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The literary character Sherlock Holmes is referred to at least twice in the film. The first reference is Landa's smoking pipe, which is a Calabash Meerschaum, the exact same one that Holmes used. The other is Landa's line, "A damn good detective. Finding people is my specialty."
Quentin Tarantino was considering abandoning the film while the casting searched for someone to play Colonel Hans Landa, fearing he'd written a role that was unplayable. After Christoph Waltz auditioned, however, both Tarantino and producer Lawrence Bender agreed they had found the perfect actor for the role.
The only movie Brad Pitt made as a leading actor for The Weinstein Company or its previous iteration, Miramax. He has said it had everything to do with wanting to work with Quentin Tarantino and nothing to do with Harvey Weinstein. His animosity for Weinstein stems from an incident in the 90s where Pitt physically threatened the producer upon learning of Weinstein's sexual harassment of his then-girlfriend Gwyneth Paltrow.
This is the first Quentin Tarantino film to win an Oscar for acting: Christoph Waltz for Best Actor in a Supporting Role. Waltz won another Oscar for Tarantino's Django Unchained (2012) while his Inglorious Basterds costar Brad Pitt would go on to win his first acting Oscar at the end of the decade for Tarantino's Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood.
In a round table discussion with Brad Pitt and Quentin Tarantino, Tarantino said that Til Schweiger had previously refused to put on a Nazi uniform for a film role, largely due to being born and raised in Germany and his very real hatred of anything Nazi related. When Schweiger was told he'd brutally kill a Nazi in every scene he wore the uniform, he happily agreed to play the part of Hugo Stiglitz.
Harvey Keitel: The voice of the American officer negotiating on the wireless radio with Raine and Landa.
Bela B.: The drummer of the German punk band Die Ärzte (The Doctors) appears as an usher at the movie premiere. He is known to be a huge fan of horror and Quentin Tarantino movies.
Bo Svenson: Small cameo as an American Colonel. Svenson was the star of The Inglorious Bastards (1978).
Samm Levine: One of the Basterds also played the painter in the background of Adolf Hitler's introductory scene. (Levine admitted this, by posting a picture of himself as the character on his Twitter account at 4:03 p.m. on August 21, 2009.)
Quentin Tarantino: In the German propaganda film-within-a-film, "Nation's Pride", directed by Eli Roth, Tarantino voiced an American soldier, who says, "I implore you, we must destroy that tower!" A Tarantino dummy also appeared as the first scalped German in the film.
Quentin Tarantino: [threesome] Tarantino typically has a trio of identical background characters moving together in unison. In this film, it is three German school girls in identical uniforms passing Colonel Hans Landa as he goes down the staircase in the theater.
Quentin Tarantino: [copyright under title] As with almost all of Tarantino's directed and produced films, the Roman numerated copyright appears during the opening credits, directly under the title of the film. Displaying the copyright info in the opening credits is an homage to films produced in the 1960s and 1970s.
Quentin Tarantino: [victim's viewpoint] Tarantino's trademark shot of actors from a trunk or engine compartment is replaced by shots from the viewpoint of post swastika-scarred victims.
Quentin Tarantino: [bare foot fetish] Shoshanna is barefoot during the end of the opening scene when she escapes from Colonel Hans Landa, and during the final scenes in the projection room.
Quentin Tarantino: [Mexican standoff] Twice during the scene in LaLouisiane. Once between Archie Hicox, Dieter Hellstrom, and Hugo Stiglitz, and just a few minutes later between Aldo Raine and Sergeant Wilhelm. Raine and Wilhelm also discuss the requirements for a "Mexican standoff".