Quentin Tarantino Defends Harvey Weinstein: 'Take the Good With the Bad'

LYON -- Days after director Olivier Dahan lashed out at Harvey Weinstein over cuts to the forthcoming Grace of Monaco, Quentin Tarantino deflected additional criticism of the producer.

"You have to take the good with the bad," the Django Unchained director told reporters on Saturday.

In an interview in the French newspaper Liberation, Dahan had vented about Weinstein."It's right to struggle, but when you confront an American distributor like Weinstein, not to name names, there is not much you can do," he said.

STORY: 'Grace of Monaco' Director Bashes Harvey Weinstein's 'Pile of Shit' Edit Plans

In an emotional Prix Lumiere ceremony on Friday, Weinstein cited Tarantino as building Miramax and saving The Weinstein Company.

The following day during an afternoon press conference, Tarantino credited Weinstein for much of his career despite his sometimes contentious relationship with directors. "Harvey offered me a home and a family to make my films. It is a home and a family, but like a lot of homes and families it can be pretty f---ed up sometimes," he joked. "C'est la vie!"

"Nevertheless, at the end of the day, I don’t think my career would have been able to stay completely on the trajectory of my own whims that it has without Harvey’s constant backing," he added.

"We have a really terrific partnership. And frankly there’s a few people in the early days that if I had never met them and if they hadn’t found something in my work I would never have made a movie," he said, citing his longtime collaborators. "Harvey Keitel is one, Richard Gladstein at Live Entertainment and Lawrence Bender is one." Keitel and Bender were present at the award ceremony Friday night, where they paid an emotional tribute to the director.

He also kept uncharacteristically tight-lipped about the anticipated next Kill Bill project or his next film. "One of the problems of my career has been that I tend to have a big mouth, so this time I won't. But I am tinkering," he said, adding that he is also writing a film book as well as finishing a script.

The avid cinephile reminisced about the early days of traveling the world from film festival to film festival. "It's film festivals that created me, that launched me, especially in that first year with Reservoir Dogs going all around the world. I would go to the Sao Paolo film festival and do a bunch of interviews in Brazil," he said. "So when it came time for Miramax to sell the foreign rights they knew who I was and wanted to buy the rights. Miramax was unaware of how popular I had become in all these countries I had visited and they all wanted the Tarantino film."

"I’m a little discouraged with film festivals these days because of digital projection, because I remember going to film festivals and it was always 35 mm and you had to get that print and people always ended up doing it and it was exciting," he said. "Now going to other countries and watching everything on digital is depressing to me."

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