Director Spike Lee’s decades-long feud with fellow filmmaker Quentin Tarantino appears to be alive and well.
The Inside Man auteur slammed Tarantino’s latest movie, the slavery-themed revenge thriller Django Unchained, in a recent interview, even though he hasn’t see it.
“I cant speak on it cause I’m not gonna see it,” Lee told VIBE TV. “All I’m going to say is that it’s disrespectful to my ancestors. That’s just me…I’m not speaking on behalf of anybody else.”
Lee continued his criticism of the potential Oscar nominee on Twitter.
“American Slavery Was Not A Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western. It Was A Holocaust. My Ancestors Are Slaves.Stolen From Africa. I Will Honor Them,” Lee tweeted.
Lee infamously lambasted Tarantino in 1997 during the release of his cult classic Jackie Brown, because of that film’s ubiquitous use of the n-word.
“The problem with Jackie Brown,” Spike Lee reportedly said. “I will say it again and again. I have a definite problem with Quentin Tarantino’s excessive use of the n-word. And let the record show that I never said that he can not use that word — I’ve used that word in many of my films — but I think something is wrong with him. You look at Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs and even that thing with Christian Slater, True Romance. It’s just the n-word, the n-word, the n-word. He says he grew up on Blaxploitation films and that they were his favorite films but he has to realize that those films do not speak to the breadth of the entire African-American experience. I mean the guy’s just stupid.”
In his defense, Tarantino argued in a Playboy interview: “I am working with The English language. I am not just a film director who shoots movies. I’m an artist, and good, bad, or indifferent, I’m coming from that place. All my choices, the way I live my life, are about that.”
Despite scoring rave reviews, the high volume of n-words in Django Unchained has also been a source of some controversy.