Quentin Tarantino rejects Kanye West’s claim that Django Unchained was his idea: ‘There’s no truth to that’
On Thursday’s episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live, filmmaker Quentin Tarantino denied recent claims made by the rapper formerly known as Kanye West that Ye, as he now goes by, came up with the idea for Tarantino’s Academy Award-winning film Django Unchained (2012).
Earlier, Ye claimed that he pitched the idea for Django Unchained during a brainstorming session for a music video for his song Gold Digger (2005), which features Django Unchained star Jamie Foxx. Jimmy Kimmel asked Tarantino, “Kanye West said that he came up with the idea for Django Unchained. He said that when he was making the Gold Digger video with Jamie Foxx, he pitched it to you guys as a video and then you made it – is there any truth to that?”
In reply, Tarantino said, “There’s no 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.”
He added, “I 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 (his 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 added.
“We used it as an excuse to meet each other 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,” Tarantino said.
Here’s the conversation:
Quentin Tarantino on Kanye West claiming that he came up with the idea for Django Unchained… pic.twitter.com/5gA4z523zW
— Jimmy Kimmel Live (@JimmyKimmelLive) October 28, 2022
Django Unchained, starring Jamie Foxx, Leonardo DiCaprio, Christoph Waltz, and Samuel L Jackson, is a period American revisionist film set in 19th century about a slave who becomes a bounty hunter.
