Hollywood feuds can be the stuff of legend and it might surprise you to learn that Denzel Washington reportedly had a beef with Quentin Tarantino for several years, between 1995 and 2002. At the time, Tarantino wrote stories and scripts for movies that he didn’t direct, including Natural Born Killers and From Dusk Till Dawn. As well as this, he was also an uncredited “script doctor” who was brought in to jazz up the dialogue in action thrillers The Rock and Crimson Tide.
Both Washington and Tarantino had close personal and professional ties with director Tony Scott (brother of Ridley), who passed away in 2012. Washington has starred in five of Scott’s movies, including Man on Fire and Unstoppable. And Tarantino wrote the script for Scott’s lovers-on-the-lam movie True Romance (1993).
According to reports, Washington was not happy with the dialogue that Tarantino brought to Tony Scott’s 1995 submarine movie Crimson Tide, in which Washington co-starred with Gene Hackman. Allegedly, Washington thought the dialogue was racist and publicly called Tarantino out about it on set.
However, in 2012, Washington told GQ that he had buried the hatchet with Tarantino ten years before (so 2002) and that his daughter Katia was working on Tarantino’s Django Unchained as an editorial production assistant; “My oldest daughter—I see her digging her independence. She doesn’t like me talking about it, but she’s working with Tarantino.”