Throughout the latter half of last year, Kill Bill star Uma Thurman hinted that she had a big Harvey Weinstein story to share, but was too angry at that point in time.

Now, joining the extensive and ever-growing list of high-profile celebrities who have come out with personal accounts of Weinstein-related sexual assaults, Uma shared her story with The New York Times.

She also had some damning words to say about director Quentin Tarantino.

Yup – but that’s not really all that surprising.

The various accounts were shared in a piece called “This Is Why Uma Thurman Is Angry”:

“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.”

Thurman got to know Weinstein and his first wife, Eve, in the afterglow of “Pulp Fiction.”

Things soon went off-kilter in a meeting in his Paris hotel room. “It went right over my head,” she says. They were arguing about a script when the bathrobe came out.

He told her to follow him down a hall — there were always, she says, “vestibules within corridors within chambers” — so they could keep talking. “Then I followed him through a door and it was a steam room. And I was standing there in my full black leather outfit — boots, pants, jacket. And it was so hot and I said, ‘This is ridiculous, what are you doing?’ And he was getting very flustered and mad and he jumped up and ran out.”

The first physical attack came not long afterwards:

“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. 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”…

“The next day to her house arrived a 26-inch-wide vulgar bunch of roses,” Thurman says. “They were yellow. And I opened the note like it was a soiled diaper and it just said, ‘You have great instincts.’”

Then, she says, Weinstein’s assistants started calling again to talk about projects.

From then on, Thurman privately regarded Weinstein as the enemy – and it affected her creative relationship with Tarantino.

You see, Weinstein’s company produced both Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill:

Thurman went to the Cannes Film Festival in 2001. She says Tarantino noticed after a dinner that she was skittish around Weinstein, which was a problem, since they were all about to make “Kill Bill.” She says she reminded Tarantino that she had already told him about the Savoy incident, but “he probably dismissed it like ‘Oh, poor Harvey, trying to get girls he can’t have,’ whatever he told himself, who knows?” But she reminded him again and “the penny dropped for him. He confronted Harvey.”

Later, by the pool under the Cypress trees at the luxurious Hotel du Cap, Thurman recalls, Weinstein said he was hurt and surprised by her accusations. She then firmly reiterated what happened in London. “At some point, his eyes changed and he went from aggressive to ashamed,” she says, and he offered her an apology with many of the sentiments he would trot out about 16 years later when the walls caved in.

But the story didn’t stop there. With four days left of a nine-month shoot, Thurman was asked to do something that made her draw the line:

In the famous scene where she’s driving the blue convertible to kill Bill — the same one she put on Instagram on Thanksgiving — she was asked to do the driving herself.

But she had been led to believe by a teamster, she says, that the car, which had been reconfigured from a stick shift to an automatic, might not be working that well.

She says she insisted that she didn’t feel comfortable operating the car and would prefer a stunt person to do it. Producers say they do not recall her objecting.

“Quentin came in my trailer and didn’t like to hear no, like any director,” she says. “He was furious because I’d cost them a lot of time. But I was scared. He said: ‘I promise you the car is fine. It’s a straight piece of road.’” He persuaded her to do it, and instructed: “ ‘Hit 40 miles per hour or your hair won’t blow the right way and I’ll make you do it again.’ But that was a deathbox that I was in. The seat wasn’t screwed down properly. It was a sand road and it was not a straight road.” (Tarantino did not respond to requests for comment.)

She then shared the below footage with the NYT:

Eina:

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

She continued to share, explaining how Tarantino had “done the honours with some of the sadistic flourishes himself” for Kill Bill. He spat in her face (where Michael Madsen is seen on screen doing it) and choked her with a chain (where a teenager named Gogo is on screen doing it).

Describing what she let happen to her with Tarantino as “a horrible mud wrestle with a very angry brother”, she didn’t feel disempowered by any of it. Until the crash.

And now it seems the world is crashing down around Weinstein. Could Tarantino be next?

You can (and should) read the full story here.

[source:nytimes]