Antoine Fuqua Defends Quentin Tarantino Against Spike Lee's 'Django' Criticisms
CAPRI, Italy – Spike Lee should have called Quentin Tarantino personally rather than criticize him in public with charges of racism, the director of 2001 Oscar winner Training Day said Sunday.
Lee, the director behin Do the Right Thing 1989) Malcolm X 1992) and the thriller Inside Man (2006), made headlines before Christmas when he said he would boycott Tarantino’s Django Unchained because it was "disrespectful" to black people.
"American slavery was not a Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western," Lee wrote on Twitter. "It was a holocaust."
Later, in an interview, Lee declined to elaborate, except to say he had no intention of seeing the film: "I can’t speak on it ‘cause I’m not going to see it," he said.
It is not the first time Lee criticized Tarantino for racial insensitivity: after the release of Tarantino’s 1997 blacksploitation tribute Jackie Brown, Lee blasted Tarantino for what he said was an overuse of "the n-word," saying, "I think there is something wrong with him."
But Antoine Fuqua, the director behind Training Day who says he knows both Tarantino and Lee but is not close friends with either one, said Lee aired his concerns in wrong way.
"That’s just not the way you do things," said Fuqua, speaking on the sidelines of the 17th Capri, Hollywood Film Festival. "If you disagree with the way a colleague did something, call him up, invite him out for a coffee, talk about it. But don’t do it publically."
Fuqua -- at the Capri festival as part of a big Hollywood contingent that also includes Leaving Las Vegas director Mike Figgis, 300 sta Gerard Butler Iceman director Ariel Vromen nd Franco Nero, the star of the original Django film that inspired Tarantino's latest -- also defended Tarantino.
"I don’t think Quentin Tarantino has a racist bone in his body," he said. "Besides, I’m good friends with [Django Unchained star] Jamie Foxx and he wouldn’t have anything to do with a film that had anything racist to it."
Fuqua continued: "I haven’t seen the film, so I can’t speak about it specifically, but we’re supposed to find some truth in films and if you set a film in the 1850s, you’re going to hear the word 'nigger,' because that’s the way they spoke then, and you’re going to discuss slavery because that was part of the reality," he said.
"I want my kids to hear those kinds of words in the right context, so that they’ll know that language is not OK," Fuqua said.
Edited at 2012-12-30 11:26 pm (UTC)
I've had conversations about the n-word before in an academic/racial theory type context and prefer to say 'the n-word' rather than the actual word. I don't completely avoid using it but do so extremely sparingly and only where it feels necessary in service of the discussion. I'm white. And I've had these conversations with other white people where they have been coming from an anti-racist perspective but will use the word themselves. I'm OK with that, despite my own personal discomfort, but in a couple of cases they've used the word more times than necessary and you start to get the very uncomfortable feeling that they are getting off on using the word in spite of the fact that the conversation is specifically around the word and its political position/offensiveness. I'm queer and have experienced this with the word 'faggot' in conversations with straight, allegedly non-homophobic people too. It's the taboo of the word and entitlement issues revealing themselves.
So sometimes people use the word in a legitimate way, but the number of times they use it does matter. Given past legitimate criticisms of Tarantino, I wouldn't be at all surprised if he does indeed throw around the word far more than necessary to serve the plot.
i was very surprised that "negro" was used at all tho
But no one wants to see the criticism because everyone wants to hop on QT's dick.
the how/when/why were all realistic for the time period but i still feel like it was way overused. I think he intentionally created extra dialog just to use it more.
For maybe the first maybe 20mins every time someone said it, it jarred me a bit but by the end of the film i didn't even notice anymore. I dont know if that was his intention but it was like the word lost its meaning and i was desensitized to it. The sounds horrible but it is the truth.
http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninsca