Ava DuVernay Says There Was "Nothing Surprising" About Quentin Tarantino's 'Selma' Diss

"It didn't bother me like so many assumed it would," DuVernay says.

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Complex Original

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When Quentin Tarantinounceremoniously bashedAva DuVernay's Selma in a T Magazine interview earlier this year with Bret Easton Ellis by snarkily saying the Martin Luther King Jr. biopic "deserved an Emmy," a lot of people were very understandably offended. After the quote started gaining traction on Twitter and promptly trickled into headlines, Tarantino publicly clarified that he actually hadn’t even seen Selma when he conducted the interview with Ellis and claimed the quote was meant as some sort of a nod to TV movies from the 1970s. "Does it look like a seventies TV movie?" Tarantino said in a letter to Indiewire. "Yes. Does it play like one? I don't know, I haven't seen it."

Ava DuVernay recently caught up with the Hollywood Reporter, revealing that she wasn’t too bothered by Tarantino’s comments, as she considers them downright predictable. "I was surprised by how surprised everyone was," DuVernay says. "When you look at his work and his persona, there’s nothing surprising about what he said. But it didn’t bother me like so many assumed it would."

Tarantino recently found himself in a very different kind of controversy after speaking out against the prevalence of racially charged police brutality across much of the country, a move which earned him a publicly announced spot on police unions' list of apparent enemies. Thankfully, Tarantino isn’t concerned with such opinions and has thus refused to back down. "What they're doing is pretty obvious," Tarantino told the Los Angeles Times. "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."

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