How low will they go?
Directors torture actress for ‘authenticity.’
“Going through day after day of excruciating work was almost unbearable. I had to cry 12 hours a day, all day long.” Actress Shelley Duvall On the making of 1980’s “The Shining”
Hollywood, as we have been learning, is a mean place to work. To obscene pay inequities and outrageous sexual misconduct, we can now add abusive on-set treatment of female actors to extract the most realistic performance for the screen.
Thank Uma Thurman and Quentin Tarantino for this latest conversation about the uglier aspects of Tinseltown, where a mania for onscreen “authenticity” comes dangerously close to abuse — or even death — on the set.
Tarantino is the director acclaimed as an auteur and equally infamous for his over-the-top moviemaking. One of his biggest stars, Thurman, has lately described precisely what that has meant for her:
She says he spat in her face and choked her with a chain for two scenes in the sadistic movie saga Kill Bill. He once made her drive an unsafe car in a scene for the film, even though she says she balked. He insisted she do it and ordered her to drive it at 40 mph so her hair would blow in the right direction. Instead, she crashed into a tree and suffered neck and knee injuries.
Tarantino copped to it all, with caveats, in a Deadline.com Q&A published Monday.
The spitting scene? “Naturally, I did it. Who else should do it? A grip? ... 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.”
The choking scene? “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. ‘I can act all strangleey, 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.’ ... Consequently, I realize … that is a real thing.”
The driving scene? Tarantino said he wanted her to drive 30 to 45 mph “just to get the hair blowing,” and he had tested the road himself.
The impulse to intensify the authenticity of an onscreen experience is as old as Hollywood itself:
❚ The classic 1928 silent film The Pas
sion of Joan of Arc is filled with closeups of French actress Renee Maria Falconetti (billed as Melle Falconetti) looking pained because director Carl Dreyer made her kneel on stone floors until her face showed the right degree of suffering. She never made another major film.
❚ Maria Schneider, who co-starred with Marlon Brando in 1972’s Last Tan
go in Paris, said in 2007 that an infamous scene in which a stick of butter is used to rape her character wasn’t in the script. In a 2013 interview, Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci admitted that he and Brando came up with the idea in order to get a reaction from Schneider, who died in 2011 at age 58.
❚ Meryl Streep says she was shocked and furious at Dustin Hoffman when he unexpectedly slapped her right before the cameras rolled for 1979’s Kramer vs.
Kramer, which earned her her first Oscar win. “He just slapped me. And you see it in the movie. It was overstepping,” Streep told The New York Times last month. Hoffman also shattered a wine glass in the middle of a scene without warning Streep, who ended up with shards of glass in her hair, according to producer Sherry Lansing.
❚ Salma Hayek described in a column for The New York Times how she was repeatedly sexually harassed by producer Harvey Weinstein, including being compelled to film a gratuitous lesbian sex scene for her 2002 passion project,
Frida, after Weinstein threatened to shut down the film.
❚ Shelley Duvall has said that she was driven nearly mad by the ultimate auteur director, the late Stanley Kubrick, on the set of 1980’s The Shining because of his methods, including filming scenes again and again until the actors were nearly in tears. The famous baseball bat confrontation between Duvall and costar Jack Nicholson supposedly took a world-record 127 takes, according to Rolling Stone.
“Going through day after day of excruciating work was almost unbearable,” Duvall told Roger Ebert in December 1980. “I had to cry 12 hours a day, all day long, the last nine months straight, five or six days a week.”
Tippi Hedren says Alfred Hitchcock made her time on the set of 1963’s The Birds a living hell with his stalking and obsessiveness. For the film’s climactic scene, Hitchcock instructed the crew to unleash live birds on Hedren rather than the fake ones they’d been using, leaving her with real cuts and scratches on her face — along with real terror.