Murder. He. Wrote

I was trying to think of every inventive and entertaining way I could to dismember and disembowel’ proclaims Quentin Tarantino. ‘Like when it came time to do the House of the Blue Leaves fight where Uma fights the crazy fuck with the Samurai sword, I was out there trying to create one of the greatest, most exciting sequences in the history of cinema, so I was definitely working overtime, thinking ‘what do I wanna see?’ It took me about a year to write that fight sequence.’

It was worth the effort. Kill Bill is an ass-kicking, blood-splattering mindfuck of a samurai movie which casts Uma Thurman as a betrayed former assassin seeking honour through revenge. Described as ‘the movie of my geek boy dreams’, by the now 40 year old wunderkind writer/director, this majestic martial arts meltdown pays overt tribute to any number of Hong Kong movies, with flashes of Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns, ‘60s Japanese bubblegum flicks and Blaxploitation classics. Even Uma’s yellow and black tracksuit is a replica of that worn by Bruce Lee on Game Of Death, the movie he died before completing. But Kill Bill isn’t merely empty pastiche to keep the Trekkers down the back happy. It’s a brilliantly original action film and a dazzling formal experiment. The trademark musings on pop-culture have vanished in favour of trippy visuals, but spectacular fight scenes and the movie’s lapses into manga-animation are inspired and as pure as cinematic pleasure gets.
Not bad for a long-forgotten doodle cooked up between Tarantino and Thurman on the set of Pulp Fiction. In the years since, there’s been the underrated Jackie Brown, and untold hours spent on Inglorious Bastards, Tarantino’s six-years-awaited, still-in-the-pipeline war movie. Described by the director as ‘The Good, The Bad And The Ugly set in Nazi-occupied France’ this project has now escalated into three scripts. Impatient rumours had it that Tarantino was finished – that he was a depressive with writer’s block, that his split from actress Mira Sorvino had left him despondent, that he couldn’t deal with his sudden fame. Some of this would appear to be true. Even though he was never quite the socially retarded video freak that some press sought to portray, he had lived a sheltered existence before filmmaking made him a celebrity. He recently admitted that he finds it frustrating to be unable to walk down the street or even into a second-hand record store without fans pestering him, and that he would trade fame for anonymity.
At any rate, a chance meeting with Thurman brought an end to Tarantino’s extended career hiatus. She reminded him about a character they once came up with called The Bride – a deadly assassin attempting to quit the life. In retaliation, her boss Bill orders her colleagues, the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad (played in the film by Daryl Hannah, Lucy Liu, Michael Madsen and Vivica Fox) to kill her on her wedding day. In the ensuing bloodbath, her husband and unborn child are murdered but she awakens from a coma four years later, understandably rather upset and hell-bent on biblical revenge.
Tarantino decided that this oriental revenge fantasy was just the thing to get him back to work, and resolved to bang the movie out with a miniscule budget and quick shoot. It didn’t quite work out that way. We’re not talking Heaven’s Gate, but this was a troubled production right from the start. Firstly, Thurman fell pregnant, and Tarantino was unwilling to proceed without the woman he regards as the ‘Marlene Dietrich to my Josef von Sternberg’. He put everything on hold for a year. ‘I was incredibly pleased, amazed, overwhelmed, and it’s a testament to his loyalty, his friendship, his patience and general goodness’ says Thurman. ‘They used to call me on production sounding panicked, and they’d say ‘okay, so when’s the baby coming? Can you try and schedule it for this day or that day?’ I’m listening to this, not believing my ears, going ‘listen guys, you’re putting undue pressure on me to drop this baby and I’d like to hang on to it. He’s gonna be overdue, he’s gonna come out with dry feet, I swear to God.’
But this wouldn’t be the only delay. Warren Beatty pulled out of the title role (making way for Kung Fu star David Carradine). The screenplay expanded from 90 to 220 pages and the budget rose from $39 million to $55 million. Suddenly Miramax made an unprecedented decision. Kill Bill would be released in two parts. The first blast, an almighty orgy of inventive sword-inflicted ultraviolence, is now upon us: and thankfully, Kill Bill 2 which promises even more mania will be with us in a matter of months.
‘If I could have done it as two movies from the get-go, I would have’, admits Tarantino, ‘but to bring it up to Harvey Weinstein right at the beginning and say ‘hey, I got an idea, let’s make this two films!’ might not have been prudent. What ended up happening was the crew pretty quickly realised they had made two movies, so there were all these two-movie jokes goin’ on, and in the last month of shooting Harvey Weinstein came on set and said ‘if you don’t want to lose anything, why don’t we make it two movies?’, and I was like ‘that’s a great idea, Harvey! Genius!’
