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Quentin Tarantino:
Think through those provocative sound bites.

On the other hand, it’s not like QT’s always the most insightful fellow in interviews either. Tarantino got many of his cinephile fans up in a bit of a lather last week when he took several weird shots at legendary Western director John Ford in an interview with The Root. “To say the least, I hate him,” Tarantino announced, for “the faceless Indians he killed like zombies” in his films, and
this idea of Anglo-Saxon humanity compared to everyone else’s humanity” — problematic elements, to be sure, but ones Ford himself addressed in later films like Cheyanne Autumn and one of the greatest Westerns ever made, The Searchers. But that doesn’t even seem to be Tarantino’s main bone of contention (and that wouldn’t make him the first to knock the filmmaker, either; Thomson’s New Biographical Dictionary of Film entry on Ford is just as sour) — it’s that Ford did a bit of work as a Klansman extra in Griffith’s notorious Birth of a Nation. Um, what? So, okay, does that mean we should shrug off the rest of Tarantino’s biography because he did a bit role as a rapist in Planet Terror? And while we’re on the subject…

Also, please, God, no more acting.

There is exactly one bad performance in Django Unchained, and it’s the one bad performance that Tarantino didn’t have the distance to remove: his own. His single-scene appearance as an Australian mining company employee is a disaster: twitchy, self-conscious, and burdened with the worst Australian accent this side of Natural Born Killers. Tarantino’s stifled acting ambitions have been our cross to bear throughout his career, and while he’s acted (with varying success) for other directors, his appearances in his own films have — since his horrifying work in Pulp Fiction — been mercifully brief. No such luck this time; he’s only got about five minutes of screen time in Django, but boy does he make the least of it.