Last week, amid all the other genuinely terrible things he’s been saying, Kanye West raised eyebrows for a completely different reason when he accused Jamie Foxx and Quentin Tarantino of stealing his idea for their film Django Unchained. “They got the idea from me,” he insisted in an interview with Piers Morgan, “because the idea for Django, I pitched to Jamie Foxx and Quentin Tarantino as the video for ‘Gold Digger.’”
However, in his own recent appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live! to promote his new book, Tarantino said that there is “no truth” to Kanye’s version of events and instead offers an alternate take that explains Mr. West’s wild claims.
“He wanted to do a giant movie version of College Dropout, the way he did the album,” he said. ” “So he wanted to get big directors to do different tracks from the album and then release it as this, like, giant movie. Not videos, oh no, there’s nothing as crass as videos. They were movies. They were gonna be movies based on each of the different tracks. So we used it as an excuse to meet each other… 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 this slave narrative, where he’s a slave and he’s singing ‘Gold Digger.’”
While Tarantino says “it sounded really cool” and that he wishes the idea had come to fruition, Kanye’s recent actions have many other former collaborators and business partners distancing themselves from him, if not outright regretting their associations with him in the first place. You can watch Tarantino and Kimmel’s full interview above.