Now we ain’t sayin’ he’s a bold fibber…Earlier this week, Kanye West stirred up a little controversy–oh, no, not that. Rather, he made the claim that Django Unchained was his idea, saying, that “[Quentin] and Jamie, 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’… then Tarantino turned it into a film.” This, as we expected, is 100% false.
Quentin Tarantino has been open about his influences–but Kanye West is not on the same list as Sergio Leone and Brian DePalma. Appearing on Jimmy Kimmel Live! this week to promote his new book, Cinema Speculation, Quentin Tarantino shut down Kanye West’s claims. “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.”
Tarantino did, however, clarify on maybe where Kanye West was coming from. “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…He did have an idea for a video. I do think it was for the ‘Gold Digger’ video, that he would be a slave…It sounded really cool. Anyway, that’s what he’s referring to.”
In the 20-minute chat with Jimmy Kimmel, Quentin Tarantino also touched on being a parent to two kids, how Wilt Chamberlain could’ve been his stepfather and, of course, his new book, which Kanye West will most certainly never read.
What do you think of Kanye West’s claim and how Quentin Tarantino handled the situation? Let us know your thoughts on the situation below.