The wartime look from Inglourious Basterds

It’s been two years since the critical mauling and commercial disappointment of Death Proof, his half of the Grindhouse double-bill with Robert Rodriguez, and Quentin Tarantino is back, back, back with what he calls his “bunch of guys on a mission film” – Inglourious Basterds. Set during World War II, the plot follows two narratives, firstly those “guys on a mission” that Tarantino spoke of, namely ‘the Basterds’, a group of Jewish-American soldiers on a violent quest to kill and terrify the Nazis led by Brad Pitt’s Lieutenant Aldo Raine, and secondly the deadly aspirations of young French-Jewish girl Shosanna Dreyfus (played by Mélanie Laurent), who plans revenge on a SS Colonel for killing her family.

The World War II setting is new territory for Tarantino who has typically played in a more modern movie playground; likewise Pitt hasn’t often played soldier with brief bursts of military action in the likes of Legends of the Fall and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, but for the action adventure’s costume designer, Anna Sheppard it’s all very familiar. Perhaps almost too familiar as Sheppard previously worked on such wartime dramas as The Pianist, Schindler’s List and TV’s Band of Brothers.

Clearly her CV made her an ideal fit for whipping up the era’s authentic period costumes, but it was a challenge that Sheppard was slow to accept until assured that Inglourious Basterds wasn’t a traditional by-the-book retelling of World War II’s horrors, but a boisterous, imaginative and spiky vision of it. As the trailer’s tag-line says “you haven’t seen war until you’ve seen it through the eyes of Quentin Tarantino,” and Sheppard was thrilled to learn that this applied to costumes as well.

“I felt that I was given a lot of freedom and that gave me courage to try new things, and to try a new approach,” she says. “I really enjoyed doing a movie from this period like never before. Maybe doing the other ones made me confident about this period, but also it gave me great joy to see how appreciated my costumes were.”