Police unions around America have been demanding an apology from Quentin Tarantino, but the director is not backing down in his first public remarks following his controversial comments 10 days ago about police violence.
“All cops are not murderers,” Tarantino, the director of “The Hateful Eight,” told the Los Angeles Times in an interview Tuesday. “I never said that. I never even implied that.” Tarantino said the police groups were trying to “demonize” him.
“What they’re doing is pretty obvious,” he said. “Instead of dealing with the incidents of police brutality that those people were bringing up, instead of examining the problem of police brutality in this country, better they single me out. And their message is very clear. It’s to shut me down. It’s to discredit me. It is to intimidate me. It is to shut my mouth, and even more important than that, it is to send a message out to any other prominent person that might feel the need to join that side of the argument.”
The furor stems from a rally against police brutality on Saturday, Oct. 24 in Manhattan. The director of “Django Unchained” and “Pulp Fiction” addressed a crowd of about 300, saying: “When I see murders, I do not stand by…” and adding: “I have to call a murder a murder and I have to call the murderers the murderers.”
Police organizations around the country, including in Los Angeles and New York, have demanded an apology and called for a boycott of “The Hateful Eight,” the bounty hunter survival tale with a cast that includes Channing Tatum, Kurt Russell and Samuel L. Jackson. While unions and other groups representing more than 200,000 officers have joined the protests, Tarantino has received some support. Actor Jamie Foxx, speaking at a recent awards show, urged the director: “Keep telling the truth and don’t worry about none of the haters.”
The Weinstein Co., which had also remained silent since the controversy erupted, released a statement saying that it “has a tremendous amount of respect for him as a filmmaker,” and saying it would allow Tarantino to “speak for himself.”
More to come….
