London, Jan 2 (EFE).– Film director Quentin Tarantino sees the Confederate flag as “some American swastika” and said, in an interview published Saturday in The Daily Telegraph, that it’s about time that his country questioned why it is still displayed.

The moviemaker, who presented in Britain his new film, “The Hateful Eight,” said that the movie, set in the U.S. after the 1861-1865 Civil War, has become “more relevant” following the recent episodes of racial tension in the United States.

“As we were making it, as the events of the last year and a half just kept happening, the movie became more relevant than we ever could have imagined,” he said.

Tarantino was referring to the death in August 2014 of African American Michael Brown, 18, in Ferguson , Missouri, shot down by a white police officer, and to the massacre of nine members of a black religious congregation last June in Charleston, South Carolina, by a white supremacist. The killer, Dylann Roof, 21, had posed with a flag of the Confederate States of America, emblem of the southern states that during the Civil War had slaves and fought unsuccessfully for secession.

“All of a sudden, people started talking about the Confederacy in America in a way they haven’t before. I mean, I’ve always felt the Rebel flag was some American Swastika. And, well, now, all of a sudden, people are talking about it, and now they’re banning it,” he said, adding that he thought it was about time.

At another moment in the interview, the maker of intrinsically violent films denied any relation between film violence and real-life shootings.

“In the last 25 years, when it comes to industrial societies, hands down the most violent cinema that exists in any one country is Japan. Sometimes grotesquely so. And as we all know, they have the least violent society of all,” he said. EFE