The film director, Quentin Tarantino is in trouble. He is accused of negligence by actress Uma Thurman, who says that he bullied her into driving an unsafe car that crashed in the set of Bill Kill. She also says that he spit in her face and choked her with a chain. It is also alleged that he tried to strangle Diana Kruger in a scene in Inglourious Basterds. Disturbing and bizarre.
An audio recording has surfaced where he is defending director Roman Polanski’s sexual assault of a 13-year-old girl in 1977, saying she was “down with it” and that rape was a “buzzword” that didn’t apply to the situation. In an interview singer Fergie said that Tarantino bit her on a film set but later she defended the director.
Clearly there is something is not right with this talented film director.
I was quite surprised when Tarantino received the Knight’s Cross from the Hungarian government in 2011. He got the state award for being one of the producers of a documentary entitled Freedom’s Fury although it is not clear if Quentin actually did anything tangible on this film. We know that the other producer of that film was Andy Vajna, the favorite and very well-connected oligarch of authoritarian Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. Perhaps Quentin’s powerful Hungarian friends had something to do with his state award. (More about Hungary’s oligarchs here.)
In 2016 when the racist and anti-Semitic political journalist Zsolt Bayer received the Order of Merit of the Knight’s Cross, a similar award, many recipients around the world returned theirs in protest.
I wrote to Mr. Tarantino “please return your award,” and I even published a piece here on Hungarian Free Press. (Read here.) There was not even a brief response. Tarantino must like his award. I assume he discussed the idea of returning with his friends but in the end, he decided to keep it.
I’m optimistic and still hope that one day Tarantino will return his Hungarian Knight’s Cross because that would be the right thing to do. In the meantime, I’ll skip his films and I suggest you do too.
Lázár György