Tarantino Says He Regrets Thurman Car Crash But Denies Bullying Her Into Doing it

Director Quentin Tarantino has done an in-depth interview with Deadline in attempt to explain accusations he’s faced from actress Uma Thurman regarding a stunt she was made to do that left her with lifelong injuries.

Thurman alleges she was bullied by Tarantino into driving down a gravel road even when she asked for it to be done by a stuntman instead, subsequently crashing and being left with a “permanently damaged neck [and] screwed-up knees“.

In the interview, Tarantino responded by admitting that there were issues with the stunt but denying that he forced her to do it:

I’m sure when it was brought up to me, that I rolled my eyes and was irritated. But I’m sure I wasn’t in a rage and I wasn’t livid. I didn’t go barging into Uma’s trailer, screaming at her to get into the car. I can imagine maybe rolling my eyes and thinking, we spent all this money taking this stick shift Karmann Ghia and changing the transmission, just for this shot. Anyone who knows Uma knows that going into her trailer, and screaming at her to do something is not the way to get her to do something. That’s a bad tactic and I’d been shooting the movie with her for an entire year by this time. I would never react to her this way.

Tarantino says the big issues behind the stunt were that they at the last minute changed the route and that they didn’t take into account the reduced ability to turn the car would have:

The road had more sand, and less dirt, than we actually anticipated. We changed the direction. That was a bad idea, to do that without checking it out. I think ultimately it is the reason she crashed. Although, by mounting a camera on the back of this little Karmann Ghia, it made the car, in the back, way too heavy once it got in trouble. At a certain point, this Karmann Ghia was almost hydroplaning on the sand. You can even see that in the shot. She doesn’t drive into the tree. The car just goes into a spin, in the sand. And it slides into the tree.

Tarantino goes on to say that he believes that his role as an antagonist in the situation was played up by the NYT and that he’s been working with Thurman to get to the bottom of this:

She got in touch with me this year and said, I really do need to see that footage. We need to make this right. I agreed with her and went out on a herculean task, to find the footage. We found the storage facility where we had a bunch of stuff. Again, this was 15 years ago, and we pull out of the boxes. Shannon McIntosh goes through all the boxes. First, we find something I had already seen, which was the edited footage, so you don’t actually see the crash. Then, we found the crash footage. I was so happy when we found the crash footage, because I was going to be able to present it to Uma.

You can read the full interview here.

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