The Religion and Political Views of Quentin Tarantino

For the last over year and a half but in particularly for the last year and a half, I’ve been, like a lot of people, sitting on my couch, watching television and watching seemingly one sickening incident after another that never seems to stop. Literally unarmed people being shot and killed. […] Talk to black folks they’ll be saying […] “This didn’t start a year and a half ago”, all right but now with actually iPhones capturing this footage and seeing it that seems pretty undeniable to us […] There is this institutional racism that is that is just bred in law enforcement that’s happened in the last 30 years and it needs to stop and to be silent is to acquiesce to it.

When you sit there and listen to Hillary Clinton on something like Charlie Rose and hear her talking in depth about the issues to such a degree it’s like, whoa, that’s who I want for my president… she knows what she’s talking about.

I think, like most children, I went through… religious fanaticism that kids do, where they get born again or something like that, and get into that for a while. I think I was born Catholic, but I was never practiced. I lived with my grandmother for a while in Tennessee, and I got involved with a Christian church there and… I got baptized and saved and all that stuff. As time has gone on… I’m not sure how much of any of that I believe in. I don’t really know if I believe in God… Oddly enough, it’s funny, though—I do believe in God-given talent. I do believe some people are given talent, and that… they’re given gifts.

I have a vast interest in race in this country. In the way blacks and whites have dealt with each other and, in particular, these last hundred years. It’s a theme that I can’t get away from. I always keep going back to it. But, it’s such an important theme in America, and such an ignored theme, for the most part, in Hollywood movies that I don’t really need much more of a theme, as long as I have that one. It doesn’t even always have to be about white and black, but it usually is. […] Not only do I think that it relates to it [THE HATEFUL EIGHT], I think it… might be the only movie coming out this year that actually directly addresses it to some degree or another… It addresses the chasm. It addresses the resentment… And it addresses how hard some hatchets are to bury. All that is actually dealt with. When I wrote the film, I wasn’t trying to make an overt political statement about today. But I really realized pretty quickly that, ‘Oh wow, this is kind of almost a blue state, red state Western.’ Because both communities are dealt with. And it’s not a bad guy, good guy thing either. Nobody’s really good in this movie.

All cops are not murderers. I never said that. I never even implied that […] I do believe that the cops who killed Eric Garner are murderers. I do believe that when Walter Scott was shot in the back in the park eight times by a cop, he was murdered. I do believe Tamir Rice was murdered.

Finally, the issue of white supremacy is being talked about and dealt with. And it’s what the movie’s about. It was already in the script. It was already in the footage we shot. It just happens to be timely right now. We’re not trying to make it timely. It is timely. I love the fact that people are talking and dealing with the institutional racism that has existed in this country and been ignored. I feel like it’s another Sixties moment, where the people themselves had to expose how ugly they were before things could change.

I’m a human being with a conscience […] And if you believe there’s murder going on, then you need to rise up and stand up against it. I’m here to say I’m on the side of the murdered. When I see murders, I do not stand by … I have to call a murder a murder and I have to call the murderers the murderers.

But when the black critics came out with savage think pieces about ‘Django,’ I couldn’t have cared less. If people don’t like my movies, they don’t like my movies, and if they don’t get it, it doesn’t matter. The bad taste that was left in my mouth had to do with this: It’s been a long time since the subject of a writer’s skin was mentioned as often as mine. You wouldn’t think the color of a writer’s skin should have any effect on the words themselves. In a lot of the more ugly pieces my motives were really brought to bear in the most negative way. It’s like I’m some supervillain coming up with this stuff.’

I think he [Obama] is fantastic. He’s my favorite president, hands down, of my lifetime. He’s been awesome this past year. Especially the rapid, one-after-another-after-another-after-another aspect of it. It’s almost like take no prisoners. His he-doesn’t-give-a-s**t attitude has just been so cool. Everyone always talks about these lame-duck presidents. I’ve never seen anybody end with this kind of ending. All the people who supported him along the way that questioned this or that and the other? All of their questions are being answered now.

I'm really annoyed. I think it's disrespectful. I think it's disrespectful to their memory, the memory of the people who died, to talk about movies … Obviously, the issue is gun control and mental health.