Quentin Tarantino Clarifies His Professional Ties To Kanye West After Django Unchained Claims

Kanye "Ye" West has been facing some backlash in recent weeks for a number of controversial and anti-Semitic statements he made which have gotten him suspended from Twitter and Instagram, as well as dropped from his partnerships with a number of high-profile companies. 

In an October 21 interview with Piers Morgan on his flagship show, "Uncensored," Ye went a step further by claiming filmmaker Quentin Tarantino got the idea for his 2012 revisionist Western film "Django Unchained" from him. "Tarantino can write a movie about slavery, where actually, him and Jamie," Ye said, referring to the film's star, Jamie Foxx, who had little to do with the film's conceptualization, "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." 

Unsurprisingly, these claims by Ye have been met with skepticism, and by now, none other than Tarantino himself has come out to set the record straight on what his professional ties really are with the controversial rapper. 

In an interview with Jimmy Kimmel on October 27, Quentin Tarantino clarified the nature of his relationship with Kanye "Ye" West after the latter's controversial claim that he came up with the idea for "Django Unchained." 

Tarantino responded that there was "not truth" to Ye's claims when asked by Kimmel. "That didn't happen," he said. "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' 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." This would have been around 2004, as Tarantino stated that, around this time, Ye developed an idea for the video which would become "Gold Digger," as Ye mentioned in his own interview. 

Of course, Jamie Foxx, who played the lead in "Django Unchained," was indeed featured in "Gold Digger," but was only brought onto "Django Unchained" months after the script had been completed. When it came to the actual concept for "Django," Tarantino spoke about it in a 2012 Comic-Con panel. "I was writing a book about Sergio Corbucci when I came up with a way to tell the story," he said, referring to the Italian film director, famous for his violent Spaghetti Westerns. "I was writing about how his movies have this evil Wild West, a horrible Wild West. It was surreal."