Uma Thurman was surely going to chime in with her two cents about the whole Harvey Weinstein sexual assault fiasco that has rampaged Hollywood fort he better part of 6 months now. Last November, when asked by Access Hollywood for a comment on Weinstein Thurman was visibly angry but not ready to tell her story just yet.
“I don’t have a tidy soundbite for you, because I’ve learned — I’m not a child, and I’ve learned that when I’ve spoken in anger I usually regret the way I express myself. So I’ve been waiting to feel less angry. And when I’m ready, I’ll say what I have to say.”
Today, in a scathing interview with The New York Times, Thurman revealed to Maureen Dowd that Weinstein indeed sexually assaulted her in a hotel room.
“I was ultimately compliant,” she remembers. “I tried to say no, I cried, I did everything I could do. He told me the door was locked but I never ran over and tried the knob. When I got home, I remember I stood in front of the mirror and I looked at my hands and I was so mad at them for not being bloody or bruised. Something like that tunes the dial one way or another, right? You become more compliant or less compliant, and I think I became less compliant.”
This wall in promotion for "Kill Bill: Volume Two," which, it turns out, was a total nightmare for Uma.
“I am one of the reasons that a young girl would walk into his room alone, the way I did. Quentin used Harvey as the executive producer of ‘Kill Bill,’ a movie that symbolizes female empowerment. And all these lambs walked into slaughter because they were convinced nobody rises to such a position who would do something illegal to you, but they do.” ... “I used the word ‘anger’ but I was more worried about crying, to tell you the truth,” she says now. “I was not a groundbreaker on a story I knew to be true. So what you really saw was a person buying time.”
It's not just Weinstein, Thurman has, more or less, thrown Quentin Tarantino under the bus for forcing her to perform a car stunt in "Kill Bill: Volume Two," which resulted in Thurman hitting a palm tree.
“The steering wheel was at my belly and my legs were jammed under me,” Thurman says. “I felt this searing pain and thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m never going to walk again.’ When I came back from the hospital in a neck brace with my knees damaged and a large massive egg on my head and a concussion, I wanted to see the car and I was very upset. Quentin and I had an enormous fight, and I accused him of trying to kill me. And he was very angry at that, I guess understandably because he didn’t feel he had tried to kill me.”
The actual video is available below.
Thurman's then-husband Ethan Hawke wasn't too happy about the incident either, The actor is interviewed in the NYT article stating “I approached Quentin in very serious terms and told him that he had let Uma down as a director and as a friend," telling QT “Hey, man, she is a great actress, not a stunt driver, and you know that.” Hawke did add that QT “was very upset with himself and asked for my forgiveness.”
“Two weeks after the crash, after trying to see the car and footage of the incident, she had her lawyer send a letter to Miramax, summarizing the event and reserving the right to sue. Miramax offered to show her the footage if she signed a document ‘releasing them of any consequences of my future pain and suffering,’ she says. She didn’t.
“Thurman was in ‘a terrible fight for years’ with Tarantino, she says. ‘We had to then go through promoting the movies. It was all very thin ice. We had a fateful fight at Soho House in New York in 2004 and we were shouting at each other because he wouldn’t let me see the footage and he told me that was what they had all decided.’
“Now, many years later, inspired by the #MeToo movement, thurman says she has come to terms with her ‘dehumanization to the point of death’ during that car stunt mishap, so much so that she “ramped up the pressure to cajole the crash footage out of Tarantino.”
“’Quentin finally atoned by giving it to me after 15 years, right?’ she says. ‘Not that it matters now, with my permanently damaged neck and my screwed-up knees.'”
That seems highly unfair, for an actress to be forced to perform a dangerous stunt. One would say she could have easily just not done the stunt, refused, but one cannot imagine the pressure of being put into the situation she was in. QT comes off as immature, but he did apologize afterward and felt very bad. This isn't a career-killing moment for the director but it is no doubt a shot to the head of his reputation.
It does sound like Thurman and Tarantino were still talking to each other as early as 2014, in an interview with Vs. Magazine she mentioned how they both had a good laugh with the rumors they were dating: "I was discussing [the rumors] with Mr Tarantino last night. He was angry at me for not calling him back because as he said, 'According to the papers we are practically married!' and he laughed hysterically." This was probably a way for Thurman to just vent off demons that have been lurking inside her for many years.