Quentin Tarantino denies Kanye West’s claims about ‘Django Unchained’
Quentin Tarantino has denied Kanye West’s claims the director stole the idea of Django Unchained from him.
During a recent appearance on Piers Morgan Uncensored, West alleged Tarantino and Jamie Foxx stole the idea for the film from his ‘Gold Digger’ video. Ye claimed during the planning of the video for the song, he pitched the idea to the duo.
West claimed: “Tarantino can write a movie about slavery where – actually him and Jamie [Foxx], they got the idea from me because the idea for Django I pitched to Jamie Foxx and Quentin Tarantino as the video for ‘Gold Digger’. And then Tarantino turned it into a film.”
Now, Tarantino has refuted these claims during an interview with Jimmy Kimmel. He explained: “There’s not truth to the idea that Kanye West came up with the idea of ‘Django’ and then he told that to me, and I go, ‘Hey, wow, that’s a really great idea. Let me take Kanye’s idea and make Django Unchained out of it.’ That didn’t happen.
“I’d had the idea for ‘Django’ for a while before I ever met Kanye. He wanted to do a giant movie version of The College Dropout [Ye’s debut studio album] the way he did the album – so he wanted to get big directors to do different tracks from the album and then release it as this giant movie – not video, nothing as crass as videos, it was movies, movies based on each of the different tracks.”
Tarantino continued: “We used it as an excuse to meet each other and and so we met each other we had a really good time. And he did have an idea for a video. I do think it was for the ‘Gold Digger’ video, that he would be a slave. And the whole thing was the slave narrative where he’s a slave, and he’s singing ‘Gold Digger.’ And it was very funny. It was a really, really funny idea.”
Kimmel then intervened and joked, “It was a funny slave video, I mean.” The director then replied, “It was meant to be ironic. And it’s like a huge musical. I mean, like no expenses spared with him in this slave rag outfit, doing everything. And then that was also part of the part of the pushback on it. But I wish he had done it. It sounded really cool. Anyway, that’s what he’s referring to.”
Watch Tarantino’s appearance on Jimmy Kimmel below.
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