Quentin Tarantino Responds to Backlash Over Police Comments: ‘I’m Not a Cop Hater’

Quentin Tarantino says he doesn’t care that cops all over the country are planning to boycott his movie The Hateful Eight because of his comments about police brutality, but he is clarifying his controversial comments about police officers.

Tarantino came under fire from police unions after he alluded to police officers as “murderers” in a NYC rally about police brutality last month, just days after an NYPD officer was shot and killed. “When I see murders, I do not stand by,” he told crowds at the rally on Oct 24, according to the New York Post. “I have to call a murder a murder and I have to call the murderers the murderers.” Police in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Philadelphia have called for a boycott of his new movie, out at Christmas, and the National Association of Police Organizations recently endorsed the boycott.

Now Tarantino appears to moderating his previous statement, even if he is not apologizing. “All cops are not murderers,” Tarantinot old the Los Angeles Times, in his first public statement since the controversy broke. “I never said that. I never even implied that.”

“What they’re doing is pretty obvious,” he told the paper. “Instead of dealing with the incidents of police brutality that those people 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.”

“I’m not being intimidated,” the director added. “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.”

[Los Angeles Times]