Quentin Tarantino says he hasn't seen 'Selma,' wasn't trying to shade Ava Duvernay

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Earlier this week, director Quentin Tarantino got in trouble with Ava Duvernay fans after he seemed to throw some shade her way over Selma.

“She did a really good job on Selma, but Selma deserved an Emmy,” he said during an interview.

Duvernay responded diplomatically by saying, “Everybody is entitled to their own opinion.”

Of course, the perceived slight against Selma did not go unnoticed, and now Tarantino is trying to explain away the shade. “I never saw Selma,” he wrote in an email to IndieWire. “If you look at the article, it was [interviewer] Bret [Easton Ellis] who was talking about Selma, not me.”

“I did say the line ‘it deserved a Emmy,’” he admitted. “When I said it, it was more like a question. Which basically meant, ‘It’s like a TV movie?’ Which Bret and myself being from the same TV generation, was not only understood, but there was no slam intended.”

He added:

Both Bret and myself come from the seventies and eighties when there were a lot of historically based TV movies: the King mini-series written by Abby Mann staring Paul Winfield; ‘Crisis at Central High’ with Joanne Woodward. And ‘Judge Horton and the Scottsboro Boys.’ These were great TV movies. I’d be honored to be placed next to those films. However, I haven’t seen it. Does it look like a seventies TV movie? Yes. Does it play like one, I don’t know, I haven’t seen it.