In the midst of a near-total denunciation of Kanye West for his repeated antisemitic comments, the rapper himself got a little off topic. In an interview with Piers Morgan, West claimed that Quentin Tarantino and Jamie Foxx got the idea for the concept of Django Unchained from him. And now, the Oscar-winning director is denying Ye’s allegation, saying that Kanye may be referring to their scrapped plans for a big-budget “Gold Digger” video with a “slave narrative.” In an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live on October 27, Tarantino said that 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.”
So what exactly went down between the two, according to Tarantino? Well, the director said the idea for Django had been cooking for quite some time, though Tarantino and Ye were spitballing ideas for a film version of the rapper’s debut studio album. “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 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.”
Apparently, they were going to make a “funny” video for the song “Gold Digger,” which would include a “slave narrative.” “We used it as an excuse to meet each other, and so we met each other and 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 told a perplexed Kimmel. He said that it was not exactly ha-ha funny but “meant to be ironic.” “It’s like a huge musical,” he tried to explain. “I mean, like no expenses spared with him in this slave rag outfit, doing everything. And then that was also part of the pushback on it.” Glad we were spared that video considering, well, everything.
