Once Upon A Time In Hollywood: Tarantino Had Specific Directions For Margot Robbie's Feet
Glancing across Quentin Tarantino's body of work, several similarities emerge. He loves revenge stories, especially those involving historical revisionism. He excels at depicting carnage and bloodshed. And he's really, really into feet, as actor Margot Robbie got to know firsthand while shooting for the director's 2019 epic, "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood," a movie containing all three abovementioned elements. As Robbie relayed in an interview with Vogue, Tarantino paid close attention to detail when it came to showing her feet on camera.
During the interview, Robbie reminisced on her fashion looks over the years. But when it came time to talk about her role as Sharon Tate in "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood," she had little to say about her outfit from the ankles up, instead pointing to the knee-high boots the character wore. "[Tarantino] wanted the white go-go boots," Robbie said, tapping the picture. "That was written in the script."
But according to Robbie, when Tate's feet were uncovered, Tarantino got even more particular. "Shortly after this, my character walks into a movie theater to see herself on the big screen," Robbie said, "and she kind of kicks off her go-go boots and puts her feet up and settles in to watch the movie. But my feet were dirty because I'd been walking around set. They stayed dirty in the movie because Quentin said, 'Don't. Don't clean them.' Someone ran in to do it, and he was like, 'No, it's real. Keep it.'" Add that to the laundry list of scenes that went too far in "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood."
Robbie wasn't the only one that had the camera on their feet
Regarding Margot Robbie's "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" theater scene, the focus on her feet is mild compared to other moments across the director's filmography and even elsewhere in the same movie. A parallel sequence in the film depicts Margaret Qualley's character kicking her bare feet up on the dashboard of a car, where the camera lingers on them for what seems like an eternity. Whether there's any deeper artistic statement being made beyond, "Look, feet!" is hard to discern. And while Qualley was in her 20s when the movie was shot, the character was strongly implied to be under 18, making the scene even more difficult to watch.
Some will argue that Quentin Tarantino's obsession with putting feet on film is a harmless, strange hang-up that can be ignored because a few feet are worth it when his movies border on masterpieces. Others may argue, as Amy Zimmerman did in a 2018 Daily Beast article, that when taken in tandem with his proclivity for depicting violence against women, Tarantino's obsession with capturing women's feet on camera can be entered among a litany of evidence suggesting concerning patterns from the celebrated director.
Overall, at this point, audiences likely know what to expect when buying popcorn and tickets for a Tarantino flick.