WWW- UMA Thurman doesn’t have a problem working on her next picture, “In Bloom,” just because its director was arrested on sexual assault charges involving two women in Connecticut.
The star’s rep, Robert Garlock, told Page Six last night that despite the charges against helmer Vadim Perelman, [pictured] “Uma remains committed to the movie.”
Cops allege a boozed-up Perelman, who made the Oscar-nominated 2003 flick “House of Sand and Fog,” groped the butts of two women, ages 18 and 23, and belted the younger one in the mouth, breaking her lip at the Rain Ultra Lounge & Sushi Bar in Norwalk. The confrontation came as Perelman scouted locations for “In Bloom,” a thriller starring Thurman and Evan Rachel Wood.
Cops say early on July 22, the club manager flagged them down to report Perelman, 42, had been involved in an assault. As officers quizzed the director, who they say reeked of alcohol and had a “dazed look,” several men stormed up yelling, “How dare you put your hands on our girlfriends!”
The two women told cops Perelman groped them several times. One of the women then stepped in front of her boyfriend as Perelman allegedly swung at him, absorbing the blow herself.
Perelman countered that the men were hitting on his girlfriend Maya Javan, who’s his production designer, and were being jerks. He was released on $5,000 bond.
“This incident arose out of a barroom brawl, and he did not intentionally touch anybody or harm anybody,” said Perelman’s lawyer, Paul Callan.
Callan said because Perelman has no previous arrests, he’s applied for “accelerated rehabilitation” in which the moviemaker would do community service.
Thurman once worked for another bar-brawling director. She starred in “Pulp Fiction” and “Kill Bill” for Quentin Tarantino, who was in a similar scrape in which he slugged a woman after aiming at her boyfriend – a case Callan got tossed. But Thurman’s rep noted with a laugh, “Ivan Reitman directed her in [“My Super Ex-Girlfriend”], and he didn’t hit anybody.”