Quentin Tarantino, the maker of many Hollywood hits with violent story lines, refused to apologize for calling police “murderers” during a Washington Square Park rally, saying he never said what he said.
“All cops are not murderers,” Tarantino said to the Los Angeles Times. “I never said that. I never even implied that.”
Tarantino, however, did just that during an October 24 rally against police violence and aggression.
His words then: “When I see murders, I do not stand by … I have to call a murder and murder and I have to call the murderers the murderers.”
He now says the furor about his comments has been taken out of context, and police union officials are unfairly targeting him. The Fraternal Order of Police has vowed a “surprise” revenge on Tarantino during the Christmas Day premiere of his “Hateful Eight,” and has also called for a boycott of the movie, as WND previously reported.
“What we do in December is going to depend in large part on what Tarantino does between now and then,” said FOP executive director James Pasco, the New York Post reported. “We don’t want to prepare him. We want what we do to him to be a surprise, like the end of his movies. We will be opportunistic, we will take every opportunity to hurt him in the only area that seems to matter to him and that’s in the economic area.”
Tarantino said to the Los Angeles Times he refused to be “intimidated” by such threats.
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“What they’re doing,” he said, of those opposing him, the newspaper reported, “is pretty obvious. Instead of dealing with the incidents of police brutality that those people [at the rally] were bringing up, instead of examining the problem of police brutality in this country, better they single me out. And their message is very clear. It’s to shut me down. It’s to discredit me. It is to intimidate me. It is to shut my mouth and, even more important than that, it is to send a message out to any other prominent person that might feel the need to join that side of the argument.”
Tarantino added, the New York Post reported: “I’m not being intimidated. Frankly, it feels lousy to have a bunch of police mouthpieces call me a cop hater. I’m not a cop hater. That is a misrepresentation. That is slanderous. That is not how I feel. But you know, that’s their choice to do that to me. What can I do? I’m not taking back what I said. What I said was the truth. I’m used to people misrepresenting me; I’m used to being misunderstood. What I’d like to think [is] their attack against me is so vicious that they’re revealing themselves. They’re hiding in plain sight.”
Even Tarantino’s father, Tony Tarantino, said his son’s characterization of cops as “murderers” was wrong.
He said, in the wake of his son’s rally call against police, NBC New York reported: “[My son] is a passionate man and that comes out in his art but sometimes he lets his passion blind him to the facts and to reality. I believe that is what happened when he joined in those anti-cop protests. I wish he would take a hard, dispassionate look at the facts before jumping to conclusions and making these kinds of hurtful mistakes that dishonor an honorable profession.”
