Why Quentin Tarantino Cut Maggie Cheung's Scene From Inglourious Basterds

"Never meet your heroes" is one piece of advice Quentin Tarantino has never listened to. His first feature "Reservoir Dogs" starred Harvey Keitel, his "favorite actor in the world." "Jackie Brown" was a vehicle for Pam Grier, star of 1970s blaxploitation films like "Coffy" which Tarantino loves. "Kill Bill," a samurai film love letter, featured Japanese genre star Sonny Chiba as sword-smith Hattori Hanzō.

There's another collaboration between Tarantino and one of his personal acting icons, one we haven't gotten to see. Who's the icon in question? Hong Kong star Maggie Cheung, who played a character cut from "Inglourious Basterds."

The hero of said film is not one of the titular Nazi-killing squad. No, it's Shosanna Dreyfus (Melanie Laurent), a young Jewish girl in Nazi-occupied France. The sole survivor of her family's massacre, she now poses as a Gentile cinema owner named "Emmanuelle Mimieux." When "Emmanuelle" comes face-to-face with Nazi Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), her family's butcher, he quizzes her on how she acquired her theater. She explains inherited the cinema from her late "aunt and uncle," Jean-Pierre and Ada Mimieux. Tarantino originally planned to show Ada onscreen, with Maggie Cheung embodying the role.

Tarantino considers Cheung, "one of the best actresses on the planet." This isn't surprising since he's also a big fan of Wong Kar-Wai, Cheung's frequent collaborator. Tarantino regards Wong as, "one of the most exciting filmmakers that's come out since I've personally been making films."

He was introduced to Wong by "Days of Being Wild," where Cheung plays Su Li-zhen, the ex-girlfriend of protagonist Yuddy (Leslie Cheung, no relation to Maggie). After seeing Wong's later film "Chungking Express" at the Stockholm Film Festival while promoting "Pulp Fiction," Tarantino helped the film secure North American distribution through his company Rolling Thunder Pictures.

Cheung returned as Su Li-zhen for "In The Mood for Love." Though the connection is too tenuous for it to be an outright sequel to "Days of Being Wild," it's still set in 1960s Hong Kong. Su Li-zhen, now a secretary, has a husband who's always away on business. She finds solace in her neighbor Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung), who has an equally busy wife. Cheung and Leung would later return for another loose follow-up, "2046." "In The Mood For Love" is the kind of film that Frederick Zoller (Daniel Brühl), a Nazi war "hero" who's infatuated with "Emmanuelle," thinks he's in — but he couldn't be more wrong.

The final cut of "Inglourious Basterds" jumps between the two points in Shosanna's life. At the end of chapter one, "Once Upon A Time in Nazi-Occupied France," she's running for her life through the French countryside. We next see her a few years later in chapter 3, "German Night in Paris," where she's already become "Emmanuelle" the cinema owner. Cheung's scene would have filled this gap, but Tarantino decided it didn't need to be filled. As he told Rotten Tomatoes:

"We did the scene, and she was wonderful in the scene, but when we were cutting the movie together we realized we didn't need the scene. Not only wasn't it essential to chronicle Shosanna's first years in Paris before we see her again, it was kinda the opposite of what I would normally do. To describe how Shosanna survived is a movie unto itself. So I'd rather leave that to the viewer, for them to make that movie in their head [...] Now, in the writing of the script I did feel it was necessary, in order for you follow the scenario on the page. But in the making of the movie it wasn't necessary."

Since Cheung's scenes were shot, Tarantino said at the time that he might include them among the deleted scenes on "Inglourious Basterds" home media. Since that didn't happen, it appears Cheung didn't give her approval. That said, the actress also told China Daily reporters that her part being cut was, "really no big deal [...] it's quite common for actors."

"Inglourious Basterds" may not feature Wong Kar-wai's muse, but there's an important similarity between it and Tarantino's cherished "Chungking Express." Not the stories themselves, but how they're told. "Chungking" (and its companion piece "Fallen Angels") both tell two stories in one film each, as does "Basterds."

The structure of "Basterds" is closer to "Fallen Angels" — the films both cross-cut between the two stories. "Chungking Express" is bifurcated, with one story in the first half and another in the second. "Basterds" is also more cleanly divided than "Angels," though. It has four alternating chapters, two for Shosanna and two for the Basterds, then they intersect for the fifth and final, "Revenge of the Giant Face."

Tarantino's observation that Shosanna's survival "is a movie unto itself" rings true. If "Basterds" was just about Shosanna's revenge, then it would make sense to fill in the gaps with Cheung's scenes. The film had a lot more ground to cover, though. Tarantino told Insider that "Basterds" was originally a six-hour mini-series; both that scope and structure remain in the final 150-minute film. For filmmakers, ambition must also come with knowing when to kill your darlings, and Tarantino has both skills.