Friday, October 20, 2017

Quentin Tarantino Speaks Out About Harvey Weinstein

Quentin Tarantino has finally spoken out about Harvey Weinstein. Here's what he had to say to the New York Times:

“I knew enough to do more than I did. There was more to it than just the normal rumors, the normal gossip. It wasn’t secondhand. I knew he did a couple of these things. I wish I had taken responsibility for what I heard. If I had done the work I should have done then, I would have had to not work with him.

What I did was marginalize the incidents. Anything I say now will sound like a crappy excuse...Everyone who was close to Harvey had heard of at least one of those incidents. It was impossible they didn’t.”

On former girlfriend Mira Sorvino telling him in 1995 about her harassment by Harvey Weinstein:
“I was shocked and appalled. I couldn’t believe he would do that so openly. I was like: ‘Really? Really?’ But the thing I thought then, at the time, was that he was particularly hung up on Mira...I thought Harvey was hung up on her in this Svengali kind of way. Because he was infatuated with her, he horribly crossed the line. (The problem was resolved, he said he felt at the time, because he and Ms. Sorvino were dating.) I’m with her, he knows that, he won’t mess with her, he knows that she’s my girlfriend.” (It's also mentioned that Tarantino knew that Rose McGowan had reached a settlement with Weinstein).

On why he didn't take women's stories seriously enough:
“I chalked it up to a ’50s-’60s era image of a boss chasing a secretary around the desk. As if that’s O.K. That’s the egg on my face right now. [In its treatment of women, Hollywood has been] operating under an almost Jim Crow-like system that us males have almost tolerated. We allowed it to exist because that’s the way it was.”

On who else knew what and when:
“I’m calling on the other guys who knew more to not be scared. Don’t just give out statements. Acknowledge that there was something rotten in Denmark. Vow to do better by our sisters. What was previously accepted is now untenable to anyone of a certain consciousness.”

On if he thinks the news about Harvey Weinstein will affect how people think of Quentin Tarantino's movies, many of which were distributed by Weinstein:
“I don’t know. I hope it doesn’t.”

Read the full interview at the New York Times.

No comments:

Post a Comment