Action
Synopsis
Awaking from a coma, an assassin (Uma Thurman) seeks vengeance against her former boss and his ruthless gang (Lucy Liu, Vivica A. Fox) .
Cast: Uma Thurman, Lucy Liu, Vivica Fox, Michael Madsen, Daryl Hannah, David Carradine, Sonny Chiba, Chiaki Kuriyama, Michael Parks, Julie Dreyfus, Gordon Liu, Jun Kunimura, Akaji Maro, Kazuki Kitamura
Producer(s): A Band Apart
Crew: Director - Quentin Tarantino, Writer - Quentin Tarantino, Executive Producer - Bob Weinstein, Executive Producer - Harvey Weinstein, Producer - Lawrence Bender, Film Editor - Sally Menke, Production Designer - Yohei Tanada, Production Designer - David Wasco, Martial Arts Advisor - Yuen Wo Ping, Director of Photography - Robert Richardson
Distributor: Miramax Films
Release Date: 10/10/2003
Running Time: 110 minutes
OFFICIAL SITE
Production Notes:
-Notes provided by Miramax Films-
KILL BILL-VOL. 1
SYNOPSIS
The fourth movie by Quentin Tarantino is an epic tale of one woman's quest for justice presented in two installments. In Kill BillVol. 1 the title character, played by DAVID CARRADINE, is a mostly unseen sinister figure looming over the story who has organized an elite group called the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad (or DiVAS).
All of the vipers are code-named after poisonous serpents and the deadliest of them all is Black Mamba (UMA THURMAN), who is also Bill's former lover.
Early in Vol. 1 a Texas Ranger (MICHAEL PARKS) surveys a grisly scene: an entire wedding party slaughtered during a dress rehearsal in a rural chapel. The pregnant woman in the blood-splattered wedding dress is Black Mamba, better known as The Bride.
Bill and The Vipers left The Bride for dead, but unluckily for them she was merely comatose. The Viper assassin California Mountain Snake, a.k.a. Elle Driver (DARYL HANNAH), creeps into The Bride's hospital room, disguised as a nurse and brandishing a syringeonly to be called off at the last possible moment by Bill himself.
Four years later, The Bride suddenly awakens and realizes what has been done to her. She disposes of the hospital orderly (MICHAEL BOWEN) who has been auctioning off her (immobile) sexual favors, confiscates his garish "Pussy Wagon," and sets off on a ferociously focused mission.
Her first target among the wedding massacre participants is the Viper known as Cottonmouth, O-Ren Ishii (LUCY LIU). At seven O-Ren hid only inches away as her parents were killed. At age eleven she took her own bloody revenge, and has since become the first female boss-of-all-bosses of the Japanese yakuza underworld.
In Okinawa, The Bride acquires a legendary bladed weapon from the last of the world's great samurai sword-smiths, the legendary ninjitsu master Hattori Honzo (SONNY CHIBA).
In Tokyo, O-Ren Ishii is surrounded by her lethal henchmen and holds court in a massive nightclub/restaurant complex, the House of Blue Leaves. The Bride's assault upon this stronghold is a pitched martial arts battle with hundreds of black clad soldiers of O-Ren's personal shock squad, The Crazy 88s. The assault also includes personal showdowns with two of O-Ren's top aides, her personal assistant, Sophie Fatale (JULIE DREYFUSS), and her private bodyguard Go Go Yubari (CHIAKI KURIYAMA).
The assault culminates in a classic, tragic snowy standoff between these two formidable warriors, O-Ren Ishii and The Bride. We begin to sense that the quest for justice could exact a heavy emotional toll upon The Bride.
A few days later, in Pasadena, California, The Bride has moved on to her second knock-down-drag-out battle with a Viper target, Copperhead, a.k.a. Vernita Green (VIVICA A. FOX). The presence of Vernita's young daughter at the scene adds a note of grim irony to the tale of a widowed mother's quest for retribution.
In the aftermath of the epic Tokyo battle, Bill appears on screen for the first time to question the fight's sole survivor, Sophie Fatale, about The Bride's intentions.
"Does she know," Bill asks Sophie, "that her daughter is still alive?"
In Kill BillVol. 2 the emotional momentum that builds throughout Vol. 1 will achieve its cathartic resolution, as The Bride goes through the remaining Vipers (including MICHAEL MADSEN's Sidewinder) to reach the man himself, the father of her child, and make a deeply poignant discovery.
