Tarantino fired Mélanie Laurent after a bad read-through, then took her back

Mélanie Laurent came very close to never playing Shosanna in Inglourious Basterds. Quentin Tarantino now says he fired her after the first table read, and he isn't shy about it.

The story comes from a new book by Jay Glennie, The Making of Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, where the director looks back on the shoot of his World War II film set in occupied France.

What happened?

For Tarantino, the full-cast script reading is the most exciting moment of pre-production. It's the closest he gets to discovering the film for the first time, he explains. So he takes it seriously.

Laurent's reading, in his words, was bad. "Mélanie was terrible, so I fired her," he says in the book.

He also let go of Isabelle Huppert, who was supposed to play Mme Ada Mimieux, the woman who hides Shosanna in Paris. According to Tarantino, she didn't even show up to the first reading. "So, damn it. I fired her."

How did Laurent get the part back?

She called him. Laurent told the director she hadn't been feeling well during the reading. Then came three days of rehearsal with him in Germany, which won her the role of Shosanna Dreyfus, a young Jewish woman out to avenge her murdered family.

Today he sounds like a fan. "Mélanie is my Shosanna. She did a wonderful job," he says.

And the replacement?

Huppert's replacement was Maggie, the actress best known for In the Mood for Love. Her scenes ended up on the cutting-room floor.

Tarantino says she was "fantastic in the film", but the story simply didn't need to explain how Shosanna got her cinema. A title card reading "Four years later" and a line about inheriting it from her aunt did the job.

His rule is blunt. He has fired actors before, he says, and he owes them nothing. What he owes his film is the best actors he can find. "Period."

A quick reminder

Inglourious Basterds premiered in competition at Cannes in May 2009 and hit cinemas that August. It became Tarantino's highest-grossing film at the time, and Christoph Waltz won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.