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kill bill - vol. 1
Quentin Tarantino knows his cinema - there has never been any real doubt about that. Just how much he knows about it, though, jumps out at you right from the startling glimpse of the old Shaw Brothers Shaw Scope logo which is the first image to appear on screen at the start of Kill Bill - Vol. 1.
The love affair with films started back in Manhattan Beach, which is not, as the name may imply, somewhere out on the Jersey shore but is a laid-back, well-heeled community between Los Angeles and San Diego. Tarantino grew up in Manhattan Beach and paid tribute to the place by shooting Jackie Brown, his last film before Kill Bill, there in 1997. It was there, too, that he discovered what Variety used to dismiss as ‘chop-socky’ - the kung-fu films that poured out of Hong Kong in the sixties and seventies.
Dismissing them couldn’t have been further from the young Quentin’s mind: he consumed them with the sort of all-encompassing appetite that other kids his age have for ice cream or baseball cards.
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Quentin Tarantino’s fans have had to wait six years for his new movie,
Kill Bill. And now they’re getting
a bonus: two films instead of one.
Nick Roddick examines the various worlds, cinematic and otherwise,
out of which the two-parter grew.
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“I was a little kid when the kung fu-explosion hit in the early seventies,” he says. “For about two years, they were showing these kung-fu films all the time. And even after the kung-fu craze died out everywhere else, it was kept alive in the seventies and early eighties in areas like the South Bay [which is where Manhattan Beach is], in grind houses and ghetto theatres. I think it’s one of the greatest genres of cinema that ever existed.”
By the time the next wave of Hong Kong cinema hit the California coast, making the names of John Woo and Tsui Hark terms of worship among the action-movie sub-culture, the grind houses and the ghetto theatres had mostly gone, replaced by video stores.
Fortunately, young Quentin - who turned 20 in 1983 (and celebrated his 40th birthday in March of this year) - had moved with the times: he had gone to work as a clerk in a video store in Manhattan Beach. The words ‘kid’ and ‘candystore’ somehow spring to mind.
Perhaps more to the point, anyone renting a video in Manhattan Beach in the early eighties could be guaranteed the kind of specialist knowledge we all dream of (and rarely find) in retail outlets. And it wasn’t just Hong Kong movies that Quentin knew about, either: he was just as obsessed with spaghetti Westerns and blaxploitation movies (with Jackie Brown being the most obvious latter-day homage to that period of his life).
YOUNG MASTER QUENTIN
Tarantino blocks a shot from the House of Blue Leaves sequence. Previous page: Uma Thurman in action in the same scene.
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“I’m a huge fan of the period martial-arts pictures made in the seventies by the Shaw Brothers in Hong Kong,” he says. “If my life had two sides, one side would be Shaw Brothers and the other side would be Italian westerns. Actually, they all have influences on each other. There are many things in Shaw Brothers movies which were borrowed from Italian westerns. During the seventies, movies from these two genres used similar plots, images and shots. There’s a fairly deep kinship.”
What links the two genres above all is what one might - to borrow from the title of a book about Italian westerns - call a ‘symphony of violence’. It’s a description that fits Kill Bill pretty well, too (or at any rate those bits of it revealed in Vol. 1), especially the extraordinary 20-minute sword-and-flying-guillotine battle in the House of Blue Leaves which is choreographed by Hong Kong master Yuen Woo-Ping (who did The Matrix), and provides the first part of the film with its climax.
“For almost an entire day,” recalls long-time collaborator and Tarantino producer Lawrence Bender, “Quentin basically acted out the ‘House of Blue Leaves’ scene for Master Yuen Woo-Ping and his crew. He’d jump up, then fall flat on his back. He’d flounder on a chair. These poor guys were watching Quentin do his thing. They’d never seen anything like it! But the end result was that they understood each other very well, and the action is a sort of hybrid between Quentin and Master Yuen. It’s got this kind of Quentin humour mixed in with the Master’s slam-bang style. They had a great chemistry. It’s a ballet in the way it works.”
It took a full eight weeks to shoot the sequence on a huge soundstage at Beijing Film Studio - only slightly less long than the time it took to shoot the whole of Reservoir Dogs, the film which established Tarantino as a major force in American cinema when it was unveiled at Sundance in January 1991. Interestingly enough, though, it was outside the US - in the UK and France - that Tarantino’s reputation was first established: Pulp Fiction was the film that made him a household name back home.
Before we go too far with the cinephile stuff, however, it’s important to make the point that Tarantino’s borrowings are not indiscriminate: watching Kill Bill (or, for that matter, any of his films) is an experience that goes way beyond those little smiles of recognition that other cinephiles crack when they see his films. And homage is not all you get in a Tarantino film, either.
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