Jamie Foxx says he understands why “Django Unchained” director Quentin Tarantino had over 100 n-word bombs dropped in the 2012 film.
After expressing his adoration for working with Tarantino, whom he likened to a “jazz musician,” Foxx explained why he had no qualms about how much the n-word was used in the film about a freed slave who sets out on a quest with a German bounty hunter to rescue his still-enslaved wife from a slave master.
“I understood the text,” Foxx told Yahoo Entertainment. “The N-word was said 100 times, but I understood the text — that’s the way it was back in that time.”
Foxx’s remarks echo those of Samuel L. Jackson, who also starred in the revisionist Western film among other Tarantino classics.
Jackson told Page Six in 2016 he didn’t get all the noise being made about the slur being used in his movies.
“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. “[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. 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.”
However, many others have scrutinized Tarantino’s use of the word, not just in “Django” but other films throughout the Oscar-winning writer and director’s career.
Spike Lee told Variety in 1997 that the “Jackie Brown” director seemed “infatuated with that word” and even questioned if he wanted to be made into “an honorary Black man.”
And Denzel Washington got on to Tarantino for using racist dialogue in an uncredited rewrite of 1995’s “Crimson Tide” script, although they’ve since buried the hatchet, as the actor revealed to GQ in 2012.
