Inglourious Basterds is a 2009 German-American war-thriller film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino and starring Brad Pitt, Mélanie Laurent, Christoph Waltz, Diane Kruger, Michael Fassbender and Eli Roth. The film tells the fictional alternate history story of two plots to assassinate Nazi Germany's political leadership, one planned by a young French Jewish cinema proprietor, and the other by a team of Jewish-American soldiers led by First Lieutenant Aldo Raine. The film's title was inspired by director Enzo G. Castellari's macaroni combat film, The Inglorious Bastards (1978).