are shown at the Inglourious Basterds premiere on 8/10/09. Credit: WENN.com