[Movies] Quentin Tarantino Says He Hates John Ford
Posted by Jeremy Thomas on 12.26.2012
Tarantino calls the legendary director a racist...
Quentin Tarantino has revealed that he absolutely hates the legendary western director John Ford. Tarantino was speaking with Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. for The Root while promoting Django Unchained and called Ford--who directed the likes of The Searchers, Fort Apache and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon--a racist for appearing as a KKK member in The Birth of a Nation.
"[As] you may well know, director John Ford was one of the Klansmen in The Birth of a Nation, so I even speculate in the piece: Well, John Ford put on a Klan uniform for D.W. Griffith," he said. "What was that about? What did that take? He can't say he didn't know the material. Everybody knew The Clansman at that time as a piece of material," said Tarantino. "And touring companies were doing plays of it all the time. And yet he put on the Klan uniform. He got on the horse. He rode hard to black subjugation."
He continues, "One of my American Western heroes is not John Ford, obviously. To say the least, I hate him. Forget about faceless Indians he killed like zombies. It really is people like that that kept alive this idea of Anglo-Saxon humanity compared to everybody else's humanity -- and the idea that that's hogwash is a very new idea in relative terms. And you can see it in the cinema in the '30s and '40s -- it's still there. And even in the '50s."
