Rosanna Arquette recently reflected on her role in Quentin Tarantino‘s 1994 cult classic Pulp Fiction, and while she noted its seminal status in the film canon, she censured the director’s excessive usage of the N-word in his works.
“It’s iconic, a great film on a lot of levels. But personally I am over the use of the N-word — I hate it,” she told The Times U.K.
She continued, “I cannot stand that he [Tarantino] has been given a hall pass. It’s not art, it’s just racist and creepy.”
The Emmy-nominated actress isn’t the sole person to take issue with Tarantino’s usage of the racial epithet, which shows up over a handful of dozens of times in movies like The Hateful Eight, Django Unchained and Jackie Brown.
The year the lattermost film premiered, in 1997, Spike Lee condemned Tarantino’s overuse of the slur, saying, “I’m not against the word, and I use it, but not excessively. And some people speak that way. But, Quentin is infatuated with that word. What does he want to be made — an honorary Black man?”
Lee added that Tarantino “uses it in all his pictures: Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs. I want Quentin to know that all African Americans do not think that word is trendy or slick.”
In recent years, fellow filmmaker Lee Daniels has also critiqued Tarantino’s decision to use the word in his projects — particularly when the Inglourious Basterds director advised audiences to “see something else” if they had a problem with his creative choices. “That’s not the right answer,” Daniels said, adding that he would have chalked up Tarantino’s usage of the slur as “artistic” a decade or so ago while noting Tarantino has “no right to feel that way.”
Meanwhile, Samuel L. Jackson, who’s starred in Pulp Fiction and Django, has defended Tarantino. In 2022, he told The Times, “Every time someone wants an example of overuse of the N-word, they go to Quentin — it’s unfair. He’s just telling the story and the characters do talk like that. When Steve McQueen does it, it’s art. He’s an artiste. Quentin’s just a popcorn filmmaker.”
