Though the latest film by Quentin Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds, has no shortage of things for movie nerds to wet their pants over, one of the most obvious is the film's brilliant casting. Prominent German actors fill the German roles, the French play the French and though there are a few more exceptions on the American side, a number of Jewish-Americans fill out the ranks of the eponymous Nazi-slaughtering commando unit. Notably, Tarantino cast his protégé Eli Roth — a burly Jewish-American actor-director — as the Basterds’ No. 2, Donnie “The Bear Jew” Donnowitz.

“I learned so much from Quentin,” says Roth. “I'd already learned so much from him as a writer, but working as an actor I saw a lot of things he did that I wanted to bring onto my sets. I really understood what it felt like when you [as an actor] don't feel like you've gotten something right, but everyone else wants to move on, and the director's saying ‘No, let's move on, it's great,’ but you know you can do it better. With Quentin, we're really close friends, so there's no bullshit between us.”

Careers like Roth's are the reason why people from all over the world will abandon their entire lives and move to the U.S. to take a crack at the film industry. Shortly after graduating from film school, he wrote, directed and produced three of the most successful horror films in recent memory — Cabin Fever, Hostel and Hostel: Part II — and befriended two of the most celebrated contemporary film directors in America, David Lynch and Tarantino.

In addition to his minor role in Basterds, Roth also directed the Nazi propaganda film-within-a-film, Nation's Pride, and acted as Tarantino's unofficial “Jewish technical advisor” while the script was being written. When his friend was struggling with the ending of the film, Roth invited him over to his family's Passover Seder, during which the history of the Jews (including the Holocaust) is discussed, so that Tarantino could better understand the Jewish psychology behind never, ever forgetting. Though he modestly makes no claims to any of the script's content, the seder does tie in, chillingly, to Lt. Aldo Raine's (Brad Pitt) preferred method of marking those Nazis he does leave alive, so that people can always tell what they are, even when the uniforms are discarded long after the war.

“As a kid... I remember watching Holocaust movies where you just want the Jews to stand up and fight back,” says Roth. “It's like, why didn't they just fight back and kill everybody? I just couldn't understand that. Of course, later on in life, you learn that these people were starved in train cars and half delirious and there were kids whose parents were shot in front of them. And they were all put together with people who spoke many different languages so that nobody could communicate and they were all turning on each other.... That was part of the reason why it was so satisfying to make a movie about Jews kicking ass. That was actually a joke on set while we were filming. We kept making reference to Knocked Up, where they talk about Munich as 'Jews kicking ass.' While we were shooting we were like, 'This is the movie those guys were talking about in Knocked Up.'”

Though it rests comfortably on the quirks and devices Tarantino has built a career out of, between all of the prolonged bludgeonings, stabbings, shootings and, in one memorable scene, one man inserting his entire forearm into another's mouth, Basterds is probably the director’s most gruesome film, even if the actual number of minutes where people's bodies are creatively ventilated clocks in well below the slaughtertime on something like Kill Bill Volume I. Some early viewers have criticized the violence in the film for actually making the Jews less sympathetic than the Nazis in some scenes, though this perspective spectacularly misses the point. Spelling out the biggest way in which this opinion is wrong-headed would spoil the ending, though Roth's excitement about “Jews kicking ass” illustrates another, more minor one, perfectly. Tarantino never once forgets that the largest, most unambiguously evil atrocity in recorded history was committed against the Jewish people over half a century ago, and while his heroes may crack macabre one-liners as they go about their grim work, there's also an unspoken understanding that these men are expressing the pent-up, existential rage of a people who refuse to be exterminated.

“People came up to us after our first screening [at the San Diego Comicon], just shaking,” says Roth. “They told us they had fantasized about it. It was exactly what they had been fantasizing about since they were kids, and to see it was — I made the joke that it was kosher porn. It was porn for Jews. Everyone has had fantasies, just as they have about taking down the 9-11 hijackers. Everyone has wanted to go back in time and destroy the most evil people who ever lived.”