For a while, it seems, Quentin Tarantino was scared of his own movie, or at least, that's what Sidney Poitier told him. While out to dinner with Poitier, Tarantino explains: "[I] was telling him about my story, and then telling him about my trepidation...  he said, ... 'Quentin, I don't think you should do that. ... What you're just telling me is you're a little afraid of your own movie, and you just need to get over that." Clearly, he got over his fear, but judging the aftermath and the wide spread debate that has erupted over the treatment of race and the use of violence in the movie, his trepidation was well placed. 

However, speaking to NPR he has defended the film, and has given his opinion about violence in movies. 

"What happened during slavery times is a thousand times worse than [what] I show/ So if I were to show it a thousand times worse, to me, that wouldn't be exploitative, that would just be how it is. If you can't take it, you can't take it." He says, "I wanted the film to be [entertaining]... But there's two types of violence in this film: There's the brutal reality that slaves lived under for, and then there's the violence of Django's retribution. And that's movie violence, and that's fun and that's cool, and that's really enjoyable and kind of what you're waiting for."

He's not an advocate of all kinds of violence though, and is completely against the use of real animals in the violence of movies: "The only thing that I've ever watched in a movie that I wished I'd never seen is real-life animal death or real-life insect death in a movie. That's absolutely, positively where I draw the line... Movies are about make-believe. ... I don't think there's any place in a movie for real death."