Quentin Tarantino fired Isabelle Huppert and cut Maggie Cheung's scenes from Inglourious Basterds

In the piece, Tarantino discusses Laurent’s first “terrible” reading, Huppert’s failure to show up for hers, and how both actors had been fired from the film. “Mélanie Laurent’s table read was terrible. It wasn’t good enough to be terrible,” he told Glennie in typically blunt Tarantino fashion. “The most exciting day of preproduction is for me the table read. That is the closest I get to seeing the movie for the first time. Up until then, it’s just been me reading all the scenes to myself or to a friend… so a table read with the whole cast is so exciting and so important to me. Well, Mélanie was terrible, so I fired her.”

While Laurent was able to convince Tarantino that she was right for the role of the revenge-minded cinema owner—she was determined to read for him again, which impressed the director enough to agree to “return to square one”—the Basterds director was less gracious to Huppert, despite his appreciation for her as an actor. Huppert was originally cast as Madame Ada Mimieux, who co-owned the Paris cinema that Shosanna uses to execute her revenge against the Nazi regime, especially SS-Standartenführer Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz). But Huppert’s failure to appear at Tarantino’s table read, coupled with an apparent contract issue, led the director to begin looking for a replacement.

“So fuck it. I fired her,” Tarantino said. “I mean, I love Isabelle Huppert—Heaven’s Gate and all that—but there were issues with her contract. It just kept stalling. And then not coming to the table read.” The role of Madame Mimieux instead went to In The Mood For Love‘s Maggie Cheung. “That invariably happens,” he went on. “As far as I’m concerned, if you’re cast and you are not at that table, I don’t owe you jack shit! You can be fired, especially if I get excited by what somebody else did in your absence.” But wait, you’re surely thinking, I don’t remember seeing Maggie Cheung in ‘Inglourious Basterds’!” Turns out Tarantino felt the scenes shot with Cheung over-explained how Shosanna came to own the theater and a title card was just as effective as any scene would be. “Maggie was fantastic in the movie, but you just didn’t need to know how Shosanna acquired the cinema. All we needed was a title card saying ‘Four Years Later’ and Shosanna explaining that she inherited it from her aunt.”