Spike Lee has managed to start controversy yet again… This time it’s not with one of his political movies, it’s with his recent comments about Quentin Tarantino’s slave film Django Unchained. The directors’ statement hasn’t warranted a response from Tarantino as of yet, but Training Day director Antoine Fuqua has stepped in to defend the Django Unchained director.
Last week, Lee publicly criticized Tarantino on Twitter saying he refused to see Django Unchained because, “American Slavery Was Not A Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western.” Lee also called Tarantino “disrespectful” to his ancestors and says “there is something wrong with” him for his overuse of “the n-word” in his films.
This criticism didn’t sit well with Fuqua, who suggested that Lee is indeed the disrespectful one. “That’s just not the way you do things,” Fuqua told THR at the Capri’s 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 publicly.”
Fuqua goes on to defend the director’s use of the n-word by saying, “I don’t think Quentin Tarantino has a racist bone in his body. 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. I want my kids to hear those kinds of words in the right context, so that they’ll know that language is not OK.”
