The line Quentin Tarantino has been waiting 35 years to use: “You’re gonna say it in my movie”
His screenplays are so heavy with wordplay that it’s hard to imagine Quentin Tarantino sitting on a single line of dialogue for 35 years without using it, but there’s a very specific reason why he’s done just that.
Cinema’s most famous magpie has cherry-picked, adapted, or emulated soundbites from other movies into his own work, but the one he was desperate to deploy was a deep, deep cut, since it was a quote filmed for a buddy action flick that was eliminated in the editing room and stayed with him ever since.
Tarantino had absolutely nothing to do with the film either, beyond a set visit. 1991’s The Last Boy Scout was directed by Tony Scott, scripted by Shane Black, and starred Bruce Willis in the lead role, and those are three names that he’s always been a big fan of, so it makes sense that something would stick in his mind.
This being the two-time Academy Award-winning cinephile, though, there are layers to this shit. In Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, he cast Danielle Harris in the minor role of Angel. He’s a fan of hers, too, dating right back to when she played Willis’ daughter, Darian Hallenbeck, in The Last Boy Scout.
The plan was simple: bring his nerdiest fantasy to life. Tarantino dreamed of weaponizing an excised line from Scott’s crime caper into his ninth feature, and the person he wanted to say it also happened to be the same actor who’d uttered it almost three decades previously, but there are some things that can’t be accounted for on a movie set.
“I get to set, and he says, ‘There’s the scene where all of you, the Manson Family, is telling Brad’s character to get out of here, and leave, and get off our lot,” Harris recalled. “And he said, ‘I want you to say, ‘Take a bath in my ass!'” It’s a highly unusual and remarkably unorthodox request, but he had an equally obscure reason for insisting that Angel tell Cliff Booth to lather up and soak himself in her sphincter.
“What people don’t realise and don’t know, but, of course, Quentin Tarantino knew, was that was a line that I said in the original script of Last Boy Scout, when I say, ‘Eat shit, you fucking redneck!'” she explained. “I also had told the character that kidnapped me to take a bath in my ass, but it never made it onscreen, and Quentin always loved that line, and was like, ‘You didn’t get to say it in Last Boy Scout, you’re gonna say it in my movie.'”
Understandably, Harris was fully on board with referencing an onscreen past nobody even knew she had. Or, as she put it, “Oh my god, I get to tell Brad Pitt to take a bath in my ass, this is the best day ever!” However, the actor, who was heavily pregnant at the time, ended up giving birth to her second child on the day she was supposed to tell an A-list superstar to take said bath in said ass.
The miracle of life robbed Tarantino of an opportunity he’d been waiting for since early 1991, when The Last Boy Scout was shot, and unless he gives it to somebody else or recruits Harris for his tenth and final movie to finally say it, he’ll end his big-screen career without having one character instruct another to take a bath in their ass, a crying shame if ever there was one.
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