On Bill Maher’s HBO show Friday night, director Quentin Tarantino spoke about the outraged and retaliatory response on the part of police unions over his comments about police brutality, accusing the unions of slander. “They’re not dealing in a fair issue,” Tarantino told Maher. “They’re saying that I’m a cop-hater, which is slander, I didn’t say that, and they’re saying—they’re implying that I meant that all cops are murderers. And I wasn’t.”

The uproar over Tarantino’s comments on police violence has taken many shapes over the last few weeks. After Tarantino’s initial statements at a police-brutality protest in New York City—during which he said, “When I see murder, I cannot stand by … I have to call a murder a murder, and I have to call the murderers the murderers”—there were calls to boycott Tarantino’s films, including the upcoming The Hateful Eight. This past week, Jim Pasco, executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police, promised to use “the element of surprise” in order to retaliate against the director economically. “Something is in the works,” Pasco [told The Hollywood Reporter] (http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/fraternal-order-police-quentin-tarantino-837394), “something could happen anytime between now and [the premiere].”

On Friday, Tarantino told Maher that the shame of the controversy is that the police weren’t responding to the real issue. “If they were saying what I said and had a problem with that, well now we’re actually talking about the problem,” he said. “But the thing that’s sad about it is that we do need to talk to the cops about this.”