HOWZAT

As the film's cast mounted the famous steps into the Palais - all together, as is traditional at the festival - Pitt ran back down the carpet to fetch Jolie, who had waited behind.

Earlier, Pitt said his appearance the film began over five bottles of wine and some kind of "smoking apparatus".

He plays an American army officer leading a group of Jewish-American soldiers around Europe taking violent revenge on Nazis.

"Quentin came to visit some time at the end of the summer, we talked about backstory, we talked about movies," he said.

"I get up the next morning and see five empty bottles of wine right on the floor. Five.

"And something that resembles a smoking apparatus - I don't know what that was about - and apparently I had agreed to do this film.

"Six weeks later I was in uniform, and I was Lieutenant Aldo Raine (his character in the film)."

Tarantino said he was only days away from abandoning the project altogether at the casting stage after struggling to find the right actor to play one of the German generals.

Dialogue in the film is in English, French and German, and Tarantino said it was only when he found the German actor Christoph Waltz, who speaks all three languages, for the role of Colonel Hans Landa that he felt he could make the movie.

Asked if he had learned German while making the film, Pitt jokingly replied: "Ja. Merci beaucoup."

Tarantino said he had always planned to launch the film at Cannes, which he said was a very special place for film-makers.

"One of the things that's so wonderful about Cannes is during this time on the Riviera, cinema matters, it's important," he said.

"All the world's press, from America, Finland, Iceland, Greenland - they're all here. And a couple from Canada. That's a country?

"I'm not an American film-maker. I make movies for the entire planet Earth and Cannes is the place that represents that."

Tarantino refused to talk about the unusual spelling of the film's title, saying it was an artistic flourish and explaining it would spoil it.

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