In a new interview with Piers Morgan, West complained that Tarantino’s “Django Unchained” was based on an idea that the Oscar winner stole from West. He claims that after collaborating with Jamie Foxx on the 2005 song “Gold Digger,” which featured Foxx’s vocals and sampled Ray Charles’ “I Got a Woman.” West said he pitched Foxx and Tarantino the idea for a slavery-themed music video for the song. West alleges that some of his ideas for that video were eventually used in Tarantino’s “Django Unchained.” “Tarantino can write a movie about slavery where – actually him and Jamie, 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,’” West said. “And then Tarantino turned it into a film.”
If any of that actually happened, West appears to have forgiven Foxx for it. West recently praised Foxx in a now-deleted Instagram post where he asked his followers a hypothetical question about who should play him in a movie.
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“My pick is Jamie Foxx,” he wrote. “One of the greatest geniuses.”
The comments are the latest examples of West’s increasingly erratic public behavior. In recent weeks he has come under fire for anti-semitic comments and social media posts, agreed to purchase the right-wing social media website Parler, and claimed that George Floyd’s death was the result of a fentanyl overdose rather than police brutality. In the interview, he appeared to apologize for some of that behavior before ultimately directing attention towards his political ambitions.
“I just want to say that it’s wrong to hold an apology hostage and I gotta let go of that, and free myself of the trauma and say, ‘Look, I’m just gonna give it all up to God right now,’” he said. “And say to those families that I hurt, you know, I really want to give you guys a big hug. And I want to say I’m sorry for hurting you with my comments. And I want to word it in not like a political way, but in a presidential way, which means what I knew a president to be when I was growing up.”
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