Uma Thurman spoke out recently about an incident which happened when she was filming Kill Bill 15 year ago.
She says that writer/director Quentin Tarantino forced her to do a stunt for the movie she was not comfortable doing.
With four days left on the epic nine-month shoot, Thurman claims she was asked to perform a particular driving stunt herself, in a car she felt entirely uncomfortable driving in, and had requested a stunt-driver perform it instead. She sustained injuries as a result of the crash, and at the time she accused Quentin of ‘trying to kill her’.
Thurman further stated that Tarantino didn’t release the footage of the crash for over 15 years, and Thurman refused to sign a document Miramax (Weinstein’s company at the time) “releasing them of any consequences of my future pain and suffering”.
The footage was eventually recovered and handed over to Uma, at which point she gave it to the New York Times to publish alongside her comments on the incident.
Responding to her article and her story, Quentin told Deadline:
“I knew that the piece was happening. Uma and I had talked about it, for a long period of time, deciding how she was going to do it. She wanted clarity on what happened in that car crash, after all these years.
She asked, could I get her the footage? I had to find it, 15 years later. I didn’t think we were going to be able to find it. It was clear and it showed the crash and the aftermath. I was very happy to get it to Uma.”
Speaking about the crash, he said:
“That is one of the biggest regrets of my life. As a director, you learn things and sometimes you learn them through horrendous mistakes. 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… It was heartbreaking. Beyond one of the biggest regrets of my career, it is one of the biggest regrets of my life. For a myriad of reasons.”
