For it to be ‘fair’ to call him a misogynist he must have wanted to do these things personally for the specific reason that it was a woman actor on the receiving end and that he enjoys recreating these things for his own personal gratification.
Yes.
“Quentin said, ‘He’s not going to do it right, it’ll either be too much or too little. I know exactly what I need and I think I should just do it’. I have to say it was very strange being strangled by the director.”
Beautifully understated last sentence there.
We don’t have 5D touch o vision. I find it very hard to imagine that I can see the difference between too hard and too little choking, or that any audience member can (albeit with competent actors). I like Tarantino a lot as a director, and Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown will always be in my top films of all time. But just like the whole discussion, I’m able to separate the artist from the art, and I find his actions incomprehensible except in the context of actor abuse and frankly misogyny. I can’t imagine him choking out Brad Pitt, can you? (Edit: or just one case in which he chokes out or otherwise abuses the male actors or extras that die in any of his movies, and I’ll accept that he’s an equal opportunity sadist.)
Maybe the person who is friends with a serial predator who targets actresses, models, anyone he can sink their career… is specially not in a position to step into those kinds of scenes and do it himself. It’s harder to believe that Tarantino didn’t know, when they’re saying they told him.
Hey I forgot all about that, that’s quite remarkable! He actually cut off her air. Well, I must admit the scene worked, it was an extremely convincing depiction of a choke. However, given that he pressured Uma to drive a car that ended up crashing and also personally intervened to spit and choke on her, I can see how these two connected observations look very bad.
Still, I sincerely hope it is about violence for him, and not specifically violence against women. I am just convinced his directorial record on the types of roles he gives actresses should give him the benefit of the doubt against being labelled a misogynist. Recklessness in regards to actor safety is another matter.
I’m not sure if you read the interview with Uma, or Tarantino earlier on, or another actress that was related, but from memory Tarantino aggressively confronted Weinstein twice from what he knew. He clearly didn’t do enough, especially considering what else Weinstein was involved in, which he himself freely admits. I’m just not sure what you’re talking about in that post.
I am talking about the NYT interview with Uma, where she mentions Tarantino confronted Weinstein about what he did to her. There was another actress whose name escapes me that said the same thing.
Daryl Hannah is news to me, I just read about it. It’s not clear if Tarantino did anything behind the scenes after she told him, but she certainly didn’t feel like anyone cared and that’s very bad for Tarantino especially considering the previous incidents.
Why someone like him would continue to work with Weinstein is beyond me. He is clearly a person that cares most of all about his freedom to do his projects his way, and so excused all this bad stuff with that justification. Including risking his actors safety. It sounds like to me from what has been revealed that he has a very weak ethical center. I hope he regrets his decisions and changes for the future. I certainly don’t look up to him in any capacity beyond film director.
Any apologising I may appear to be doing for him in this thread is specifically in regards to him being a misogynist himself. I think that’s a strong claim that should not just be assumed about someone, as I don’t think there are many worse attitudes in the world to have than that.
I read Uma’s interview, but I was referencing the link Gordon posted after that.
I am going to repeat what I said earlier, maybe it’s not super odd for a director to be directly involved in these scenes, but he knew what was going on, maybe even acted in some cases, maybe not in others… You’d think if he actually took anything to heart, cared about these women at all, he would have proceeded with additional consideration… which he clearly did not. And that’s setting the bar low when he should have been doing a lot more knowing about Weinstein in the first place.
Weinstein and Nassar got as far as they did because of their enablers. Those enables are not going to get a pass simply because they didn’t participate in the direct crimes. Taratino looks more like an enabler these days than a clueless friend who shrugged things off.
There is a whole conversation to be had with safe filming practices. Whether it be Twilight Zone, The Birds, The Abyss, what have you – those are legitimate concerns. And I see how the power structure in which a (usually male) director is placed at the top can lead to some really problematic psychosexual situations. No question Hitchcock’s choice to throw birds at Tippi Hedren all day long is hard to disentangle from his frustrated lust for her.
I don’t think it needs to be bundled into #MeToo that Uma Thurman’s character suffered violence and degradation, though. (Particularly as it is impossible to have a female action heroine who isn’t at least confronted with the threat of violence/death, as that goes into the definition of an action hero/ine, and we’ve been hearing for years how there should be more female action heroines.) That is a different conversation about violence in media. I’m not really comfortable with Chastain’s eliding of the difference between content and how it is obtained.
If someone came up to you an told you you were raped, molested and otherwise coerced, would you be spitting her face and choking her in the next few weeks?
Tarantino is trying to portray himself as someone who had their best interest in heart, but didn’t act enough. If he actually had their best interest in heart… you’d think he would behave differently.
You don’t seem interested in reading my posts, so let me make it plain that I am not defending Quentin’s personal choice to be the member of the crew who spit at, and choked, Uma.
What bothers me is that some of the rhetoric flying around seems unwilling to distinguish between a fictional scenario in which an actress goes through a simulation of being degraded or harmed, and the method by which that scenario was put on film.
