The vicious drama between Quentin Tarantino and Uma Thurman is rocking Hollywood — and it’s more complicated than you think

• The latest #MeToo reckoning is between Quentin Tarantino and Uma Thurman.
• Thurman said she suffered from a car crash on the set of “Kill Bill” — and it’s partially Tarantino’s fault.
• Tarantino accepts the blame.
• He’s also been suspect because of his closeness to Harvey Weinstein, who produced all his movies.
• But Thurman is more angry at the Creative Arts Agency and “Kill Bill” producers, who she says avoided helping her after the accident.
• The backlash toward Tarantino was swift, but CAA and those producers have largely escaped scrutiny.
• Confusing the narrative even further, Thurman and Tarantino gave interviews to journalists who muddled the story.

As the #MeToo movement sweeps through Hollywood, the latest powerful man to be snagged in scandal is director Quentin Tarantino.

During the filming of “Kill Bill” in the early 2000s, star Uma Thurman suffered from a car crash. Tarantino, she says, deserves part of the blame.

But it’s complicated.

The frayed relationship between Tarantino and Thurman, and the way the story made its way to the public discourse, is at the crossroads of almost every controversial issue at the center of #MeToo and the fallout in Hollywood following the Harvey Weinstein scandal. It’s tangled up in questions about the shaky facts around some of these debates, how the discourse forms swiftly, how that conversation can be at odds with the perspectives of the people involved, and how we’re supposed to think about the art created around these situations.

Here’s a look at what it’s all about.

Quentin Tarantino and Uma Thurman were collaborators in the 1990s — and Harvey Weinstein helped them succeed.

Harvey Weinstein’s place in Tarantino and Thurman’s careers shows just how powerful he was in the Hollywood system.

In the 1990s, Weinstein produced hit after hit. His productions companies — Miramax, Dimension, and The Weinstein Company — distributed every Tarantino movie from 1992’s “Reservoir Dogs,” his directorial debut, to his latest, 2015’s “The Hateful Eight.”

In the 1990s and early 2000s, Thurman was Tarantino’s star actress. She garnered acclaim for starring in 1994’s “Pulp Fiction,” which made them both household names.

Then she starred in “Kill Bill: Volume 1” and “Kill Bill: Volume 2” in 2003 and 2004 — a two-part, violent epic where Thurman plays an assassin seeking revenge on the people who killed her unborn child and put her into a coma, and her former boss and lover who planned the murder.

Tarantino and Thurman also remained friends and reported romantic partners at that time.

Tarantino pushed back against Weinstein’s alleged sexual misconduct — but says it wasn’t enough.

Tarantino’s decades-long closeness to Weinstein made people suspicious, especially after allegations surfaced about Weinstein in 2017.

In an October interview with The New York Times, shortly after the Times was first to publish allegations of Weinstein’s sexual misconduct in late 2017, Tarantino said he didn’t know the full scope of Weinstein’s behavior. He said he knew Rose McGowan settled a rape accusation with Weinstein, as well as rumors of sexual misconduct, and now he felt ashamed he didn’t push back more against Weinstein and stop working with him earlier.

“I knew enough to do more than I did,” Tarantino said. “There was more to it than just the normal rumors, the normal gossip. It wasn’t secondhand. I knew he did a couple of these things.”

On one occasion, after Tarantino began dating Mira Sorvino in 1995, Sorvino told him about Weinstein’s alleged behavior towards her. Tarantino said he was appalled and told Weinstein to back off.

“I thought Harvey was hung up on her in this Svengali kind of way,” Tarantino told the Times. “Because he was infatuated with her, he horribly crossed the line.”

“What I did was marginalize the incidents,” he continued. “Anything I say now will sound like a crappy excuse … I chalked it up to a ’50s-’60s era image of a boss chasing a secretary around the desk. As if that’s OK.”

In the Times interview, Tarantino called for a reckoning in Hollywood over its treatment of women.

“[Hollywood is] operating under an almost Jim Crow-like system that us males have almost tolerated,” Tarantino said. “We allowed it to exist because that’s the way it was.”

Thurman, on the other hand, was allegedly attacked by Weinstein.

While Tarantino’s professional work blossomed in collaboration with Weinstein and he says he missed signs of any alleged misconduct, Thurman was furious.

In an interview with Access Hollywood in October and an Instagram post in November, Thurman said she was angry at Weinstein and was taking time before speaking out on the issue.

“Happy Thanksgiving Everyone!” she wrote on Instagram, alongside a still from “Kill Bill.” “Except you Harvey, and all your wicked conspirators — I’m glad it’s going slowly — you don’t deserve a bullet.”

