Quentin Tarantino sat down for one hell of a chat on The Joe Rogan Experience last week.
Of course, on the many topics they spoke on, naturally one of them was one of Tarantino’s earlier film, Reservoir Dogs.
Tarantino revealed that one of the movie’s key scenes – absolutely not for the faint of heart whatsoever sparked an argument with now-disgraced Hollywood producer, Harvey Weinstein.
The scene in question is the torture scene, the scene that corrupted ‘Stuck In The Middle With You’ by Stealers Wheel, forever.
On fighting to remove the scene from the film altogether, Tarantino recalls Weinstein telling him, “His reasoning was, ‘Look, Quentin, this is a movie that anybody can watch.”
He continued, “But with that torture scene, you’re gonna alienate women; they’re not gonna wanna see this. So you’re literally putting your own movie in a little box. But without that scene, anybody can go and see this movie and everybody will enjoy it.’”
“And that’s kind of actually where I became me, because Harvey was used to winning these type of arguments.”
Elsewhere during the podcast session with Rogan, Tarantino continued to defend his depiction of Bruce Lee in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood.
He told Rogan, “I can understand his daughter having a problem with it. It’s her fucking father. Everybody else: go suck a dick.”
Now Lee has responded to Tarantino’s sentiment by penning a letter as published on The Hollywood Reporter, where Lee said she is “tired of hearing from white men in Hollywood that [Bruce Lee] was arrogant and an asshole”.
In her letter, Lee wrote, “They have no idea and cannot fathom what it might have taken to get work in 1960s and 1970s Hollywood as a Chinese man with (God forbid) an accent.”
Lee added that Tarantino’s remarks were even more insensitive given the recent racist attacks on Asian Americans.
She said, “At a time when Asian Americans are being physically attacked, told to “go home” because they are seen as not American, and demonised for something that has nothing to do with them I feel moved to suggest that Mr. Tarantino’s continued attacks, mischaracterisations and misrepresentations of a trailblazing and innovative member of our Asian American community, right now, are not welcome.”
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