When Margot Robbie signed on to star in Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood’, she expected a quirky, meticulous director—but not a request this unusual. The three-time Oscar nominee, now known worldwide for ‘Barbie’, ‘Babylon’, and ‘I, Tonya’, recalled one surprising moment on set that revealed Tarantino’s long-rumored obsession.
According to Robbie, Tarantino asked her not to wash her feet during a barefoot scene after they had got dirty. “No, don’t clean them,” the director told her, insisting the grime stay visible on screen.
Why Tarantino didn’t want clean feet in ‘Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood’
Robbie played Sharon Tate in the 2019 film, a role that often required her to be barefoot. In one sequence, her character slips off her boots inside a movie theater and casually props her feet up while watching herself on screen.
But after walking across the set, Robbie’s feet were noticeably dirty. Crew members rushed in to tidy her up, but Tarantino stopped them. “Someone came running to clean my feet, and Quentin said, ‘No, leave it. That’s real,’” Robbie recalled in an interview. The result was a giant close-up of her dusty soles, filling movie screens worldwide.
Tarantino’s longstanding reputation with feet
The incident only fueled the conversation around Tarantino’s well-documented fascination with women’s feet. From ‘Pulp Fiction’ to ‘Kill Bill’ and beyond, close-ups of bare feet have become a signature of his filmmaking style.
Tarantino, however, has always downplayed the idea that it’s a fetish. “I don’t take it seriously,” he once said. “There are a lot of feet in the films of many great directors. That’s just good filmmaking. Before me, Luis Buñuel was known for it. Hitchcock was accused of it. Sofia Coppola too.”
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The Salma Hayek connection
The director’s reputation also ties back to a famous moment in ‘From Dusk Till Dawn’, a film he wrote and starred in, directed by close friend Robert Rodriguez. In the now-legendary scene, Salma Hayek transforms into a vampire and places her foot in Tarantino’s mouth.
Rumors have long suggested that Tarantino rewrote the scene himself, even insisting on multiple takes until he was satisfied. For many fans, it cemented the belief that his interest in feet went beyond cinematic technique.
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