H A P P Y T H A N K S G I V I N G I am grateful today, to be alive, for all those I love, and for all those who have the courage to stand up for others. I said I was angry recently, and I have a few reasons, #metoo, in case you couldn’t tell by the look on my face. I feel it’s important to take your time, be fair, be exact, so… Happy Thanksgiving Everyone! (Except you Harvey, and all your wicked conspirators – I’m glad it’s going slowly – you don’t deserve a bullet) -stay tuned Uma Thurman

Thurman found her venue with Maureen Dowd, a columnist at the New York Times. In an interview published on February 3, she said Weinstein attacked her in a hotel room not long after the release of “Pulp Fiction.”

“It was such a bat to the head. He pushed me down. He tried to shove himself on me. He tried to expose himself. He did all kinds of unpleasant things,” Thurman said. “But he didn’t actually put his back into it and force me. You’re like an animal wriggling away, like a lizard. I was doing anything I could to get the train back on the track. My track. Not his track.”

Thurman said she felt partly to blame for all of Weinstein’s alleged victims. By starring in “Kill Bill,” she said she made it seem as if it was OK for women to work with Weinstein.

“I am one of the reasons that a young girl would walk into his room alone, the way I did,” Thurman said. “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.”

Thurman said she told Tarantino about the incident in 2001. Then, “the penny dropped for him,” she said, and he confronted Weinstein. Weinstein gave a “half-assed apology” that resembled his apologies from the past few months, Thurman said.

“In this case, I wasn’t giving Harvey the benefit of the doubt,” Tarantino told Deadline in a February 4 interview. “I knew he was lying, that everything Uma was saying, was the truth. When he tried to wriggle out of it, and how things actually happened, I never bought his story. I said, I don’t believe you. I believe her. And if you want to do ‘Kill Bill,’ you need to make this right.”

Tarantino and Thurman’s relationship fell apart after a car crash on the set of “Kill Bill.”

The pivotal incident between Tarantino and Thurman happened on one of the final days of the nine-month shoot for “Kill Bill.”

In a scene where she’s on her way to commit the titular murder, Thurman’s character drives down a straight dirt road. Thurman had reservations about the car’s stability and asked if a stuntman could do it. Tarantino persuaded her that it would be safe.

Thurman crashed. She injured herself.

“The steering wheel was at my belly and my legs were jammed under me,” she told the New York Times. “I felt this searing pain and thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m never going to walk again.’”

Thurman suffered from a concussion and had neck and knee injuries. She said she fought with Tarantino and accused him of trying to kill her, which made him furious.

Tarantino characterized the incident differently. In the interview with Deadline, he said the danger came from a last-minute decision to change the direction of the drive. The car would go down a road that hadn’t been tested by the production team and wasn’t as straight as it looked.

“She believed me. Because she trusted me. I told her it would be OK,” Tarantino said. “I told her the road was a straight line. I told her it would be safe. And it wasn’t. I was wrong. I didn’t force her into the car. She got into it because she trusted me.”

He said the mistake was the biggest regret of his life.

“As a director, you learn things and sometimes you learn them through horrendous mistakes,” Tarantino said. “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.”

The outrage against Tarantino was swift and harsh.

After Thurman’s interview with Dowd was published online, the backlash against Tarantino was harsh. Many users on Twitter held him as an accomplice of Weinstein and a reckless professional.

In addition to the car crash, part of the condemnation was about a scene where Thurman’s “Kill Bill” character is choked with a chain. Dowd wrote that Tarantino had “done the honors” himself, as well as spit into her face for a scene that called for it.

—Kaivan Shroff (@KaivanShroff) February 3, 2018

—Melissa Silverstein (@melsil) February 3, 2018

—Miriam Bale (@mimbale) February 5, 2018

Condemnation came from within the movie industry as well. Asia Argento, who accused Harvey Weinstein of sexually assaulting her, called him a “sick f—.”

—Asia Argento (@AsiaArgento) February 3, 2018

Judd Apatow said Tarantino ignored one of Weinstein’s alleged victims.

—Judd Apatow (@JuddApatow) February 3, 2018

Jessica Chastain derided the aestheticization of violence in Tarantino’s movies, suggesting they enable on-set abuses.

—Jessica Chastain (@jes_chastain) February 4, 2018

—Jessica Chastain (@jes_chastain) February 4, 2018

—Jessica Chastain (@jes_chastain) February 4, 2018

But Thurman’s relationship with Tarantino is far more ambivalent.

While the audience outrage against Tarantino exploded quickly, Thurman herself isn’t adopting as harsh a tone.

