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kill bill - vol. 1
Lucy Liu in the House of Blue Leaves.
The process of writing Kill Bill, meanwhile, involved even further immersion in genre movies. “Once I got going, I just wrote and rewrote for a whole year,” says Tarantino. “If I hit a snag, I would just stop and go watch a martial-arts movie. I basically watched at least one Hong Kong movie a day, and sometimes two or three. I also watched Japanese samurai movies and anime. So images from these movies just filled my head until they were second nature, and that became the raw material of Kill Bill. I knew absolutely nothing about any of the Hollywood movies that had been released during that year!”
TWO DOWN, TWO TO GO
The ‘Deadly Viper Assassination
Squad’ consider their
handiwork after the
Wedding Day Massacre
(left to right Daryl Hannah,
Vivica A Fox, Michael Madsen and Lucy Liu)
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Tarantino also made sure that Thurman knew what he was talking about. “It was like his genre schooling of me,” she recalls. “Way back when the idea was first created, he screened John Woo’s The Killer, and the Pam Grier film Coffy, the Sergio Leone/Clint Eastwood films, John Flynn’s Rolling Thunder and Lady Snowblood, a Japanese female-samurai film which was a big inspiration. It was like, ‘What is he writing for me?’”
Well, a hit, to start with - and one which has been garlanded with superlatives from the most unlikely quarters (the newspaper ads look like Christmas decorations, so covered are they with little clusters of four stars).
Tarantino was also, it turned out, writing not one film but two. Vol. 1 was released in most of the world last month (October), with Vol. 2 due on February 20, 2004.
“If I had thought when I was writing Kill Bill that Harvey Weinstein would be willing to release it in two parts,” says a for once rueful Tarantino, “I would have suggested it then. But I frankly never thought he would. Later on, when he himself said he didn’t want to cut a thing and would we consider releasing it as two movies, I said, ‘What an interesting idea!’ Within an hour, I had figured out how to do it!”
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KILL BILL - VOL. 1
A Band Apart, for Miramax Films
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Prod: Lawrence Bender; Exec prod: Harvey Weinstein, Bob Weinstein; Dir/Scr: Quentin Tarantino; Ph: Robert Richardson; Prod des: Yohei Tanada (Japan/China), David Wasco (US/Mexico); Martial arts advsr: Yuen Woo-Ping; Cost des: Catherine Thomas, Kumiko Ogawa; Ed: Sally Menke; Mus: The RZA.
With Uma Thurman (The Bride, aka Black Mamba), David Carradine (Bill), Lucy Liu (O-Ren Ishii, aka Cottonmouth), Daryl Hannah (Elle Driver, aka California Mountain Snake), Vivica A Fox (Vernita Green, aka Copperhead), Michael Madsen (Budd, aka Sidewinder), Michael Parks (Texas Ranger), Sonny Chiba (Hattori Hanzo), Chiaki Kuriyama (Go Go Yubari), Julie Dreyfuss (Sophie Fatale), Gordon Liu Chia-hui (Johnny Mo), Jun Kunimura (Boss Tanaka), Kazuki Kitamura (Boss Koji), Akaji Maro (Boss Ozawa).
International distribution: Miramax International/Buena Vista International.
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