Quentin Tarantino Breaks Silence On Uma Thurman Car Crash

As we reported last week, Uma Thurman detailed an attack against her by Harvey Weinstein, and also spoke about issues she had with Quentin Tarantino. The Kill Bill star said she was almost killed during a driving stunt on the set of Kill Bill.

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

In an interview with Deadline, Tarantino explained his side of the story. Here are highlights:

On knowing about the New York Times piece: “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. We had to go through storage facilities, pulling out boxes. Shannon McIntosh found it. I couldn’t believe it. 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. The thing is, Uma had people she wanted to indict, for that cover-up. Part of my job on the piece was to do an interview with Maureen Dowd, and back up Uma’s claims. And we never hooked up. Me and Dowd never hooked up. I read the article and basically it seemed like all the other guys lawyered up, so they weren’t even allowed to be named. And, through mostly Maureen Dowd’s prose, I ended up taking the hit and taking the heat.”

On giving Thurman footage of the accident: “I figured that eventually it would be used whenever she had her big piece. Also, there was an element of closure. She had been denied it, from Harvey Weinstein, being able to even see the footage. I wanted to deliver it to her, so she could look at it. So she could see it and help her with her memory of the incident. I never talked to Uma about this, but I don’t exactly know exactly what caused the crash, and Uma doesn’t know exactly what cause the crash. She has her suspicions and I have mine. I thought, if I get this footage to her and she puts it out there in the world, that a crash expert can look at it and determine exactly what happened on that road.”

On what happened with the crash: “The idea was for her to drive around 30-45 mph, just to get the hair blowing. With all the foliage on either side, her driving 35 would seem like 60. But there were no obstacles, it was a straight shot.

I came in there all happy telling her she could totally do it, it was a straight line, you will have no problem. Uma’s response was…”Okay.” Because she believed me. Because she trusted me. I told her it would be okay. 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. And she believed me.

So, it’s decided she would get in the car. I had not heard about anything about a guy from transpo saying that the car didn’t work. Which would be a strange thing for a guy from transpo to say, because they’re the ones responsible for delivering safe vehicles. If a guy from transpo had something to say about an unsafe car, he should be telling the First AD, the production manager or the producer. Uma goes off to get ready. I go off, after my trip and talking to Uma, to number one, ready for her to show up. I arrive and then a question develops.

Would it be okay if we had the car drive the opposite direction? Because the lighting would be better because it was the end of the day. I’m guessing on this, but let’s say we were going to do the car from east to west? Could we go from west to east? It didn’t affect the shot. I didn’t see how it would affect anything. A straight road is a straight road.

We changed our number one, so the car would be driving in the opposite direction from the way I had gone down. And that was the beginning of where the crash happened.”

On how he felt about it: “Just horrible. Watching her fight for the wheel…remembering me hammering about how it was safe and she could do it. Emphasizing that it was a straight road, a straight road…the fact that she believe me, and I literally watched this little S curve pop up. And it spins her like a top. 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. It affected me and Uma for the next two to three years. It wasn’t like we didn’t talk. But a trust was broken. A trust broken over a year of shooting, of us doing really gnarly stuff. Doing really big stunt stuff. I wanted her to do as much as possible and we were trying to take care of her and we pulled it off. She didn’t get hurt. And then the last four days, in what we thought would be a simple driving shot, almost kills her.

When you start doing the autopsy on this stuff. When a big stunt goes wrong, you kind of knew what you were getting into in the first place. When a little thing like this goes out of control, and you’re trying to start doing the post mortem on it, you realize there are a lot of little things that present themselves in a bad way. 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.”

On helping her tell her story about Weinstein: “I was absolutely being her accomplice, talking through it with her, working my own memory, figuring out the timeline even as to when the assault happened. Like, if this was that, that means it was in 1996. Helping all that come out. Something else Uma was misunderstood about [in the article], and I don’t think she realized it until last night while we were talking, was she feels that a whole cover-up happened. After the car incident. She feels it’s very possible the car was destroyed, at Harvey Weinstein’s insistence, and at Bennett Walsh and Lawrence Bender’s execution. I didn’t know about any of that, after the fact. Me and Uma weren’t talking about stuff like that, the aftermath of her being in the hospital, coming out and wrapping up the movie. Frankly, I didn’t think about the car, after the crash, one iota.

Because to me, it was an insurance situation after that. Insurance would come in, do an investigation, and if there was something wrong with the car, they would find out and it would be handled. Writer/directors don’t deal with the insurance company; production managers do. Producers, business affairs people at Miramax deal with the insurance company.

Uma thought I had acquiesced to them not letting her see the footage. I didn’t know any of that was necessarily going on. I knew they weren’t letting her see the footage, but I didn’t know she thought I was part of that. She had just told me they hadn’t let her see the footage.

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.”

On what happened when she told him about Weinstein’s attack: “While we were getting ready to do Kill Bill, Uma tells me that he had done the same thing to her. That was when I realized there was a pattern, in Harvey’s luring and pushing attacks. So I made Harvey apologize to Uma. In the Maureen Dowd article it says, that is when Quentin confronted Harvey? Well, my confrontation was saying, you have to go to Uma. This happened. You have to apologize to her and she has to accept your apology, if we’re going to do Kill Bill together.”

On his relationship with Thurman now: “We’ve been okay. Uma was in turmoil about the uprising against me this whole weekend. She blames me for not talking to Maureen Dowd, saying it’s your own damn fault. She never meant this to roll over onto me. We’ve been talking about it ad nauseum and I feel bad because she has been doing a Broadway play, at the same time. The whole weekend, we’ve been talking. The uproar that happened against me, she was not prepared for. We have a long complicated history. We have been dealing with it for 22 years. We’re both one of the closest people in each other’s lives. So it was rather shocking to read this article, where the headline is about Uma’s anger, and lumping me into her anger about Harvey. As much detail as they went into, no one seemed to care about the Harvey stuff.”