Inglourious Basterds Trivia
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59 free Inglourious Basterds trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
This Inglourious Basterds trivia quiz covers Quentin Tarantino's 2009 alternate-history war film from the opening farmhouse interrogation to the swastika carved in the final shot. There are questions on the plot (Operation Kino, the Bear Jew, Bridget von Hammersmark's shoe, the card game in the tavern), the cast (Christoph Waltz, Brad Pitt, Mélanie Laurent, Michael Fassbender, Diane Kruger, Daniel Brühl, Til Schweiger, Mike Myers and a retired Rod Taylor as Churchill), and the making of it: the decade-long script, the actors Tarantino wanted first, the fire that burned three times hotter than planned, and why the title is misspelled. Roughly a third of the questions are easy for anyone who has seen the film, a third are medium, and the rest dig into the awards, the box office, the music and the casting what-ifs. It works as a movie-night challenge, a Tarantino pub-quiz round or a solo test. Every answer was checked against a primary or encyclopaedic source, and each question links to the page that confirms it.
30 of 59 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Hollywood star plays Lieutenant Aldo Raine, leader of the Basterds?
Brad Pitt
Brad Pitt had spoken Tarantino's lines before, as a stoned layabout in True Romance, but Tarantino only wrote that one. Aldo Raine was the first role he directed Pitt in.
Q 02What did Inglourious Basterds borrow from a 1978 war film by director Enzo G. Castellari?
Its title
Its title is all Tarantino took: the story is his own, not a remake. Asked about the misspelling, he said he was never going to explain it, likening it to a flourish in a Basquiat painting.
Q 03What nickname does Colonel Hans Landa boast about in the opening scene?
Jew Hunter
Jew Hunter is a title Landa relishes at the farmhouse. By the last chapter, bargaining with the Allies, he shrugs it off as just a name that stuck.
Q 04The French dairy farmer hiding the Dreyfus family under his floorboards is named what?
Perrier LaPadite
Perrier LaPadite gives the family up only after Landa switches their talk to English, a language the people hiding beneath them cannot follow.
Q 05Under what false name does Shosanna run her Paris cinema?
Emmanuelle Mimieux
Emmanuelle Mimieux is the name under which Shosanna meets Landa again. He questions her politely and never lets on whether he recognises the girl who escaped him.
Q 06The German propaganda film premiered at Shosanna's cinema is called what?
Nation's Pride
Nation's Pride gets its premiere at Shosanna's little cinema because its smitten star, Zoller, lobbies for the move, which puts the Nazi leadership under her roof.
Q 07Fredrick Zoller, the war hero starring in the propaganda film, is famous for what military role?
Sniper
Sniper is right: alone in a bell tower, Zoller shot his way into the record books, then played himself in the film made about it.
Q 08Shosanna plans to burn down her cinema using what?
Nitrate film prints
Nitrate film prints burn so fiercely that Shosanna needs no bomb. Her lover Marcel locks the doors and flicks a cigarette into a heap of them behind the screen.
Q 09What is the codename of the British plan to attack the Nazi premiere in Paris?
Operation Kino
Operation Kino takes its name from the German word for cinema. As the general briefing it says, the enemy's rotten eggs are all in one basket, and the plan is to blow up the basket.
Q 10Before the war, British Lieutenant Archie Hicox had what profession?
Film critic
Film critic Hicox made German cinema his speciality before the war, which is why he is picked to walk into a premiere on the arm of a German film star.
Q 11In the tavern guessing game, which famous name is stuck to SS Major Hellström's forehead?
King Kong
King Kong is his card. He works it out by asking whether he crossed from the jungle to America by boat and in chains, guessing first at the story of the slave trade.
Q 12Hicox finally blows his cover in the tavern by doing what?
Making a non-German hand gesture
Making a non-German hand gesture is all it takes: Hicox orders three glasses without using his thumb, and a German counts to three starting from the thumb.
Q 13Which two items does Landa recover from the tavern that expose von Hammersmark?
A shoe and a signed napkin
Q 21Which A-list star did Tarantino originally want for Hans Landa before opting for a native German speaker?
Leonardo DiCaprio
Leonardo DiCaprio was the early idea, but Tarantino came to see Landa as a linguistic genius, a part that needed his dialogue delivered equally well in German, French and English.
