Quentin Tarantino is setting the record straight on Kanye West’s claims that the director stole his idea for the plot for his Oscar-winning film Django Unchained.
West made the claim in an interview earlier this week with Piers Morgan, telling Morgan he pitched a similar slavery idea to Tarantino when the two met to talk about the rapper’s 2005 Gold Digger music video.
“There’s no truth to the idea that Kanye West came up with the idea of Django. And then he told it 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.” OK that didn’t happen,” Tarantino told Kimmel.
Tarantino acknowledged, “He [West] did have an idea for a video, and 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 the slave, and he’s singing “Gold Digger.” And it was very funny. It was a really, really funny idea.”
Kimmel then questioned, “A funny slave video?”
‘It was meant to be ironic,” Tarantino clarified. “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.”
In the end, the music video for “Gold Digger” didn’t go with the idea West alleged he had. Django Unchained is a 2012 revisionist Western film about a freed slave (Foxx) who teams up with a bounty hunter (Christoph Waltz) to free his wife from a slavery.
You can watch Tarantino’s interview with Kimmel above.
