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Quentin Tarantino Apologises To Uma Thurman, But Faces Backlash For Defending Roman Polanski

By Silverscreen India Staff
Feature Image: Screen Crush

Quentin Tarantino, speaking to Deadline, recently admitted that his biggest regret in life was to make actress Uma Thurman do the car stunt herself while filming Kill Bill, a video of which Thurman shared for her interview with The New York Times.

A D V E R T I S E M E N T

“I thought, a straight road is a straight road and I didn’t think I needed to run the road again to make sure there wasn’t any difference, going in the opposite direction. Again, that is one of the biggest regrets of my life. As a director, you learn things and sometimes you learn them through horrendous mistakes. That was one of my most horrendous mistakes, that I didn’t take the time to run the road, one more time, just to see what I would see,” he told Deadline, while apologising for his actions.

The interview has the filmmaker narrating his side of the story, and speaking about how he ensured that disgraced film producer Harvey Weinstein apologised to Thurman for his sexual misconduct.

In an exclusive interview with Maureen Dowd of The New York Times, Thurman spoke about Tarantino and how Weinstein had assaulted her, even to the point of threatening to derail her career.

In the iconic scene in Kill Bill where Thurman is driving the blue convertible, the actress was asked to do the driving herself despite her reservations about safety. Tarantino didn’t accept her no and assured her that she had nothing to worry. Her instructed her ‘hit 40 miles per hour or your hair won’t blow the right way and I’ll make you do it again.’

“But that was a deathbox that I was in. The seat wasn’t screwed down properly. It was a sand road and it was not a straight road,” she told The New York Times.

On Weinstein, Tarantino said, “So I made Harvey apologise to Uma. In the Maureen Dowd article it says, that is when Quentin confronted Harvey? Well, my confrontation was saying, you have to go to Uma. This happened. You have to apologise to her and she has to accept your apology, if we’re going to do Kill Bill together.”

While Tarantino’s side of the story has come in focus, there are several who aren’t buying his apology. Apart from the fact that soon after his apology, an audio of the Pulp Fiction director defending filmmaker Roman Polanski, who is accused of raping minor girls, has surfaced.

A clip and transcript of the comments in a 2003 radio interview with Howard Stern has surfaced this week, with him defending Polanski: “He had sex with a minor. That’s not rape. To me, when you use the word rape, you’re talking about violent, throwing them down – it’s like one of the most violent crimes in the world … she wanted to have [sex]! Dated the guy!”

Actress Busy Phillips took to Twitter, reacting to the audio and her own frustration at trying to star in a movie by him.

Golden Globe Award winner Jessica Chastain, too, tweeted about how Tarantino defending Polanski mirrors his filmmaking style, where he uses violence against women as a plot device.

 

Here are other reactions:

 

Feature Image: ScreenCrush

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Silverscreen India Staff is a at Silverscreen India, and can be reached by email at contact@silverscreen.in