Despite having worked together on Girl 6, it sounds like Quentin Tarantino and Spike Lee will never work together again after the former told journalists (at a press conference for his new movie The Hateful Eight) in Brazil, “I have two more films to direct and I will not spend any of them working with that son of a b*****. He [Spike] would be very happy the day I accept to work with him. But it will not happen.” The comments, reported on Brazilian website O Globo, continue the pair’s war of words, which has been raging since the 90s.
Lee criticized Tarantino for the excessive use of the n-word in Jackie Brown in 1997, to which Tarantino countered, “As a writer, I demand the right to write any character in the world that I want to write. And to say that I can’t do that because I’m white… that is racist.” Lee hit back, explaining, “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… 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… African-American experience. I mean the guy’s just stupid.”
When Tarantino’s last movie, Django Unchained was released in 2012, Lee told Vibe magazine, “I can’t speak on it ’cause I’m not gonna see it. 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.” He later tweeted, “American Slavery Was Not A Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western. It Was A Holocaust. My Ancestors Are Slaves. Stolen From Africa. I Will Honor Them.”
Both directors have big projects coming up this December, with Tarantino’s Hateful Eight hitting the big screen and Spike Lee’s Chiraq coming out on Amazon Prime. At the press conference, Tarantino also said that he only has two more films in him after this. “The Hateful Eight is my eighth film. The next will be the ninth, and the next [after that] will be the last…I have a mythological perspective with respect to myself and my career.”
Credits
Photography Georges Biard