Q 22Which actor went up for the part of Hans Landa and ended up playing British officer Archie Hicox instead?
Michael Fassbender
Michael Fassbender read for Landa first. Hicox only came free when Simon Pegg, the original choice, had to pull out over a scheduling clash.
Q 23Which Basterd is a German sergeant, recruited after he murdered a string of Gestapo officers?
Hugo Stiglitz
A shoe and a signed napkin are all Landa needs. At the premiere he lifts her foot into his lap and slips the shoe on, a sinister Cinderella, and it fits.
Q 14At the premiere, Raine, Donowitz and Ulmer pose as filmmakers of what nationality?
Italian
Italian was picked because von Hammersmark reckons Germans have no ear for it. Landa turns out to speak it fluently and makes the Basterds repeat their fake names for fun.
Q 15How does Landa kill Bridget von Hammersmark at the premiere?
He strangles her
He strangles her, and the hands in the close-up are Tarantino's own. The actress said the director did not trust an actor to get the pressure right, so he did it himself.
Q 16Which two Nazi leaders do Ulmer and Donowitz shoot dead in the opera box?
Hitler and Goebbels
Hitler and Goebbels are machine-gunned in their opera box, which is not how history went: both real men killed themselves in Berlin as the war ended.
Q 17In the final scene Raine carves what into Landa's forehead, calling it his masterpiece?
A swastika
A swastika, because Landa has just bargained his way to a new life. Raine wants him to carry something he cannot take off once the uniform is gone.
Q 18Sergeant Donny Donowitz, 'The Bear Jew', executes German soldiers with what?
A baseball bat
A baseball bat, and in a flashback cut from the film it had a history: Donny bought the heaviest he could find and had Jewish neighbours sign it with the names of loved ones in Europe.
Q 19What nickname has the Basterds' leader earned through his habit of scalping Germans?
Aldo the Apache
Aldo the Apache tells every recruit that he owes him a personal debt of one hundred Nazi scalps, and he means to collect.
Q 20Which Austrian actor plays Hans Landa, a role Tarantino feared was 'unplayable'?
Christoph Waltz
Christoph Waltz was the find that kept the production alive. Tarantino said that if he had not found him, he would probably have pulled the plug on the movie.
Hugo Stiglitz is played by Til Schweiger, who had always refused to put on a Nazi uniform for a role. He made an exception for a character who kills them.
Q 24Which comedy star plays British General Ed Fenech in the Churchill briefing scene?
Mike Myers
Mike Myers let it be known he would love a part. He is a Second World War buff whose parents were both veterans, and he had always wanted to play an elderly British general.
Q 25Which star of Hitchcock's The Birds came out of semi-retirement to play Winston Churchill in Inglourious Basterds?
Rod Taylor
Rod Taylor had drifted into semi-retirement when Tarantino, a long-time fan of his action films, offered him the cameo. It turned out to be his last film role.
Q 26Which German actress plays Bridget von Hammersmark, a screen star secretly spying for the Allies?
Diane Kruger
Diane Kruger got the part only after talks with Nastassja Kinski fell through. Tarantino had even flown to Germany to meet Kinski before the deal collapsed.
Q 27Samm Levine, who plays the Basterd Hirschberg, first found fame as a teenager in which cult TV series?
Freaks and Geeks
Freaks and Geeks was cancelled before its first season finished airing. By Levine's account Tarantino was a big fan, though the actor later found that many of his lines had been cut.
Q 28Which US state does Lieutenant Aldo Raine, with his thick mountain drawl, call home?
Tennessee
Tennessee is home, and Raine tells his recruits he is a direct descendant of the mountain man Jim Bridger. That, he says, gives him a little Indian in him, and his battle plan with it.
Q 29Which Tarantino regular is heard but never seen as the narrator of Inglourious Basterds?
Samuel L. Jackson
Samuel L. Jackson never appears on screen: his voice breaks in over the action to tell how one of the Basterds became known to every German soldier.
Q 30Tarantino shelved the Inglourious Basterds script for years because he was missing what?
An ending
An ending was the one thing he could not find. He called the drafts some of the best writing he had ever done, then set them aside and made Kill Bill instead.