Quentin Tarantino has started answering for the decisions he made during the making of “Kill Bill,” which saw Uma Thurman nearly suffer serious injuries following a car sequence gone wrong. Eyebrows were further raised when it was revealed that the director himself spit and choked on the actress during key scenes in the film. However, Tarantino defended his position saying he didn’t want another actor or a technician to perform those tasks, and that he could arguably get the takes done faster, since as the director, he’d know exactly what he wants.
For Tarantino, those scenes involving spitting and choking involved trust, and in his talk with Deadline, he pointed to another example in his career, noting that he also guided Diane Kruger through a choking scene in “Inglourious Basterds.”
“When I did ‘Inglourious Basterds,’ and I went to Diane [Kruger], and I said, look, I’ve got to strangle you. If it’s just a guy with his hands on your neck, not putting any kind of pressure and you’re just doing this wiggling death rattle, it looks like a normal movie strangulation. It looks movie-ish. But you’re not going to get the blood vessels bulging, or the eyes filling it with tears, and you’re not going to get the sense of panic that happens when your air is cut off. What I would like to do, with your permission, is just…commit to choking you, with my hands, in a closeup,” he explained. “We do it for 30 seconds or so, and then I stop. If we need to do it a second time, we will. After that, that’s it. Are you down to committing to it so we can get a really good look. It’ll be twice, and only for this amount of time, and the stunt guy was monitoring the whole thing.”
“Diane said, yeah sure. She even said on film in an interview, it was a strange request but by that point I trusted Quentin so much that, sure. We did our two times, and then like Uma with the spitting thing, Diane said, okay, if you need to do it once more, you can,” Tarantino continued. “That was an issue of me asking the actress, can we do this to get a realistic effect. And she agreed with it, she knew it would look good and she trusted me to do it. I would ask a guy the same thing. In fact, I would probably be more insistent with a guy.”
Kruger herself has responded on Instagram, confirming that her experience with Tarantino was positive, calling it a “pure joy” and noting, “He treated me with utter respect and never abused his power or forced me to do anything I wasn’t comfortable with.”
The actress’ full statement be read below.