I’m happy to say that Tarantino should have used a spritz bottle or a properly-vetted Spit Wrangler and it goes without saying that any simulation of strangulation should be conducted within the strictest possible safety parameters. But the mere fact that a fictionalized representation of spitting and strangling occurred does not offend me, and it seems to me that there is a difference between Uma’s prior personal experiences and the job she was hired to do.
And you don’t seem to be reading mine, I already said that if it wasn’t Taratino, this might be seen differently. The people involved… matter. Sure you have a victim mixing fiction from fantasy, but she was victimized in real life while making fantasy. If you want to dehumanize the situation, go ahead, but I am humanizing. You have one victim, a woman who was targeted by violence again women, talking about about a woman who was also victimized, portraying a woman being acted by a man in real life who was friends of a monster and at best, let himself be blind to that fact, at worst enabled it. All that matters.
I don’t even know what we’re arguing about. I got into this part of the thread because I found Jessica Chastain’s comment, in which she seems oblivious to the distinction between a fictional representation and how it was obtained, problematic. I have nowhere said that Tarantino was justified in spitting in her face. I do happen to think that if the script says ‘this character gets spit in the face,’ well, one way or another it ought to be filmed, and the actor knows that going in. He can use a spritz bottle if Uma isn’t comfortable with him doing the spitting. That’s really not the issue I’ve been addressing here.
By the way, I would characterize my description of the situation as ‘professionalizing,’ not ‘dehumanizing.’ Part of an actor’s job is to experience the simulation of unpleasant things.*
*I am not therefore endorsing the way that Mr. Tarantino chose to simulate those particular unpleasant things. Although the wrongness of a spit in the face seems to me utterly trivial compared to what happened with the car crash, incidentally. Unless he had a communicable disease.
I’ll try to explain myself in a way that is clearer.
Your describing professionalism and acting… like these women were not victimized in their profession. They were. I don’t know how you can simply describe fantasy and reality as if these horrific things were not happening around them when we know they were.
This would be a completely different conversation in a world where Hollywood isn’t full of rapists… but it clearly it is. That makes the line of professionalism and fantasy… horrifically blurred. It is no longer black and white, and that is not because the women started speaking out about it. It’s because the line was blurred decades ago by the predators in that industry.
You can’t use a textbook definition where clear lines are made when women are being raped by the people running that industry. It’s not even an if at this point. We know they were.
After catching up on this thread and Uma’s interview, I’ll add a couple things that immediately sprang to mind.
First, Dario Argento pretty famously always featured his own black-gloved hands whenever his actresses were strangled, stabbed, etc. Creeped me out knowing that, and it makes it hard to watch his movies nowadays, as much as I loved them in my youth.
Second, lots of folks are pretty tired of the trope of putting women in peril- it’s lazy, for starters. In fact, recently one person decided to put their money where their mouth is, and fund a prize “in which no woman is beaten, stalked, sexually exploited, raped or murdered”, the Staunch Prize.
This, I’m a little torn on. On the one hand, it seems a bit of an overreaction- does that mean females in your stories all have plot armor? But on the other, I’m genuinely curious what comes of this, and what kinds of submissions they get. How can you have a female protagonist in a thriller/crime novel after all, if they are never put in harm’s way? The Guardian had an interesting article on it last week.
Violence is the basis of action movies, and people will continue to pay to see it. Beatrix Kiddo is going to suffer and commit awful acts of violence, or those movies don’t get made or seen. And they’re good movies.
I’m more interested in another ‘prize,’ the name of which I have forgotten. Some actress pointed out that it’s worth noting how often movies feature two female characters talking directly to each other, at length, about any subject other than men or children. Watching through that lens really made me think about how crappy and shallow most female roles are.
The focus of my comments is extremely limited here. I’m specifically talking about the filming of those scenes in Kill Bill in which Uma Thurman’s character was strangled and spit upon. That is the entire scope of my contribution to this discussion, and it keys off of Jessica Chastain’s comments in which she appears to conflate the content with the method in which it was acquired.
It is never right to abuse an actor any more than it is right to abuse anyone else in any work environment. But to simulate abusive or unpleasant acts, and to simulate the experience of them, is a key component of an actor and director’s profession. Therefore, for the third or fourth time, let me state: I am quite willing to allow that Tarantino’s choice to be the ‘spitter’ and the ‘strangler’ may be as problematic in terms of his relationship with Uma Thurman as, say, Hitchcock’s choice to have birds thrown at Tippi Hedren was. But I am not going to pretend to be offended at the idea of movie scenes in which fictionalized strangling/spitting occurs toward women, without consideration of the specific movie in question. And I don’t concede that, as Chastain appeared to imply, having fictionalized violence against women in a movie is itself some sort of violation of the spirit of #MeToo. There may be a larger cultural conversation about the place of violence in movies, and what that violence signifies and for whom – and guess what, there is such a conversation and it has been going on since movies began. But to conflate that with the behind-the-scenes predation of Weinstein and his ilk seems to me an unsustainable expansion of the movement’s scope.
I also draw a strong distinction between the spitting incident, which was unpleasant, and the car-driving incident, which was life-threatening. In my opinion they are offenses of quite different orders of magnitude. I’m not sure about the chain because I haven’t seen indications whether it was conducted in an unsafe way.
Beyond this, we’re clearly talking past each other so I’ll just move on.
