Kanye West’s ‘Django Unchained’ Claim Gets Quentin Tarantino Response

Kanye West has gotten a response from Django Unchained director Quentin Tarantino after the Yeezy mogul claimed he came up with the idea for the film.

During an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live, the famed Pulp Fiction director sat down to discuss his new book Cinema Speculation but took a moment to address Ye’s bizarre claim.

“There’s no truth to the idea that Kanye came up with the idea of Django,” Tarantino said. “That didn’t happen. I’ve had the idea for Django for a while before I ever met Kanye. He wanted to do a giant movie version of College Dropout, the way he did the album. He wanted to get big directors to do different tracks from the album and then release it as like this giant movie.”

He continued: “So me and Kanye used it as an excuse to meet each other. So we met each other and had a really good time and he 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 a slave and he’s singing ‘Gold Digger’ and … it was a really funny idea … that’s what he’s referring to.”

While the timeline for this conversation is unclear, Kanye West dropped his lauded album College Dropout in 2004, whereas Django Unchained – which follows Jamie Foxx as a freed slave out to rescue his wife from a plantation owner in Mississippi – hit theaters on Christmas Day, 2012. The blockbuster grossed over $425 million worldwide at the box office against its $100 million budget, becoming Quentin Tarantino’s most commercially successful film.

Kanye made the claim in an interview with Piers Morgan Uncensored earlier this month.

“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,” Ye explained at the time.

The thievery allegations are just one of many strange comments Kanye West has made in the last few weeks, including numerous antisemitic rants that cost him his relationships with adidas, Balenciaga, Chase Bank and even Def Jam. In the interview with Piers Morgan, Ye did apologize for the antisemitic ramblings, though judging by the ongoing fallout, it seems the damage has already been done.

“I will say I’m sorry for the people that I hurt with the Death Con,” Ye said. “I feel like I caused hurt and confusion and I’m sorry for the families of the people that had nothing to do with the trauma that I’d been through. And I used my platform where you say, ‘Hurt people, hurt people.’ And I was hurt.

“I wanna say that it’s wrong to hold an apology hostage and I gotta let go of that and free myself of the trauma and say, ‘Look, I’m just gonna give it all up to God right now. And say to those families that are hurt I really wanna give you guys a big hug and I say I’m sorry for hurting you with my comments.”