MOVIE NEWS – Tarantino explicitly forbade Michael Madsen from wearing his own hat: Madsen ignored him, and the resulting clash actually ended up in the movie. In Kill Bill Vol. 2, Tarantino even wrote a line just for the hated hat, because he truly despised it.

Harvey Weinstein couldn’t stand long movies. As a producer, profit always came before art in his mind—he believed that the shorter a film was, the more screenings it could get and the more tickets could be sold. It’s well known that the notorious producer butchered films like Mimic, 54, The Other Side of Crime, and Fanboys, and almost chopped up Quentin Tarantino’s masterpiece, Kill Bill. He saw two options: cut it so much that it lost all meaning, or release it in two parts. As we know, he chose the latter—and it paid off handsomely.

The production of Kill Bill is full of behind-the-scenes secrets and stories, from Tarantino planting a seed for a possible Volume 3, to the break he ordered when Uma Thurman became pregnant, comparing her importance to Marlene Dietrich in a movie. But one of the strangest, now-legendary stories is linked to the recently deceased Michael Madsen and his hat.

During rehearsals, Madsen showed up wearing his own cowboy hat. Tarantino, who absolutely hated the hat, went up to him and asked, “You’re not planning to wear that in the movie, are you?” Madsen had no intention… until someone made an issue of it. During filming, the director ended up asking him to wear it in a bar scene with Larry Bishop. Why? Because Tarantino wrote a new line into the script that Madsen had never heard before: “That fucking hat. I want you to leave that fucking hat at home.”

The actor was convinced the idea came from Bishop and Tarantino, and while some claim the line was improvised, it was actually in the script—and Madsen’s response was rehearsed. One thing is certain: without it, we wouldn’t have had one of the ugliest cowboy hats in film history.

Source: Sensacine