Quentin Tarantino Has Something to Say About Feet in His Films

Quentin Tarantino’s foot fetish is no secret for the fans of his movies. Uma Thurman, Bridget Fonda, Diane Kruger, Rosario Dawson, practically the entire cast of Death Proof or, more recently, Margaret Qualley and Margot Robbie in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood have flashed their feet on screen to keep with the script.

Both on Google and social media, articles and memes about the filmmaker’s obsession with this part of the human body are recurrent, something he is well aware of, although he claims to downplay the comments: “I don’t take it seriously,” he assured in a recent interview for GQ.

“There’s a lot of feet in a lot of good directors’ movies,” the filmmaker added: “That’s just good direction. Like, before me, the person foot fetishism was defined by was Luis Buñuel, another film director. And Hitchcock was accused of it and Sofia Coppola has been accused of it.” The director is not wrong in stating that others before him have portrayed feet in cinema, including many great filmmakers like the ones he cites.

However, it is inevitable to link Tarantino’s filmography with this fetishism due to the large number of feet close-ups that can be seen in his films.

Tarantino’s fixation for feet isn’t something only his fans, cinephiles or critics comment on. His own stars have joked about it on occasion, as did Brad Pitt when accepting his Best Supporting Actor SAG Award in 2020 for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

“I want to thank my costars,” the actor said in his speech, before listing Leonardo DiCaprio and Margot Robbie, “Margot Robbie’s feet, Margaret Qualley’s feet, Dakota Fanning’s feet…seriously, Quentin has separated more women from their shoes than the TSA,” he added.

Margaret Qualley has also referred to the bad time she had preparing the scene where she had to act barefoot in this last film by the director. Let us remember that her character, a member of the Manson family, gets a ride from Brad Pitt when it occurs to her to rest her bare feet on the dashboard of the vehicle.

The actress didn’t want to show her feet on camera: “I was in pointe shoes for far too long to have toes that can be shown to the world.” Eventually, the actress agreed to shoot the scene in question and doesn’t regret it: “I used to actually be pretty mortified with my feet. Maybe I can finally just give up that now.”