To be clear, she hasn’t totally absolved Tarantino for the car crash, but she finds him negligent rather than sadistic.

“The circumstances of this event were negligent to the point of criminality. I do not believe though with malicious intent,” she said.

She also said she was grateful that Tarantino took a risk by digging up footage of the crash, which Thurman said Weinstein and other producers on “Kill Bill” had denied to her.

“Quentin Tarantino was deeply regretful and remains remorseful about this sorry event, and gave me the footage years later so I could expose it and let it see the light of day, regardless of it most likely being an event for which justice will never be possible,” she said. “He also did so with full knowledge it could cause him personal harm, and I am proud of him for doing the right thing and for his courage.”

i post this clip to memorialize it’s full exposure in the nyt by Maureen Dowd. the circumstances of this event were negligent to the point of criminality. i do not believe though with malicious intent. Quentin Tarantino, was deeply regretful and remains remorseful about this sorry event, and gave me the footage years later so i could expose it and let it see the light of day, regardless of it most likely being an event for which justice will never be possible. he also did so with full knowledge it could cause him personal harm, and i am proud of him for doing the right thing and for his courage. THE COVER UP after the fact is UNFORGIVABLE. for this i hold Lawrence Bender, E. Bennett Walsh, and the notorious Harvey Weinstein solely responsible. they lied, destroyed evidence, and continue to lie about the permanent harm they caused and then chose to suppress. the cover up did have malicious intent, and shame on these three for all eternity. CAA never sent anyone to Mexico. i hope they look after other clients more respectfully if they in fact want to do the job for which they take money with any decency.

In his Deadline interview, Tarantino said spitting on Thurman himself, rather than have the actor Michael Madsen do it, was for practical reasons. They’d also be able to do it in fewer takes, since Tarantino, as the director, knew exactly what he wanted.

“Naturally, I did it. Who else should do it? A grip? One, I didn’t trust Michael Madsen because, I don’t know where the spit’s going to go, if Michael Madsen does it,” Tarantino said. “The idea is, I’m doing it, I’m taking responsibility. Also, I’m the director, so I can kind of art direct this spit. I know where I want it to land. I’m right next to the camera. So, boom! I do it. Now, if I screw up and I keep missing, once we get to that third one, if she doesn’t want to do it anymore, well then, that’s on me.”

As for why it had to be real spit, Tarantino explained to Deadline that he tried alternate methods and it didn’t achieve the realism he was looking for.

Tarantino also said having him choke her with a chain was her idea.

“I was assuming that when we did it, we would have maybe a pole behind Uma that the chain would be wrapped around so it wouldn’t be seen by the camera, at least for the wide shot,” Tarantino said. “But then it was Uma’s suggestion. To just wrap the thing around her neck, and choke her. Not forever, not for a long time. But it’s not going to look right. I can act all strangle-ey, but if you want my face to get red and the tears to come to my eye, then you kind of need to choke me.”

It’s also worth noting the unique power dynamic between Tarantino and Thurman. While Tarantino was the director, the two worked collaboratively on the movie. They developed the character together, and Tarantino delayed production on the movie for months to account for Thurman’s pregnancy at the time.

In the years since the crash, Thurman and Tarantino have reverted back to a friendship, if a tenuous one.

Tarantino confirmed that he assisted Thurman by helping find the footage, which had been in his archive for 15 years. He told Deadline that the two have been “OK.”

“Uma was in turmoil about the uprising against me this whole weekend,” Tarantino said. “She never meant this to roll over onto me. We’ve been talking about it ad nauseum.”

Tarantino said there was a similar experience with him faux-strangling Diane Kruger in “Inglourious Basterds.” On Instagram on February 6, Kruger wrote that Tarantino didn’t make her do anything she was uncomfortable with.

“My work experience with Quentin Tarantino was pure joy,” Kruger wrote. “He treated me with utter respect and never abused his power or forced me to do anything I wasn’t comfortable with.”

In light of the recent allegations made by Uma Thurman against Harvey Weinstein and her terrifying work experience on “Kill Bill”, my name has been mentioned in numerous articles in regards to the choking scene in “Inglourious Basterds”. This is an important moment in time and my heart goes out to Uma and anyone who has ever been the victim of sexual assault and abuse. I stand with you. For the record however, I would like to say that my work experience with Quentin Tarantino was pure joy. He treated me with utter respect and never abused his power or forced me to do anything I wasn’t comfortable with. With love, D xoxo

Tarantino doesn’t have any benefit of the doubt.

One major factor muddling the conversation about what, exactly, is happening between Tarantino and Thurman is that few people in that conversation are willing to give Tarantino the benefit of the doubt.