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INTRODUCTION
KILL BILL is both an homage and a reimagining of the genre films that Quentin Tarantino has seen and loved: spaghetti westerns, Chinese martial arts films, Japanese samurai movies as well as anime. Put simply, Tarantino describes the movie as a "duck press" of all the grindhouse cinema he's absorbed over the past 35 years. The film is conceived in chapters, each with the characteristic look and pulse of a specific genre and then interwoven with references from pop culture and other genres.
When a rubout sequence from a yakuza film is presented in Japanese anime imagery with a score lifted from an Italian Western what comes through is a sense of the thematic and emotional binding energy that gives all of these forms their enduring power. Tarantino evokes not just the gaudy, engaging surface of genre cinema but also its rebel spirit.
As a result the archetypal characters of Vol 1. have a surprising undercurrent of emotional conviction that pulls us toward the ultimate confrontations of Vol. 2.
.Kill Bill-Vol. 1 opens nationwide on October 10, 2003, with Kill Bill Vol. 2 following on February 20, 2004.
SOUTH BAY DAYS
Strange as it may sound, some of the origin of Kill Bill is geographical. Tarantino spent his youth in the South Bay, the region south of Los Angeles in Orange County that includes Manhattan Beach. His previous movie, Jackie Brown (1997) is set in that vicinity and is a showcase for the area's many charms.
The South Bay was an area that still had second-run "grind houses," showing blaxploitation and kung fu films, long after the market had dried up in more northerly sections of the city.
"I was a little kid when the kung fu explosion hit in the early '70's," Tarantino recalls, of his schooling in Old School Martial Arts Cinema. "For about two years they were showing all these kung fu films all the time. And even after the kung fu craze died out everywhere else, it was kept alive in the late 70's and early 80's in areas like the South Bay, in grind houses and ghetto theaters. I think it's one of the greatest genres of cinema that ever existed."
On television, Tarantino watched The Green Hornet, which featured a young Bruce Lee as the title hero's masked sidekick, and later followed the exploits of David Carradine's Eurasian kung fu master, Caine, on the ABC-TV series Kung Fu. A few years later he extended his interest in Asian action genres, tuning in a local Japanese-language UHF station to follow the subtitled exploits of Sonny Chiba's ninja-detective, Hattori Hanzo, on the imported series Shadow Warriors. When the new wave of Hong Kong action cinema hit in the mid-1980s, Tarantino, by then a video store clerk in Manhattan Beach, was one of its earliest and most vociferous boosters.
Knowledgeable Tarantino-philes have been spotting the influence of these punchy films on the writer/director's work right from the beginning: Sonny Chiba's ultra-violent Streetfighter films influenced the screenplay for True Romance and the Hong Kong action movie City of Fire was given a nod in his thunderous directorial debut, Reservoir Dogs (1992). "Sonny Chiba was to me right up there in the 1970s with Charles Bronson and Clint Eastwood as one of the greatest action stars," Tarantino says.
"I'm a huge fan of the period martial pictures made in the '70s 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 1970's, movies from these two genres often used similar plots, images and shots. There's a fairly deep kinship."
ASIAN INFLUENCE
The influence of Asian cinema on Kill Bill extends well beyond it storylines and visual style: Tarantino also created roles in the film for three of the martial arts genre's legendary actors.
For Japanese cinema's renowned sword master Sonny Chiba, he revived the Ninja character Hattori Hanzo, from the series Shadow Warriors.
Tarantino cast Chinese martial artist/actor Gordon Liu Chia-hui as both Johnny Mo, his Reservoir Dogs black suit-clad leader of the Crazy 88 bodyguard squad in Tokyo, and as Pei Mei, a popular "white eyebrowed monk" character from several vintage Shaw Brothers films (featured in Kill Bill Vol. 2). In this case he was casting against type: Liu always played stalwart (or occasionally comic) heroes in his Shaw films, while Pei Mei (often portrayed by actor Lo Lieh) was one of the studio's darkest villains, betraying his martial brothers to the Manchu tyrants in pictures like Liu Jia-liang's Executioners From Shaolin (1977).
Liu was impressed when he learned that David Carradine had been cast in the movie's title role. During filming in China, he made a point of taking the actor aside to tell him how much he had admired the program. "That series was a very important part of people in the West understanding kung fu," Liu explains.
