Quentin Tarantino’s press tour for his new book, “Cinema Speculation,” continued with a guest appearance on Chris Wallace’s HBO Max series “Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace,” where the host pressed Tarantino on his relationship with Harvey Weinstein. The disgraced film producer worked with Tarantino on nine movies. The two severed ties amid Weinstein’s downfall in October 2017 over sexual harassment and assault. Tarantino admitted at the time that he was aware of Weinstein’s behavior to a certain degree, but he stressed to Wallace that he never knew such behavior included sexual assault.
“I’d never heard the stories that later came out at all,” Tarantino said. “I heard the same stories that everybody had heard. What I wish I had done was talk to Harvey about it and say, ‘Harvey, you can’t do this.’ To tell you the truth, I chalked it up to a ‘Mad Men’-era version of the boss chasing the secretary around the desk. I’m not saying that’s ok. That’s how I heard it… in that category. There was never any talk of rape or anything like that.”
Tarantino continued, “The reason I didn’t [say something to Weinstein] was because that’s a real hard conversation to have. I felt it was pathetic. I felt what he was doing was pathetic and I didn’t want to deal with his pathetic-ness.”
“I didn’t think it was, ‘Ok, you do this for me or you’re not going to get this movie.’ I never heard any actresses say anything like that,” Tarantino concluded. “It was just you know, ‘Don’t get in the back of a limo with him.’ It was easy to compartmentalize that to some degree. Anyway, I feel bad about. What I feel bad about is I feel bad that I did not have a man-to-man talk with him about it.”
Tarantino revealed in October 2017 that former girlfriend Mira Sorvino confided in him about Weinstein’s sexual harassment. “I knew enough to do more than I did,” the director said at the time. “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.”
Back in July 2021, Tarantino appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast and said, “I wish I had sat [Harvey] down and gone, ‘Harvey, you can’t do this, you’re gonna fuck up everything.’ Maybe his brother Bob [did], but I don’t think anybody talked to him about it. And the thing about it is everybody who was in his orbit knew about it. Probably they didn’t know anything about rapes, but they had heard things.”
“Cinema Speculation” is now available for purchase.