Because of his decades-long closeness to Weinstein, he may be lying about his ignorance of his alleged crimes. If not, he may have been criminally negligent.

Tarantino has also publicly shared beliefs that many find unsavory. In a 2003 interview with radio host Howard Stern, he defended convicted rapist Roman Polanski.

“He didn’t rape a 13-year-old. It was statutory rape … he had sex with a minor. That’s not rape,” Tarantino said. “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.”

Samantha Geimer, who Polanski raped, told the New York Daily News that Tarantino is wrong, but says she’s willing to forgive Tarantino because of his support of Thurman and other actresses who have been assaulted.

“It’s not a big deal to me what people think,” Geimer said. “It doesn’t make a difference in my life. I know what happened. I do not need other people weighing in on what it’s like getting raped at 13.”

On Thursday, Tarantino apologized for his remarks.

“Fifteen years later, I realize how wrong I was,” Tarantino said in a statement. “Ms. Geimer WAS raped by Roman Polanski. When Howard brought up Polanski, I incorrectly played devil’s advocate in the debate for the sake of being provocative. I didn’t take Ms. Geimer’s feelings into consideration and for that I am truly sorry. So, Ms. Geimer, I was ignorant, and insensitive, and above all, incorrect.”

There is also the perception that, as a filmmaker, Tarantino uses his art as a proxy for an ideal moral universe. His movies are a form of wish fulfillment. He has Jewish actors bash Nazi heads in “Inglourious Basterds” and black actors massacre slaveowners in “Django Unchained,” because he thinks that would be a good thing and wants to see that onscreen. To him, what happens onscreen and what happens off-screen are intertwined. (He’s also been criticized in those terms for use of racial slurs in his movies.)

With that understanding, critics claim, choking and spitting on an actress has a completely different meaning. If Tarantino is making his movies as a form of wish fulfillment, then choking and spitting on actresses in that process is considerably more ugly.

“He loves actors’ baggage of all sorts,” Larissa MacFarquhar wrote in the New Yorker in 2003, following a visit to the set of “Kill Bill.” “When Tarantino says they’ve done it all, he means, equally, the roles they’ve played and the life they’ve lived. These things are not distinct for him: Both create a kind of density or thickness in a character that you can’t get any other way.”

The venues for each story muddle them even further.

Both major interviews — with Thurman and Tarantino — have been deeply criticized.

Maureen Dowd, who interviewed Thurman for the New York Times, wrote her interview in a way that, to many, minimized the experience. Her story’s main focus was on Weinstein as well as a sexual assault Thurman experienced when she was 16 years old. The passage about Tarantino occupied the second half of the article, and included plenty of her own prose but few direct quotations.

In interfering with Thurman’s story with her own writing, Dowd made the situation more confusing than it should have been. Her writing robbed the story of some of its power, some argue.

—𝕏𝕖𝕟𝕚 𝕁𝕒𝕣𝕕𝕚𝕟 (@xeni) February 3, 2018

—Ira Madison III (@ira) February 3, 2018

—J. Escobedo Shepherd (@jawnita) February 3, 2018

—Kayleigh Donaldson (@Ceilidhann) February 3, 2018

—Lindsey Adler (@lindseyadler) February 3, 2018

—porochista khakpour (@PKhakpour) February 3, 2018

—Pᴀᴛʀɪᴄᴋ Kᴀʀʟssᴏɴ ⛈ (@Patrickesque) February 3, 2018

Dowd also wrote her article in a way that Thurman being sexually assaulted, Weinstein’s alleged harassment, and Tarantino’s responsibility for the car crash were on the same plane. (“She has been raped. She has been sexually assaulted. She has been mangled in hot steel.”) Thurman disputed that characterization in her Instagram post.

Tarantino’s follow-up interview, too, is framed unevenly. He spoke to Deadline’s Mike Fleming Jr., who has a history of commentary that’s perceived as sympathetic to men who have been accused of sexual misconduct. He wrote in the introduction to his interview about stories “often getting twisted to suit convenient narratives in this #MeToo moment.”

—Mark Harris (@MarkHarrisNYC) February 6, 2018

—Alison Willmore (@alisonwillmore) February 6, 2018

—Lily (@woahx31) February 6, 2018

—Angie J. Han (@ajhan) February 6, 2018

—Kayleigh Donaldson (@Ceilidhann) February 6, 2018

Both stories also made it unclear why Tarantino didn’t get involved in Dowd’s piece. Dowd wrote that Tarantino was unresponsive to her efforts to reach him. Tarantino said he supported Thurman when she told him about the interview, but never got in touch with Dowd.

