A couple months ago, Quentin Tarantino told the New York Times that he had a half-written prequel to Inglourious Basterds that he’d like to make if the first does well. This didn’t come as much of a surprise; if there’s one thing Tarantino likes to do, it’s mention follow-up projects to whatever he’s currently promoting. Additional Kill Bill stories and anime, the Vega Brothers movie and other projects have all been QT-touted vaporware over the years. Then again, Inglourious Basterds was vaporware for a decade, too, and now it exists. So who the hell am I to say? Why you might actually see a prequel/sequel to Basterds, after the jump.

The second film has been described as a prequel, featuring a squad of African-American soldiers that played into a subplot Tarantino dropped from earlier drafts of Basterds. Now, in an interview with GQ, Harvey Weinstein says that over the years he’s read stuff that is now part of the prequel, about which he had this to say:

I’m not tellin’ you! [But] Brad wants to do Inglorious II. We all want to do it. And the movie hasn’t even come out yet! But unfortunately I cannot give away the plot. [pause] Unless you turned into Jacqueline Bisset when she was 27 years old. Under those circumstances, I would give it away.

He goes on to say that there were desires at one point to do the Basterds story as a short series on HBO or Showtime, essentially a QT Band of Brothers (which we’ve also heard about over the years) because there is just that much material. This is also in line with the grandiose projects Tarantino creates.

He had so much stuff mapped out, we could have done like 3 movies. It was just epic. We could do two movies, three movies. I was begging for the movies, but Quentin wanted to do the TV series, Bob [Weinstein] wanted to do the TV series, so it was like two against one, you know? And I was getting outvoted all over the place, so I just figured, “All right, forget it, I’m not gonna be a loser, I’ll jump to the winning side.” And then Quentin turns it into one movie. Go figure.

Read the entire interview for more on Tarantino’s grand plans for Basterds, and what it could of been, and finally how it all ended up as one movie. Harvey also talks about the ‘cutting 40 minutes’ rumor, dismissing it altogether.

Those stories are all untrue. There’s no fucking way. Here, read my lips: That is nuts. Please don’t even write that, it’s insanity. There’s not even a question of that. Whatever you’re reading, it’s like some insane blogger… There’s no truth to any of this. He’s not gonna cut. What he’s doing is just reorganizing some scenes. I mean, the guy had six weeks to cut his movie [for Cannes]; most guys take six months.