DEADLINE: In this article, Uma complains about being choked by you in a scene…
TARANTINO: Let me address that. According to Uma…You notice there are not quotes around that. Uma didn’t share that with Maureen Dowd. Maureen Dowd interviewed other people on the set who mentioned it to her. If you notice, all that choking and spitting stuff is not in quotes from Uma. It’s part of Maureen Dowd’s prose. For some reason there is a lot of hay being made out of this. Which I don’t understand, at all. You’ve seen movies where somebody spits in somebody’s face?
DEADLINE: Many.
TARANTINO: Well, that’s what this was. A scene where somebody spits in somebody’s face. I can explain why I did exactly what I did, but my question is, what’s the f*cking problem?
DEADLINE: Well, the context…
TARANTINO: What do you think the problem is?
DEADLINE: The wording in the article: Uma says that in Kill Bill, Tarantino had done the honors with some of the sadistic flourishes himself, spitting in her face…there seems to be a subtext of some anger, or not treating a woman the way she deserved to be treated.
TARANTINO: So that’s where it is coming from. We’ve all seen movies where people get spit in the face. I’m assuming if it was a two-shot and Michael Madsen spat in her face, there probably wouldn’t be an issue. But that wasn’t the shot. The shot was, Michael Madsen had snuff juice. And you see him spit out a stream of snuff juice. Cut to Uma’s face, on the ground and you see it hit her.
Naturally, I did it. Who else should do it? A grip? One, I didn’t trust Michael Madsen because, I don’t know where the spit’s going to go, if Michael Madsen does it. I talked to Uma and I said, look. I’ve got to kind of commit to doing this to you. We even had a thing there, we were going to try and do it with a plunger and some water. But if you add snuff juice to water, it didn’t look right. It didn’t look like spit, when it hit her, when we tried that. It needed to be that mix of saliva and the brown juice. So I asked Uma. I said, I think I need to do it. I’ll only do it twice, at the most, three times. But I can’t have you laying here, getting spit on, again and again and again, because somebody else is messing it up by missing. It is hard to spit on people, as it turns out.
Now, I love Michael, he’s a terrific actor, but I didn’t trust him with this kind of intricate work, of nailing this. So the idea is, I’m doing it, I’m taking responsibility. Also, I’m the director, so I can kind of art direct this spit. I know where I want it to land. I’m right next to the camera. So, boom! I do it. Now, if I screw up and I keep missing, once we get to that third one, if she doesn’t want to do it anymore, well then, that’s on me.
Frankly if I asked an actor, a grip or a stunt guy. Hey Charlie, can you spit on Uma’s face for this shot? Charlie’s going to be so intimidated that first take that he’s going to f*ck it up. And he’ll probably be intimidated on his second take and maybe by the fourth or fifth time, he’ll get his sh*t together. In that instance, we did our three takes, and Uma said, if you really need a fourth one, go ahead, do a fourth one.
DEADLINE: What about the description of you choking Uma with the chain…
TARANTINO: In the case of the choking, when Gogo [Chiaki Kuriyama] throws her chain ball at the bride, and the chain wraps around her neck. And then she’s getting choked by it. Frankly, I wasn’t sure how we were going to shoot that scene. Wrap a chain around the neck, you’ve got to see choking. I was assuming that when we did it, we would have maybe a pole behind Uma that the chain would be wrapped around so it wouldn’t be seen by the camera, at least for the wide shot. But then it was Uma’s suggestion. To just wrap the thing around her neck, and choke her. Not forever, not for a long time. But it’s not going to look right, otherwise. I can act all strangle-ey, but if you want my face to get red and the tears to come to my eye, then you kind of need to choke me.
I was the one on the other end of the chain and we kind of only did it for the close ups. And we pulled it off. Now, that was her idea. Consequently, I realize…that is a real thing. When I did Inglourious Basterds, and I went to Diane [Kruger], 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.