Not only did Tarantino always intend to make the film in two pieces, he always intended to make two very different movies -‘I can’t really elaborate that much, all right’, says the quintessentially American director, ‘there’s a big dot-dot-dot there for volume two, and I’m not even being cagey, I still have to finish volume two. That’s the reason we’re doing such a whistle-stop.’ Not that this gruelling promo stint for Kill Bill (five cities in five days) seems to have exacted any toll at all on Tarantino’s clearly sky-high spirits, as he rattles on and on like automatic rifle-fire in a London suite, with muse and leading lady Uma Thurman helping to finish his sentences (and vice versa). Throughout, Tarantino’s joyful, insane, captivating, almost childlike enthusiasm for his own film’s brilliance comes across loud and clear.
‘There’s a big personality change that happens between volume one and volume two’ he enthuses, ‘If you see the film, you’ll see at the end of it, Sonny Chiba gives this little parable saying ‘revenge is never a straight line. It’s like a forest, and it’s easy to get lost and lose your way and forget where you came in’. Well, volume one is the straight line. Volume one is the straight-ahead, heart-pumping, edge-of-your-seat ‘wow, that was a night at the movies’. It can be sad, but where’s the resonance? My feeling is, it’s there, but you don’t need it, when I watched Avenging Eagle growing up or Five Fingers Of Death, I wasn’t looking for resonance. I was getting off, man. That’s where I was coming from. So it’s there, but it don’t have to be there, the resonance is in volume two. And also it’s not a straight story, it’s the forest. Now we slow down a bit and we get to know the characters a little more, and things aren’t simple 1-2-3-kill for her anymore, real life rears its ugly head into her journey.’
In the meantime, before things get even more taxing in Volume 2, Thurman can be seen battling 88 assassins at once in a set-piece that makes The Matrix Reloaded’s Burly Brawl look like a playground beyblade battle. To get in shape for such demanding action, she took on the post-natal press-up regime from hell – ‘The pressure was immense’ she sighs, ‘denial was probably the best way to move forward. And the only thing I had was, constantly, I will do my best today, I will do my best this hour, I will do my best in this shot, and I will stand back up again after I fall down. That was how I had to take it, pretty much for five months. When I first put my tracksuit on to go down for my hair and make-up test, it was the first time I’d been remotely in presentable shape for someone who’s gonna take on eighty-eight people. I had tears in my eyes, and the entire wardrobe department had bloody fingers from taking that costume in every week. I was slowly shrinking, and it was getting down to the wire, like ‘is she gonna make it, or is this gonna be very funny for Quentin, with this very large-bottomed Samurai? But he probably wouldn’t have minded that – Quentin is a fan of booty.’
‘You say that like it’s a bad thing! Nothing wrong with a big back yard’ interrupts Tarantino.
‘There we are, see, you have it from the horse’s mouth’ continues Thurman, ‘And then we pretty much went straight into shooting in the House of Blue Leaves, which was deceptively expanded. In normal film world language, when you look on the schedule at a 220-page script and your director says to you ‘this is going to be a 90-minute film’, you think ‘ok, this will be quick!’ On the schedule, that sequence was meant to be two weeks. And in any normal movie, if a sequence goes a third or 50% or double over-time, they consider it a catacylsmic failure on the side of production. So having a life in the movies, you’re used to this, you’re vaguely aware these rules apply for a good reason. But this took eight weeks. Eight weeks later, when I walked off that set covered in blood, and there was a lot of blood, with my sword, and my beautiful fight team behind me, and fell to my knees, I realised I had just been involved in something that was going to break every rule of cinema.’
Was the intention to create a classic black comedy from this splatterfest?
‘Definitely’ beams QT. ‘That’s definitely the case. I mean I’ve done violence before, but I’ve never done it in such an outrageous way, so I think that goes a long way. Not that I’ve any problem with violence when it’s not outrageous, but this is definitely not taking place on Planet Earth, and actually uses a lot of Japanese film-making influences. There’s a standard staple in Japanese cinema to cut somebody’s arm off and have them use water-hoses for veins, like PSSSHHH!, spraying everywhere. I’m keeping that tradition alive.’
Were there any particular martial arts titles that inspired him?
