Los Angeles, Oct 29 (IANS): Filmmaker Quentin Tarantino has dismissed rapper Kanye West's claim that he and Jamie Foxx "got the idea" for the concept of their 2012 film 'Django Unchained' from him.
Kanye said that he pitched a similar idea when initially brainstorming the music video for his 2005 song "Gold Digger," which features Foxx. Ye released the official music video in 2009, which centres on a montage of Foxx and Ye dancing with various pin-up models, reports Variety.
Tarantino appeared on 'Jimmy Kimmel Live' on Thursday and the 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 replied: "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."
"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' (Kanye'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," Tarantino added.
"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'. And it was very funny. It was a really, really funny idea," Tarantino said.
Kimmel interjected: "It was a funny slave video, I mean."
Tarantino responded: "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 is currently facing a massive backlash after his recent anti-semitic comments.