Samuel L. Jackson defends Quentin Tarantino's use of the N-word in films

Samuel L. Jackson is defending director Quentin Tarantino's frequent use of the N-word in The Hateful Eight...

Jan 8, 2016

Samuel L. Jackson is defending director Quentin Tarantino’s frequent use of the N-word in The Hateful Eight.

“I don’t understand the whole craziness about it, or people spending their time sitting in a movie counting the number of times a word is said,” Jackson said in an interview this week.

Tarantino’s 2012 slave-epic Django Unchained used the N-word an astounding 110 times, but Jackson thinks that okay.

“[I don’t understand] why nobody said anything about it in ‘12 Years a Slave,’ when [the N-word] is said, like, 300 times, but nobody said, ‘Oh, that’s awful in a movie,’” Jackson recalled. “People tend to think Quentin is this pop artist that has this affectation, or, as some critics have written, juvenile obsession with the word . . . all of a sudden, when you’re sitting in a theater, it’s like, ‘How many times do I have to hear this?’ As many times as the character says it! If you don’t like the story . . . leave the movie.”