Michelle Yeoh Confirms What We Suspected All Along About Quentin Tarantino's BTS Behavior
Quentin Tarantino has to be on any list of the most famous directors working today, and he's developed a distinct public persona to go along with his impressive body of work. But even if you've seen every Tarantino film from worst to best, or seen him on one of his particularly frantic talk show interviews, or listened to The Video Archives, his podcast with Roger Avary, you can only guess at what the motor-mouthed movie geek is really like behind the scenes or off the set.
Interestingly, none other than action movie legend Michelle Yeoh, herself a joy to work with, according to "Everything Everywhere All At Once" stunt coordinator Timothy Eulich, recently gave some insight on that subject, despite the two never having actually worked together — at least not yet. But, they did have a fateful meeting many years ago, and according to Yeoh, it was a significant one for her career as well as her life. It also confirms what most of us probably already suspected about how Tarantino behaves around established genre movie stars like Yeoh.
Yeoh credits Tarantino's persistence with reviving her career
Over the course of her incredible career as an international action star, Michelle Yeoh has never worked in a Quentin Tarantino film. Nevertheless, she credits the eccentric filmmaker with kickstarting her career after one of her typically dangerous onscreen stunts landed her in a hospital bed and out, so she believed at the time, of the movies forever.
In a recent interview with Town and Country, Yeoh discussed how after a stunt gone wrong during filming of 1996's aptly titled "The Stunt Woman," she was debilitated with what she believed was a career-ending injury. Around that same time, Tarantino was still hot after the success of "Pulp Fiction," and he was in Hong Kong to screen the film — with Yeoh being high on the filmmaker's list of those he wanted to visit while he was in town.
Stuck in bed with a painful injury, Yeoh was not in the mood to meet Tarantino or anyone for that matter. But he didn't give up. "I must say, Quentin, he's persistent," remembered Yeoh. "He is who he is today because he's full of passion and love, so he wore me down." She said she decided to give him five minutes of her time, and characteristically, Tarantino began reciting from memory all of his favorite Yeoh screen feats up to that point. "Suddenly we became animated," she said, "[s]o then I thought, maybe I'm not ready to give up on this."
Shortly after, Yeoh got back to work and eventually made her English language debut in the 007 adventure "Tomorrow Never Knows" and started using her real name instead of her pseudonym. The rest is history, and it might not have happened if Tarantino had politely demurred from their first meeting.