Quentin Tarantino: Obama 'Favorite President…of My Lifetime'

August 31st, 2015 5:08 PM

Quentin Tarantino is one of the most famous and successful writers and directors in Hollywood, his unconventional films often becoming cult classics – Reservoir Dogs, Kill Bill Volumes 1, 2 and 3,  Pulp FictionNatural Born Killers, etc. Although there’s no denying his talent and creatively, his politics are predictable cookie-cutter Hollywood liberalism, apparently.  The director told an interviewer recently that Barack Obama is his "favorite president, hands down."

"I think he's fantastic," he gushed to New York Magazine: 

He’s my favorite president, hands down, of my lifetime…He’s been awesome this past year. Especially the rapid, one-after-another-after-another-after-another aspect of it. It’s almost like take no prisoners. His he-doesn’t-give-a-sh*t attitude has just been so cool. Everyone always talks about these lame-duck presidents. I’ve never seen anybody end with this kind of ending. All the people who supported him along the way that questioned this or that and the other? All of their questions are being answered now.

Tarantino says that his admiration for Obama only increased with the president's stances on health care, legalization of same-sex marriage, foreign trade, and potentially Iran.

Of course, Tarantino's comments don't appear to be divorced from his flacking for his latest project, The Hateful Eight – a westernset in post-Civil War Wyoming which ollows eight strangers that are stranded together in a blizzard, then discover they are somehow involved in a deadly plot. It’s being compared to the Sergio Leone classic The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, but as Tarantino points out:

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly doesn't get into the racial conflicts of the Civil War; it's just a thing that's happening…My movie is about the country being torn apart by it, and the racial aftermath, six, seven, eight, ten years later.

Tarantino also discussed the perfect timing of the film – given the "Black Lives Matter" movement. Though he claims any similarities in the movie and the movement were unintentional, he is glad that is being brought to the forefront and that "white supremacy" is also being tackled:

It was already in the script. It was already in the footage we shot. It just happens to be timely right now…We're not trying to make it timely. It is timely. . I love the fact that people are talking and dealing with the institutional racism that has existed in this country and been ignored. I feel like it’s another ’60s moment, where the people themselves had to expose how ugly they were before things could change. I’m hopeful that that’s happening now.

In 2012 Tarantino's western Django Unchained earned the derision of Washington Times columnist Jeff Kuhner who found the message absurdly simplistic: "Anti-white bigotry has become embedded in our postmodern culture. Take Django Unchained. The movie boils down to one central theme: the white man as devil—a moral scourge who must be eradicated like a lethal virus."

The Hateful Eight comes out on Christmas Day – "perfect" for the season peace and goodwill towards men.