To say it's a revisionist view of the second world war is understating it, but when Quentin Tarantino takes on Hitler and the Nazis, there is never any real doubt about who is going to win.

Tarantino today unveiled Inglourious Basterds at the Cannes film festival, starring Brad Pitt as the leader of a troop of Nazi-killing Jewish-American soldiers in occupied France.

Pitt admitted the film was "definitely outrageous" and recalled Tarantino's visit to his French home last summer to pitch it. "All I know is we talked about backstory and we talked about movies into the wee hours. I got up the next morning and I saw five empty bottles of wine on the floor. Five. And something that resembled smoking apparatus, I don't know what that was.

"Apparently I had agreed to do the movie and six weeks later I was in a uniform."

Tarantino said he had wanted to create a character for Pitt for a long time. "Artistically, me and Brad have been sniffing around each other for a while.

"The longing looks across the room, the little notes, 'I like you, do you like me.' Pretty quickly into writing I realised this is the one for Brad and then I started getting nervous – 'shit, if he doesn't do it, what the fuck am I going to do?'"

Tarantino wrote Inglourious Basterds for 10 years on and off and it was financed and filmed, by normal movie standards, remarkably quickly in order to be ready for this year's festival. It is a kind of spaghetti western-comedy-fairy tale where the characters revel in violence.

Asked if it was fair to call it a Jewish revenge fantasy, Tarantino said: "That wouldn't be how I would define it 100%. You could definitely say that and it works completely in that way. That wouldn't be the section in the video store I would maybe put it in.

"People ask me, is it a fairy tale? Is it Jewish wish-fulfilment fantasy? There are aspects of that but to me, more than anything else, it is that my characters change the outcome of the war. Now that didn't happen because my characters didn't exist, but if they had existed then the movie is plausible."

The actor Eli Roth, who plays a baseball bat-swinging Basterd, was upfront about how he felt. "Being Jewish, for me it's like kosher porn. It's something that I have fantasised about since I was a very young child. It was like I performed a sex scene when I beat that guy to death."

The film is also about how cinema could have won the war and the main British character, played by Michael Fassbender, is a film critic turned soldier who is an expert on German cinema. Perhaps predictably, there was generous applause from the audience of film journalists after its first screening today.

Tarantino won Cannes's Palme d'Or for Pulp Fiction in 1994 and served as jury president five years ago. "During this time on the Riviera, cinema is important; even the things which are booed, it's out of passion, it means something. All the world's film press are here and I value that. I am not an American film-maker, I make movies for the planet Earth and Cannes is the place that represents that."

One potential snag for Tarantino winning his second Palme d'Or, it was put to him, is the presence of Isabelle Huppert as jury president. Huppert had been in talks to be in the film.

"I don't think it will affect it at all," said Tarantino. "Nobody adores Isabelle Huppert more than myself.

"It just didn't work out because of scheduling and timing-wise and deal stuff. There was no thing, no thing at all. I don't think twice about it because I adore her and she likes me and I'm sure that we will eventually work together and I can't wait for that day to happen. There's no acrimony between us that I'm aware of at all. I'm still her biggest fan and I hope one day to work with her."

Mike Myers plays a cameo role as a British general briefing the Fassbender character on his mission. Myers said: "I'm the biggest Quentin Tarantino fan that you'll find. My parents were born in Liverpool and my father was in the Royal Engineers and my mother was in the Royal Air Force. Those ladies who stand in front of big maps saying 'Jerry's over Norfolk, scramble Biggin Hill', my mom was one of those people.

"World War II was talked about at the table. So when I got a call saying, would you like to play a World War II general I did a jig, I was very happy and I'm still very happy."

Inglourious Basterds should delight Tarantino fans and irritate his detractors. It may also annoy English teachers. The title is borrowed from a little-known 1978 film called Inglorious Bastards by Enzo Castellari but Tarantino's film is completely original, neither a remake or an adaptation.

"I'm never going to explain the spelling," said Tarantino. "When you do an artistic flourish like that, to describe it, to explain it, to take the piss out of it would invalidate the whole stroke in the first place."