Quentin Tarantino states that Kanye West’s claim about Django Unchained “didn’t happen”

Legendary filmmaker Quentin Tarantino recently fired back at Kanye West after the rapper made claims that he came up with Django Unchained.

Quentin Tarantino has shut down Kanye West’s claim that the renowned director, along with main actor Jamie Foxx, got the idea for the 2012 film Django Unchained from him, which the rapper stated on Piers Morgan Uncensored.

Kanye – or Ye as his name has been since 2021 – stated that he pitched a similar idea when brainstorming the music video for his 2005 song Gold Digger, which actually features the aforementioned Foxx. The music video that was then released in 2009 ended up quite different, featuring a montage of Ye and dancing with various models.

This debacle is also occurring in the midst of Ye facing a massive controversy after his recent anti-Semitic comments.

Tarantino shuts down Kanye West on Jimmy Kimmel

While Tarantino may or may not have planned to address the Ye situation directly, it was brought up to him while he appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live.

The titular host asked him: “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?”

Tarantino responded as thus: “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.

“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.

“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.”

Kanye has yet to respond to Tarantino.

Django Unchained is currently available to stream on Amazon Prime Video.