Quentin Tarantino offered nothing even close to an apology on Tuesday for calling cops “murderers” — and instead pathetically claimed he has been victimized by police unions.
Speaking publicly for the first time since his inflammatory comments at a Washington Square Park rally on Oct. 24, the “Pulp Fiction” director insisted his words were all taken out of context.
“All cops are not murderers,” Tarantino told the Los Angeles Times. “I never said that. I never even implied that.
“What they’re doing is pretty obvious. 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.”
At the rally against “police terror,” Tarantino said, “When I see murders, I do not stand by . . . I have to call a murder a murder and I have to call the murderers the murderers.”
The 52-year-old filmmaker also told the LA Times that he won’t back down in the face of a threatened boycott of his new movie “The Hateful Eight,” to be released Christmas Day.
“I’m not being intimidated,” Tarantino said. “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.
“But you know, that’s their choice to do that to me,” he continued. “What can I do? I’m not taking back what I said. What I said was the truth. I’m used to people misrepresenting me; I’m used to being misunderstood. What I’d like to think [is] their attack against me is so vicious that they’re revealing themselves. They’re hiding in plain sight.”
James Pasco, executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police, is promising a “surprise” act of revenge at the premiere of “Hateful Eight.”
“What we do in December is going to depend in large part on what Tarantino does between now and then,” he told The Post. “We don’t want to prepare him. We want what we do to him to be a surprise, like the end of his movies. We will be opportunistic, we will take every opportunity to hurt him in the only area that seems to matter to him and that’s in the economic area.”
