If you think Quentin Tarantino overuses the N-word in his films, he thinks you should look away
"See something else," Quentin Tarantino advises critics in a new interview. "If you have a problem with my movies, then they aren’t the movies to go see."
Quentin Tarantino has faced many questions as a director—questions like “Why do you love feet so much?” and “What did you and Paul Thomas Anderson say to Fiona Apple that night?” But others that have dogged nearly his entire career relate to the high level of violence in his movies, and his extreme comfortability with using the N-word in his scripts. His response to content criticism? “See something else.”
The topic of racial slurs came up during a conversation between Tarantino and host Chris Wallace on the HBO program Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace. “You talk about being the conductor and the audience being the orchestra,” Wallace asks Tarantino in the interview (via Variety), referencing one of the director’s previous comments. “So when people say, ‘Well there’s too much violence in his movies. He uses the N-word too often.’ You say what?”
“You should see [something else],” Tarantino responds. “Then see something else. If you have a problem with my movies then they aren’t the movies to go see. Apparently I’m not making them for you.”
Tarantino doesn’t stand alone in his personal defense. Samuel L. Jackson has also continuously defended Tarantino’s liberal use of the N-word (Django Unchained, set in the slavery-era South, uses the slur nearly 110 times.) One of Tarantino’s longest-running collaborators, Jackson has acted in nearly every one of the director’s films, including Django. In 2019, he told Esquire he thought the criticism was “some bullshit.”
“You can’t just tell a writer he can’t talk, write the words, put the words in the mouths of the people from their ethnicities, the way that they use their words,” Jackson explained. “You cannot do that, because then it becomes an untruth; it’s not honest. It’s just not honest.”
Django star Jamie Foxx has also stood with Tarantino on the matter, although his statements have been slightly less impassioned than Jackson’s. “I understood the text,” Foxx told Yahoo Entertainment in 2018. “The N-word was said 100 times, but I understood the text — that’s the way it was back in that time.”