Do we like Quentin Tarantino?
Our score: 5 out of 10. No campaigning against anyone's rights turned up, but a record of looking away and some cutting remarks sit against a genuine love of film.
Tarantino was born in Tennessee in 1963 and moved to California as a kid. He was the only child of a single mum, hated school, dropped out, and worked as an usher at an adult cinema. Then came the Manhattan Beach video store where he soaked up films and started writing the scripts that became True Romance and Natural Born Killers.
Reservoir Dogs landed at Sundance in 1992 and Pulp Fiction won the Palme d'Or in 1994. That film, and a run including Kill Bill and Django Unchained, made him one of the most recognisable directors alive. His long working relationship with Harvey Weinstein's studio is where the first big stain comes from.
After the allegations against Weinstein broke in 2017, Tarantino told the New York Times he had known about Weinstein's alleged misconduct, and that he “knew enough to do more than I did”. He said he had downplayed the incidents and should have stopped working with him. Owning it counts for something, but it came after the dam burst, not before.
In 2018 he addressed the Kill Bill car crash that injured Uma Thurman, calling it one of the biggest regrets of his career. He said he believed the shot was safe and did not pressure her, and that a trust was broken between them. Where you land depends on whether you see a director who trusted a bad call, or one who put an actor at risk for a shot.
That same month a 2003 radio interview resurfaced in which he had defended Roman Polanski over the 1977 case involving a 13-year-old girl. He apologised, saying he had played devil's advocate to be provocative and accepting that Samantha Geimer was raped. The apology was real and specific, though it took a viral clip to prompt it.
In March, Rosanna Arquette told the Sunday Times she could not accept the repeated slur in his films as art, and called it racist. Tarantino replied that she showed “a decided lack of class” after taking the money. Plenty of viewers defend the slur's use as part of his style, plenty find it grating, and the pile-on tells you he does not take criticism gracefully.