What a week it’s been for Kanye West. No shoemaker will have him, not even Skechers. People want his music removed from Spotify. Jewish rappers have been dissing him left, right and centre.

There’s a reason for the backlash, of course, with the rapper making several inflammatory antisemitic comments. While not the most controversial thing he’s said recently, eyebrows were still raised when he claimed that Quentin Tarantino got the idea for his classic film Django Unchained from him.

Was someone like Quentin Tarantino ever going to allow that claim bypass him? Of course he didn’t. The director appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live! yesterday and the host inevitably asked him about Kanye’s comment. “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?” Kimmel queried.

“There’s not 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,” was Tarantino’s brusque response.

“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 rapper’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 continued: “We used it as an excuse to meet each other and and so we met each other and 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.”

“It was a funny slave video, I mean…” Kimmel then said, to which Tarantino replied with a compliment for Kanye. “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.”

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In terms of Kanye’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week, Tarantino’s rebuttal probably won’t register too high on his list of priorities, but it’s still a stinging rebuttal nonetheless.

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