‘I’d have to say Five Fingers Of Death, but I’d have to mention a couple of different Angela Mao movies, I’m big into The Female Avenger, Lady Whirlwind would definitely be one, Broken Oath would be one as well. But as far as I’m concerned, almost anything by Zhang Che (the 102 year old veteran of 99 ‘Master Wong’ kung-fu pictures) who to me is to old-school kung fu movies what John Ford was to Westerns. I have to go off on a tangent here, because Zhang Che died when we were in pre-production, and anytime we put the camera up on the ceiling and looked straight down, I’d call on Zhang Che to POV. And there was a stage where I was getting really frustrated by all the modern-day pyrotechnics, to get some of these blood effects that I was going for, everything required hydraulics and fire-extinguisher cannisters and tubes going up legs. I’m there ‘screw this, guys. We’re not making a horror movie here, let’s pretend we’re little kids making a Super-8 movie in our back yard and you don’t have all that shit. How would you achieve this effect? Ingenuity is important here.’
Bizarrely, yet touchingly, Tarantino claims that the late Chinese superstar came to his aid, with the assistance of oriental contraceptives – ‘I was getting pissed off. Then I remembered that Zhang Che, to get some of those cool blood effects that he had, what he would do was take a Chinese condom and fill it full of blood – a Trojan doesn’t work, it has to be a Chinese condom – and the fighters would have a sword in one hand and a blood-filled condom in the other. And when they were SHHM! swinging at the bad guys, as they AAAHH! go like that, they PSSHH! squeeze the condom and PSST! blood would spurt out everywhere, and it was great. No cannisters, no tubes, no nothing, just Chinese condoms and it worked like a charm.
“So anyway, I’m doing this shot where Uma swings the sword at this girl’s throat, the camera’s behind the girl, who grabs her throat and squeezes the condom at the same time, and the blood spurts out towards the camera. And it just wasn’t working, we’d shot the scene twelve times but the blood was going down her front as opposed to out the way from the throat – it wasn’t directional, it’s a Chinese condom, so who knows where the fuck the blood is going to go? And I was starting to get seriously frustrated, it wasn’t her fault, it wasn’t anyone’s fault, aerodynamics were just not on my side.
“At that point, I swear to goodness, I felt like Zhang Che talked to me and kind of came to me and told me to stay calm: ‘Hang in there, Quentin – it’s going to work out. It’s bound to explode the right way once, have patience, you’re almost there.’ And sure enough, about four takes later, it worked perfectly. To this day, I’m almost positive he came to me.’
Whatever about spectral intervention, things do seem to have worked out well for Kill Bill. It would be impossible, for example, to now imagine the film with Warren Beatty. ‘I’ve always considered David Carradine one of the great Hollywood mad geniuses,’ says Tarantino, ‘when it comes to wild actors. Nicholson would be up there, Christopher Walken would be up there, and definitely David too. One of the things that was a big factor in David getting the role is I’d actually read his autobiography, and it was called Endless Highway, and it’s one of the best autobiographies I’ve ever read in my life, it was just fantastic. To read about this guy’s life and imagine it, it was quite a fascinating journey and as I was reading it I thought ‘god, this guy is like Bill, he could be Bill.’
Is there anything Thurman wouldn’t do in film for Tarantino?
‘Of course, there’s always things you won’t do…’
‘Hey’ he interjects, ‘there’s things I wouldn’t ask her to do. Not many, but a few.’
‘Like a long time before production’ continues Thurman, ‘he called me up and sounded all blushy and nervous on the phone and said ‘I-I-I’m going to read you something and I feel really bad about it, okay, and you can have any reaction you want.’ He proceeded to read me an early version of the ‘fuck Buck’ scene, then he read me the goriest, violent Frances Farmer-style sequence complete with a fantasy sequence which went to hell, it was really something. The villain ended up having his behind smacked by a cloven-footed…’
Literally foaming at the mouth with excitement, Tarantino leaps in here: ‘I’ll describe it – after she kills Buck and bashes that door into his head, it cuts to a title card that says ‘ONE WEEK LATER, IN HELL’. And all these centaurs and minotaurs are lining up to gang-fuck Buck, and he howls out in pain and this big minotaur with a big bull blue-veiny dick comes over and just keeps ramming it up his ass, and a cloven hoof is smacking his cheek, he’s crying in agony and the devils are laughing and playing little violins to his pain.’
‘See, that’s Quentin’s conscience in action’ laughs Thurman, ‘he felt so badly about this gang-raping of the bride that he just had to add in this hell sequence, if only to get through the call with me. My response to it was to be completely amused. Everything works out OK with him. It’s hard going sometimes, but it all comes out pretty good.’
It certainly does.

Kill Bill is released October 17