In remarks at the end of a Q&A session at the Produced By conference in New York Saturday, chef and TV star Anthony Bourdain took a shot at director Quentin Tarantino over his role in the Harvey Weinstein scandal, Deadline reports.
Bourdain is dating Italian actress and director Asia Argento, one of Weinstein’s accusers, and, as he explained to Slate’s Isaac Chotiner, has been doing some soul searching since the scandal broke. But he’s pretty clear on one thing: he has no sympathy for Tarantino, who made most of his films at Weinstein’s studio, Miramax. In a conversation with the New York Times about the scandal, Tarantino recently admitted, “I knew enough to do more than I did. … I knew [Weinstein] did a couple of these things.” Bourdain doubtless had this in mind when, in the course of explaining why he and his producing partners decided to turn down a lucrative offer because it would have meant working with someone they thought was an asshole, he described the tradeoff like this:
[Taking the offer] would have destroyed everything—everything that makes us good, everything that makes us happy, our quality of life. It would have been a lethal compromise, a slow-acting poison that would have nibbled away at our souls until we ended up like Quentin Tarantino, looking back at a life of complicity, shame, and compromise.
Variety asked Bourdain if he was referring to the Weinstein scandal; he replied, “One might think.” Later, on Twitter, Asia Argento weighed in:
