Quentin Tarantino has earned a hefty amount of backlash and scrutiny for his excessive use of racial slurs in his scripts over the years. So much so that many of Tarantino’s contemporaries, such as Katt Williams, Spike Lee and Denzel Washington have criticized his use of the N-word. In a 2012 interview with GQ, Washington revealed that he even confronted Tarantino for placing the n-word in the script for Crimson Tide. Tarantino’s overt use of the n-word is most prominent in Django Unchained, where the word is used 110 times.

Now, in an interview for the Quentin Tarantino documentary QT8: The First Eight, Academy Award-nominated actor Samuel L. Jackson, voices his criticism on the backlash against the Pulp Fiction filmmaker’s constant use of the n-word in his films.

“You take 12 Years a Slave, which is supposedly made by an auteur. Steve McQueen is very different than Quentin,” Jackson says on camera. “When you have a song that says nigger in it 300 times nobody says shit,” Jackson said. “So it’s ok for Steve McQueen to use [nigger] because he’s artistically attacking the system and the way people think and feel, but Quentin is just doing it to just strike the blackboard with his nails. That’s not true. There’s no dishonesty in anything that [Quentin] writes or how people talk, feel, or speak [in his movies].”

Directed by Tara Wood, QT8: The First Eight will be available to stream on VOD platforms on December 4.

Photo: Getty Images

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