CANNES, France, (Reuters) - US director Quentin Tarantino rolls a Western, gangster flick and wartime caper into one in his new film starring Brad Pitt as the leader of a ruthless gang of Nazi-slayers. So fearsome is the band of Jewish-American bastards that Adolf Hitler himself comes to hear of them, and the predictably violent and action-packed narrative weaves real-life figures into a riotous plot that re-writes history. Most of the dialogue is in German and French and translated with subtitles, possibly limiting the films box office potential in the United States. But at the Cannes film festival, where Tarantinos picture is in the main competition and has its world premiere on Wednesday, there was warm applause after a press screening. I am not an American film maker, I make movies for the planet Earth, and Cannes is the place that represents that, said the 46-year-old, who won the Palme dOr in Cannes in 1994 with Pulp Fiction. During this time here on the Riviera, cinema matters, its important, he told reporters, explaining why he rushed to have his movie ready in time for the worlds biggest film festival. Tarantino declined to explain why he inserted spelling mistakes into the title of his film, borrowed from Italian director Enzo Castellaris 1978 picture Inglorious Bastards. The narrative opens in the first year of the German occupation of France, where character Shosanna Dreyfus witnesses the execution of her family at the hands of Nazi Colonel Hans Landa, flamboyantly played by Christoph Waltz. Elsewhere in Europe, Pitts character Aldo Raine forms a group of Jewish-American soldiers charged with scalping their Nazi victims, and so successful are they that Hitler comes to fear them. Diane Kruger plays a famous German actress who is also an undercover agent on a mission to take down the leaders of the Third Reich the strands converge on a small Parisian cinema where history is turned on its head in an explosive climax. The cinema itself to me ... its a metaphor for the power of cinema, Tarantino said. I get a big kick out of that. Much of the humor in Inglourious Basterds stems from language. Americans reputations for speaking nothing other than English is a recurring theme, with Pitts limited Italian comically exposed by the polyglot Landa. Tarantino said he and Pitt had wanted to work together on a movie for some time. Artistically, me and Brad have been sniffing around each other for a while, the longing looks across the room and everything, the little notes: 'I like you, do you like me? Pitt said he agreed to play Raine after discussing the part with the director long into the night. I got up the next morning and I saw five empty bottles of wine laying on the floor ... and something that resembled a smoking apparatus, I dont know what that was about, Pitt said. And apparently I agreed to do the movie, because six weeks later I was in uniform and I was Lieutenant Aldo Raine.