Diane Kruger: Tarantino ‘treated me with utter respect & never abused his power’
February 7, 2018
Quentin Tarantino used to have a reputation for working closely with actresses, for having muses, for writing good roles for actresses he adored. Muses included Uma Thurman, Pam Grier, Diane Kruger, Melanie Laurent, etc. Diane worked with Tarantino on Inglorious Basterds, in a role which got her a lot of respect and attention. Before that movie, Diane wasn’t really seen as a serious actress, and she was able to widen her career after that film’s success. It seemed like Diane and Quentin got along really well too, that she was his “new Uma.” So in the wake of the Uma Thurman revelations, people went back and tried to figure out if Tarantino behaved abusively towards Diane. They found some old interviews where she talked about how Tarantino insisted on “strangling” her on camera, just so it would look right. People were like “that’s f–ked up.” Tarantino tried to explain the Kruger thing in his Deadline interview, saying in part:
“When I did Inglourious Basterds, and I went to Diane, 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. 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. 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.”
[From Deadline via People]
It still doesn’t sound 100% awesome, but he stressed that everything happened with her consent, so what do we know? In any case, Diane decided to chime in to say that her experience with Tarantino was totally fine. She posted this message on her Instagram:
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
What Diane and Uma have said over and over is that they had good working relationships with Tarantino, that they trusted him and they would do whatever he needed. The problem for Uma was that the trust was broken when he convinced her to do something that left her injured. Diane’s thoughts would probably be a lot different if the choking had really hurt her, physically or emotionally. I don’t know. Whatever, man.
Also: Jezebel unearthed a 2003 interview Howard Stern did with Tarantino where he insisted that Roman Polanski didn’t really drug and rape a 13-year-old, that the child “wanted it” and it was only statutory rape. Ugh.
Photos courtesy of WENN.