ANOTHER WORLD
It is important to point out that Tarantino has not merely duplicated his genre sources in Kill Bill. He has transformed them; filtered them through the sensibility of a devoted American fan whose imagination functions as a melting pot (or as he would say, a duck press) that reveals the kinships between seemingly unrelated genres.
"I have said many times," he explains, "that there are two different worlds that my movies take place in. One of them is the 'Quentin Universe' of Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown it's heightened but more or less realistic. The other is the Movie World. When characters in the Quentin Universe go to the movies, the stuff they see takes place in the Movie World. They act as a window into that world. Kill Bill is the first film I've made that takes place in the Movie World. This is me imagining what would happen if that world really existed, and I could take a film crew in there and make a Quentin Tarantino movie about those characters.
"This movie does not take place in the universe that we live in. In this world women are not the weaker sex. They have exactly the same predatory hunting instincts as the men, the same drive to kill or be killed."
The challenge of living inside Tarantino's alternate B-movie universe, Uma Thurman says, "is walking an incredible line of finding the humanity inside this unreal, insane, mad, epic."
TWO VOLUMES
Originally planned as a single film, the movie will be presented in two installments, Kill Bill-Vol. 1 and Kill Bill-Vol. 2.
"If I had thought while I was writing it," Tarantino says, "that [Miramax co-chairman] Harvey Weinstein would be willing to release it in two parts, 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 exactly how to do it."
When the time to make the final decision rolled around, in the summer of 2003, Tarantino showed Weinstein his cut of what would soon be designated Kill Bill-Vol. 1. He introduced the screening by saying: "This is either the first movie, or it's the first half of the movie". Weinstein's response was unequivocal: "This is a terrific ending! So that's it! It's two movies!"
There is certainly more precedent in American film distribution now than ever before for planning films from the outset in terms of a series of several installments. And in Europe and Asia this has been common practice for decades. In fact, one of the key influences upon Kill Bill, Kinji Fukasaku's Battles Without Honor and Humanity, was an epic gangster drama about the decline of a yakuza clan, which was released in several installments from 1973 to 1976.
TWO VOLUMES, TWO MASTERS
As it happens, each of the two volumes of Kill Bill has its own tone and mood and employs quite different narrative strategies. In terms of its Asian influences, for example, Vol.1 is dominated by Japan, as personified by Sonny Chiba (The Streetfighter), who plays the samurai sword maker Hattori Hanzo and who served as the film's kenjutsu choreographer. Vol. 2, on the other hand, is dominated by China, as personified by martial arts movie legend Gordon Liu Chia-hui (The Master Killer), who plays the Bride's implacable Shaolin Five Animals kung fu instructor, the "white eyebrow" monk Pei Mei. (Liu also has a small role in Vol. 1 as yakuza boss O-Ren Ishii's top enforcer, Johnny Mo).
The numerous Spaghetti Western references in Vol. 1, particularly in the haunting strains of some of Tarantino's musical choices, will pay off powerfully in Vol. 2, when The Bride encounters Michael Madsen's Budd (aka Sidewinder) in El Paso, Texas, and tracks Bill to Mexico.
And then there is the odd fact that the title character, David Carradine's Bill, barely appears at all in Vol. 1. His spirit certainly looms large, and his inimitable murmuring voice can be heard the soundtrack on several occasions." He is all over Vol. 2," Tarantino says, "which is really all about the confrontation between the two of them.
There was also a much simpler practical consideration, Tarantino says, for dolling out Kill Bill in smaller, measured doses:
After all, the final fight sequence in Vol 1., "The Showdown at the House of Blue Leaves," is a 20-minute samurai sword battle between The Bride and the minions of killer-turned-yakuza boss O-Ren Ishii (Liu), that took a full eight weeks to shoot, on a soundstage at the Beijing Film Studioonly two weeks less than the entire production schedule of Pulp Fiction. "When you get to the end of Vol. 1," Tarantino says, "you're exhausted. You're ready to take a break."
On a more philosophical level, Tarantino suggests, "This is supposed to be my version of a grindhouse movie, and the very idea of a three hour grindhouse movie is a contradiction in terms. It seemed pretentious, whereas two 90-minute grind house movies seems more app."
SERVED COLD
Kill Bill has the basic plot structure of a kung fu film, a format that has been central to the genre right from the beginning, from seminal early Shaw Brothers films such as Chang Cheh's One-Armed Swordsman (1967) to American derivatives like The Karate Kid (1984). One thing that is clearly not missing, however, is the traditional samurai swordsman or kung fu hero's do-gooding code of honor.