Dowd later told a New York Times news reporter that she reached out to Tarantino six times. The Times confirmed that Tarantino received the messages and that Thurman encouraged her to participate in the story, but Tarantino didn’t respond to Dowd regardless.

“We made a request to reach him six times through various channels,” Eileen Murphy, the head of communications at the New York Times, told INSIDER.

Murphy declined to comment on the subject of why Dowd, an opinion columnist, wrote the story instead of a reporter on the news team.

Weinstein, of course, tried to muddle the story even further. In most stories that involve his alleged sexual misconduct, his publicist releases a statement after the story is published with the intention of casting doubt on the story’s veracity. In this case, his publicist sent images of Thurman and Weinstein hanging out together, suggesting they were friends.

“Ms. Thurman’s statements to the Times are being carefully examined and investigated before deciding whether any legal action against her would be appropriate,” a representative for Weinstein told INSIDER.

All of this begs the question: Who can be trusted to tell stories of abuse?

Having a writer with strong preconceptions report on a story of abuse or negligence causes a few problems.

When the reporter values a narrative over facts, significant details become loose. Why didn’t Tarantino participate in Dowd’s story? Did Thurman hold Tarantino as responsible as she did for Weinstein? Was she bothered by the spitting and choking scenes in “Kill Bill”? What’s her relationship with Tarantino like now? How many people saw Thurman’s pushback to Dowd’s story on Instagram compared to her original article?

Some of those questions took days to answer, and some still don’t have answers publicly available.

Because the story wasn’t nailed in straightforward terms the first time, Thurman ultimately cast doubt on the reporter who wrote about her own story. Dowd also opened up ambiguities and ambivalences that were exploited by bad-faith critics of both Tarantino and Thurman. And the entire enterprise of reporting on abuse in Hollywood — a massively important project — has been weakened.

Real life is messy.

While some have characterized Tarantino as a Weinstein-enabling monster, Thurman’s picture of him is far from black and white.

Was Tarantino negligent? Tarantino says yes. So does Thurman.

Was Tarantino abusive or malicious? Thurman stops short of that.

These are two people with decades of closeness. They’ve been artistic collaborators, professional colleagues, and personal friends.

Through a representative, Thurman declined INSIDER’s request for comment. Representatives for Tarantino didn’t immediately respond to INSIDER’s requests for comment.

The overlooked people in this story are the producers, the agents, and the movie’s insurers.

In her Instagram post, Thurman harshly condemned the Creative Arts Agency (CAA), which represented Thurman, and the producers Lawrence Bender, E. Bennett Walsh, and Weinstein.

“The cover up after the fact is unforgivable,” she wrote. “For this, I hold Lawrence Bender, E. Bennett Walsh, and the notorious Harvey Weinstein solely responsible.”

Thurman accused them of more than negligence, but of criminally conspiring to cover up harm and withhold justice by keeping the unedited video of the crash out of her hands. It was only published with Dowd’s article after Tarantino dug it up from his archives at Thurman’s request.

“They lied, destroyed evidence, and continue to lie about the permanent harm they caused and then chose to suppress,” Thurman said. “The cover-up did have malicious intent, and shame on these three for all eternity.”

After filming “Kill Bill,” Tarantino stopped working with Walsh. He stopped working with Bender after 2009’s “Inglourious Basterds.” Bender recently produced “Hacksaw Ridge,” directed by Mel Gibson, who remains unapologetic about his comments widely perceived as sexist and antisemitic.

In a statement on Wednesday, Bender denied he tried to cover up the incident.

“I never hid anything from Uma or anyone else nor did I participate in any cover up of any kind,” he told the Hollywood Reporter. “I deeply regret that Uma suffered the pain she has, both physically and emotionally, for all of these years from the accident that occurred on the set of ‘Kill Bill.’”

CAA has also been widely accused of turning a blind eye at Weinstein’s alleged misconduct. At least eight talent agents were told of Weinstein’s alleged misconduct, according to the New York Times, and did nothing. The company later issued a statement apologizing for neglecting to protect its clients from Weinstein.

Though the CAA has enormous influence over Hollywood, it’s easy to overlook. Its role in representing and managing actors, producers, directors, writers, and everyone else in the entertainment industry is relatively obscure to the outside world.

Tarantino told Deadline that Dowd didn’t talk about Walsh and Bender in her story because the two “lawyered up and they seemed to keep themselves from being named in the piece” and had their names redacted from the article.

Times representative Eileen Murphy declined to comment on the matter. CAA and representatives for Bender and Walsh didn’t immediately respond to INSIDER’s request for comment.

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