Tag Archives: birth of a nation

John Ford may be one of American cinema’s great directors, but Quentin Tarantino has some choice words for the maker of such film classics as The Searchers , Stagecoach , and The Grapes of Wrath : “To say the least, I hate him,” Tarantino told The Root in a recent conversation about Django Unchained . What’s more, he says Ford inspired him to write a scene in Django Unchained in which comically inept proto-Klansmen get their just desserts. Earlier this month, Django producer Stacey Sher alluded to Tarantino’s animosity toward Ford at the film’s PGA screening. “He’s not a John Ford fan,” she said. “Do you know why? John Ford was a Klansman in Birth of a Nation , so Quentin can’t really get past that — and I can’t blame him.” That’s terrifically provocative and explanatory a statement in itself, but in a fantastically in-depth interview at The Root , Tarantino explains the Ford beef further : Oddly enough, where I got the idea for the Klan guys [in Django Unchained ] — they’re not Klan yet, the Regulators arguing about the bags [on their heads] — as you may well know, director John Ford was one of the Klansmen in The Birth of a Nation , so I even speculate in the piece: Well, John Ford put on a Klan uniform for D.W. Griffith. What was that about? What did that take? He can’t say he didn’t know the material. Everybody knew The Clansman [on which Birth of a Nation was based] at that time as a piece of material. …he put on the Klan uniform. He got on the horse. He rode hard to black subjugation. As I’m writing this — and he rode hard, and I’m sure the Klan hood was moving all over his head as he was riding and he was riding blind — I’m thinking, wow. That probably was the case. How come no one’s ever thought of that before? Five years later, I’m writing the scene and all of a sudden it comes out. One of my American Western heroes is not John Ford, obviously. To say the least, I hate him. Forget about faceless Indians he killed like zombies. It really is people like that that kept alive this idea of Anglo-Saxon humanity compared to everybody else’s humanity — and the idea that that’s hogwash is a very new idea in relative terms. And you can see it in the cinema in the ’30s and ’40s — it’s still there. And even in the ’50s. A true cinephile controversy! (Read/listen to the whole interview here .) Pot, consider yourself stirred. Discuss! [ The Root h/t @GlennWhipp ]

Excerpt from:
Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Django’ Klansmen Inspired By John Ford: ‘To Say The Least, I Hate Him’