Kanye West is asserting that he birthed the idea for filmmaker Quentin Tarantino’s 2012 movie “Django Unchained.”
During an interview Friday with broadcaster Piers Morgan, the rapper, who is legally known as Ye, said that he had originally shared the premise for the slavery-themed blockbuster as the concept for a music video.
“The idea for ‘Django’ I pitched to [actor] Jamie Foxx and Quentin Tarantino as the video for ‘Gold Digger,’” the rapper said, referring to his hit 2005 song. “And then Tarantino turned it into a film.”
Foxx appeared both on the Grammy-winning track and in its Hype Williams-directed music video, which ended up centering around a vastly different subject than “Django,” with pinup models posing for fictitious magazine covers. He would go on to star in the Tarantino film years later alongside Leonardo DiCaprio, Samuel L. Jackson and Kerry Washington.
Ye’s assertion came after Morgan asked if he saw any limits to free speech, amid controversy over the rapper sporting a “White Lives Matter” shirt at Paris Fashion Week earlier this month. “White Lives Matter” is categorized as a hate slogan by the Anti-Defamation League, while the Southern Poverty Law Center calls it “a racist response to the civil rights movement Black Lives Matter.”
The “Stronger” musician has also come under fire for recent antisemitic social media posts that resulted in his suspension from Twitter and Instagram.
Although Ye didn’t elaborate further on his purported pitch to Tarantino, he brought up “Django” to argue that free speech exists with context, providing the example of how DiCaprio used racial slurs in the film but was not labeled a racist.
Tarantino and Foxx have not publicly responded to Ye’s claims.
Released on Christmas Day 10 years ago, “Django″ soon became Tarantino’s highest-grossing film. The critically acclaimed movie follows a freed slave (played by Foxx) who sets out to rescue his wife from a brutal plantation owner in Mississippi with the help of a German bounty hunter.