I'm Such an Idiot

Here I was thinking that the lovely Diane Kruger, who was famously plucked from near-obscurity to play the war-inducingly beautiful Helen in 2004's Troy, and has since co-starred in the Oscar-nominated Joyeux Noël and in the box office smashes National Treasure and its sequel as the fiendishly clever and capable Abigail Chase, among other films, is responsible for her own successful career as an autonomous, self-determining being.

But it turns out she belongs to Quentin Tarantino and wasn't worth shit until he "found" her.

Text: "The Call Back: That bad-boy auteur Quentin Tarantino auditions his newest find, Diane Kruger."

This image is even more unsettling, for a variety of reasons.

Weirdly, nothing in Tarantino's interview is remotely related to this framing. As per usual, he talks about himself more than anything else; the only passing mention of Kruger is in a question he's asked. And in an interview with Kruger, linked from the piece, she notes that she had to beg for an audition with Tarantino, who didn't originally want to see her because he didn't believe she was really German, and then had to fly to Berlin for an audition after he was unable to work with his first-choice actress.

In other words, he didn't "find" her at all, but her persistence and tenacity and hard work (she memorized 30 pages in German and English for the audition) paid off.

So the framing is wholly a construction of the Times' evident inability to talk about a man and a woman in a professional relationship without turning her into his property. Nice.