If this year has proven anything for film-maker Quentin Tarantino, it’s that the 52-year-old director hasn’t mellowed with age.  As well as his recent controversial remarks concerning police violence that landed him in trouble with the largest police union in the US, Tarantino has been vocal on a number of less urgent matters in interviews leading up to the release of his eighth film, The Hateful Eight, which opens in December.  A week before his participation in the New York rally in late October, where he made his headline-inducing comments about police, Tarantino was criticised in the media for saying in a New York Times profile by American Psycho writer Bret Easton Ellis that Ava DuVernay’s Oscar-nominated Martin Luther King Jr biopic Selma “deserved an Emmy” – in other words, that it looked made for TV. In response to the backlash, Tarantino simply clarified that he had in fact not seen the film, but that judging by its promotional material, it looked “like a 70s TV movie”.  Related: Quentin Tarantino wants to 'go further' with his anti-police violence protests  Tarantino was also gleefully outspoken in a popular summer feature that ran in Vulture, saying that Wes Craven’s direction of Scream “kept it earthbound and stopped it from going to the moon”. (The Vulture piece was published before Craven died.) Another highlight from the interview that immediately went viral: Tarantino saying he skipped the second season of True Detective because it looked “just awful” – not an unusual judgment, but one perhaps less frequently expressed in the upper echelons of the entertainment industry.  “I regret it a lot,” Tarantino tells the Guardian of the remarks he made in the two interviews that caught traction on the internet via countless articles published by news outlets – including, he points out, the Guardian. “I wasn’t quite prepared for all that, because I’m one of the only film directors that comes from a slightly film critic point of view. At the same time I am a film student – I mean, a student of the history of cinema. I can see myself writing film piece books, and film reviews at another point in time, maybe more in my retired years or something.  “I don’t think I was coming from a disrespectful place about anything,” he adds. “I said as many positive things about other people.”  And it’s true: during his chat with Vulture, Tarantino praised David O Russell’s The Fighter (while also arguing why Ben Affleck’s The Town can’t compare), and expressed his love for Kingsman: The Secret Service.  Explains Tarantino: “I was still coming [at it] from the world where you sit down with a reporter that’s doing a piece, either for Vanity Fair, or for New York Times magazine, and the piece has an integrity all of its own that carries from the beginning to the end. That’s how it’s read. And that is the deal. Then maybe other journalists refer to it as they talk to you, because they’ve read your article, but that’s it.  “[But nowadays] a few pull quotes are pulled, and salacious headlines are attached to it, and this one thing you said appears in 150 different online outlets – the whole article is cannibalized, based on that. I wasn’t quite used to that.”  Related: Quentin Tarantino: film maverick and police critic delights in controversy  As a result of the backlash that ha greeted Tarantino’s personal opinions of late, the film-maker says he’s now wary of taking part in any more long-form profiles, no matter the outlet. For Tarantino, the risk of being misinterpreted isn’t worth it.  “Let me put it like this,” Tarantino says. “A sit-down, where you get to know the guy, and you hang out with him for three days? I don’t see what I get out of that anymore. When [an interview] had its own integrity, that was a different thing. If I keep giving fish, and they’re giving me back chum in 450 different outlets, I don’t know why I’m doing it.”
The Oscar-winning film-maker tells the Guardian it’s unlikely he’ll ever sit down for a long-form interview again, after criticisms he’s received this year