In a sit-down with Jimmy Kimmel Live! Thursday night, Quentin Tarantino denied Kanye West‘s claims it was he who came up with the idea for Tarantino’s Oscar-winning film Django Unchained.
Ye claimed during a Piers Morgan Uncensored interview last week, “Tarantino can write a movie about slavery where — actually him and Jamie [Foxx], 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,’ and then Tarantino turned it into a film.”
Like many of West’s claims recently, Tarantino told Jimmy Kimmel that Ye’s side of the story doesn’t hold up. “That didn’t happen,” Quentin insisted.
Tarantino admitted he and West at one point discussed collaborating on a film version of his 2004 album The College Dropout, but that’s where the similarities ended. “He wanted to get big directors to do different tracks from the album … Not videos, nothing as crass as videos,” the Oscar-winning Pulp Fiction screenwriter said, explaining, “They were going to be movies based on each of the different tracks.”
He added, “I do think it was for the ‘Gold Digger’ video that he would be a slave. 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.”
Jimmy questioned the poor taste of a slave-themed comedy video, to which Tarantino said, “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 pushback on it. But I wish he had done it. It sounded really cool. Anyway, that’s what he’s referring to [with Django].”