Things We Learned About Our Favorite Tarantino Movies

When the Basterds make their way into the cinema and begin their onslaught on the Nazis on their big night, there's a moment in which two of them use guns fastened to the back of their gloves, which they set off by punching their targets. If this looks a bit too unreal in a movie that doesn't exactly follow history as it actually happened, you might be surprised to learn that those things were real and developed for use in WWII.

They were manufactured for the US Navy by the RF Sedgley company and are known as Sedgley Guns. The guns are single-shot .38 Smith & Wesson barrels mounted alongside a plunger. The plunger extends beyond the muzzle, and when the user makes a fist and punches someone or something, the plunger is depressed, and the bullet is fired. Only about 50 to 200 were made, and while there is no record of their being used in combat, they were likely used by covert operatives in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).

While filming the tense dinner table scene in Django Unchained, Leonardo DiCaprio's Calvin Candie was supposed to repeatedly slam his hand onto the table. In the final cut, he only hit the table once, breaking a crystal glass in the process, which cut his hand. The cut on his hand was real, and the breaking of the glass was entirely accidental.

If you watch the scene closely but focus on the man to Candie's right (the left side of the screen), he's taken aback momentarily when he sees the extent of his co-star's injury. DiCaprio, being the professional he is, continued the scene in character, and that's the cut that made it into the film. He even picked some of the glass out of his hand, but otherwise, he didn't really acknowledge the injury.

Stacey Sher, the film's producer, described the incident, saying, "Leo had slammed his hand on the table countless times, and he moved his hand further, and he crushed a crystal cordial glass. Blood was dripping down his hand. He never broke character. He kept going. He was in such a zone. It was very intense. He required stitches."

If you've seen a Tarantino movie, you know the man doesn't censor himself in any way. He writes every conceivable type of profanity into his scripts, and the actors dutifully deliver those lines. While most don't have a problem saying your standard set of cuss words (you know what they are), it's not easy to use words that have a more harmful historical connotation.

Leonardo DiCaprio had trouble with the N-word, which his character - a vile, entitled plantation owner -  has to say a lot throughout the movie. Behind the scenes, it wasn't quite as easy as it was for the fictional character, as DiCaprio had some hesitations about the dialogue. While filming one scene, he stopped himself and explained that he was having a difficult time using so many racial slurs. Samuel L. Jackson simply looked at his co-star and said, "Hey, motherf**ker, this is just another Tuesday for us. Let's go."

Jamie Foxx also chimed in at the time, explaining that others would "resent the hell out of you" if the scene didn't play out just right. Since a slave owner like Calvin Candie would have no problem saying hateful slurs, DiCaprio got back on track and finished his work on the movie.

Reservoir Dogs features one of the most brutal torture scenes put to film in the 20th century. One of the reasons it's so horrifying is the way Michael Madsen's character, Mr. Blonde, behaves during the scene. He dances to the music, smiling, and through his actions and the mutilation of the cop's ear, it's clear Mr. Blonde is a true psychopath.

That's the character; the actor, fortunately, is a normal guy. Madsen had a hard time acting through that scene, and when the cop blurts out the unscripted line, "I've got a little kid," Madsen lost it. He had recently become a father himself, and even though they were only pretending, he had a tough time finishing the scene.

The change to the scene was crafted by Tarantino and Kirk Baltz, the actor who played Officer Marvin Nash. He explained how that went down in an interview with the Daily Mail:

The moment Michael stops acting crazy is when I said: 'I have a son,' that was my line and not in the original script, but Quentin loved it. I feel that he felt Michael and I may have become a little pally during rehearsals, so before the take, Quentin said to me: 'I want you to get Michael to stop, you know? Just make him stop. Don't let him kill you.' Michael just had a son, and I thought if I bring up something to do with family that could do it, he had no idea I was going to yell that. So we shot it, and I spat out, 'Stop, I have a son,' which caught Michael so off guard he just stopped cold. He looked at Quentin, who smiled back; he had done his work.

One of the many rules of moviemaking is that a final film will look very different from the original script. Through the course of filming, script changes are common, so the original intent of a scene or character often turns out very differently. One of the scenes in Pulp Fiction that shifted from the original script is the moment Vincent "accidentally" shoots Marvin in the face.

Originally, he was supposed to shoot him in the throat, which wouldn't have claimed his life right away. Instead, he was supposed to fight for life while bleeding out and gurgling. As that was happening, Jules and Vincent were to have a discussion about what to do while Marvin listened to their discussion in horror. The scene wasn't changed too much for the film, and while it certainly was gory, it could have been much worse. Phil LaMarr spoke about the scene during an appearance on Nerdist's Talkin' Toons:

We were rehearsing, and originally my character in the back of the car is supposed to be shot twice... he was supposed to shoot me in the throat, and I was supposed to sit there gurgling while they have Tarantino-esque banter: 'So put him out of his misery.' So he was supposed to shoot me a second time. And that’s when the blood sprays all over, and everything continues as it is in the movie. And John [Travolta] said, 'I gotta kill him? Oh man, the audience is going to hate me.' And Quentin stopped and said, 'You’re right.' And he realized the slight difference between, '[a gun shot] What happened?' and aiming at this kid in the back and, 'I’m just going to put him down like a dog.' [Travolta] just had such an understanding of his relationship to the audience, and he was like, 'This will ruin everything else I have in the movie.' You don't like him if he does that. And Quentin was like, 'You’re right.' And he changed it.

When he made an appearance on The Graham Norton Show, Quentin Tarantino explained that it was his own hands "strangling" Diane Kruger during her final scene in Inglourious Basterds. His reasoning was that he didn't like that close-up shots of strangulation never looked real enough, so he opted to do things a bit differently.

He went up to Kruger and asked if she would be okay with him choking her... one time... on camera. He explained his side of the conversation, saying, "What I said to her is, 'I'm going to be the hands, and I'm going to just strangle you, alright? I'm gonna cut off your air - we're going to see the reaction on your face. We're just going to do it once, and we'll never have to do it again."

Kruger agreed, and Tarantino strangled the actress to capture a real reaction from her. It worked, and Kruger wasn't harmed, so it worked out in the end, but cutting off someone's airway like that - even for a brief shot - is still pretty dicey.