Says Uma Thurman "For me the important thing is that the character has a certain nobility. She's not just sneaking up on people and trying to knock them off. She goes to each of the other Vipers, meets them on their own turf, gives them the choice of weapons, and basically challenges them to a duel. So there is a code of ethics that she followsthe Viper Rules of Honor that Quentin laid out for me."
"Once I got going, I just wrote and re-wrote for a whole year," Tarantino says. "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 a day. 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."
Tarantino consulted often with his designated leading lady during the writing process: "I even left the character as written somewhat more open than I usually do, so that she could continue to contribute."
He also began the process that Thurman calls "his genre film schooling of me. 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 was a big inspiration. Just piles and piles of stuff, these action movies that were all sort of terrifying to me. It was like, 'What is he writing for me?'"
SOUNDTRACK
As the movie slowly took shape on paper, the soundtrack was also taking shape in Tarantino's head, and on his stereo.
Tarantino is almost as passionate about music as movies. His choices about music enter into the thought process about a movie right at the beginning. "I can't really go forward with the writing," he says, "until I find out what the opening music is going to be, the music that will put people in the mood. One of the first things I knew about Kill Bill was that opening music would be 'Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down).' And I had the flamenco music for the snow garden fight scene before I wrote the scene. It's the music that helps me find the rhythm of the movie, the beat the movie will play to."
Many of the cuts that wind up in Quentin Tarantino movies are drawn from the director's labor-of-love collection of thousands of movie soundtrack albums. So in addition to tracks by Sinatra, Southern rockabilly great Charlie Feathers, Japanese surf guitar trio The 5.6.7.8's (who also appear on screen as the house band at Tokyo's House of Blue Leaves), and the ultra-obscure German neo-lounge band Neu!, the Kill Bill soundtrack also includes several generically apt choices from some classic grindhouse soundtracks:
A section of Luis Bacalov's score for the 1972 spaghetti western The Grand Duel is used during the anime flashback to the death of O-Ren Ishii's father. And a clip from 1968 thriller Twisted Nerve, a vintage Bernard Herrmann screw-tightener, is effectively employed in the films' early hospital sequence. Perfect examples of the Duck Press Effect.
Also: the soulful Enka theme from Kinji Fukasaku's yakuza gangster blow-out Battles Without Honor or Humanity, the Isaac Hayes's track "Run Fay Run" from the Italian blaxpolitation classic Three Tough Guys, and an uplifting number called "The Flower of Carnage," written and performed by Japanese film star Meiko Kaji, whose trademark character Lady Snowblood, a samurai widow, was a key influence upon the portrayal of O-Ren Ishii in Kill Bill.
Theme elements from two vintage 70s TV shows round out the mix: Al Hirt's insectile trumpet riff from The Green Hornet (in which kung fu great Bruce Lee played the hero's sidekick, Kato) and a sting from the Quincy Jones title track for Ironside, which becomes the Bride's main theme.
"If the albums for my movies seem to do okay," Tarantino says, "I think it's because they really are personal to me and to the movie. It isn't just music we pick to sell CDs. Apart from the professional sound quality they are very much what you get if I just made a mix tape of some of my favorite stuff and handed it to you."
For assistance in selecting songs, as well as for the composition of original music, Tarantino turned to The RZA (pronounced "Rizza"), the groundbreaking producer of several albums for the hip-hop group Wu-Tang Clan, an outfit that drew much of its inspiration (and many sound bites) from Chinese martial arts films. RZA had also produced several solo albums (including two under the name Bobby Digital) and had created the score for the Jim Jarmusch film Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999).
CASTING
"One of the great things about Quentin's is he's very particular about casting because he knows how to use people's qualities extremely well," comments actress Julie Dreyfus, who plays the trilingual yakuza functionary Sophie Fatale. This certainly proved to be true in her case: Tarantino met the English, French and Japanese-speaking actress several years ago at the Toronto International Film Festival and devised this unique role especially for her. And she was not the only one.
LUCY LIU
For O-Ren Ishii, the samurai-sword wielding ex-Viper who becomes the first female boss-of-all-bosses of the Japanese underworld, Tarantino sought out Lucy Liu, whose performance as a Manchu princess in Jackie Chan's Shanghai Noon (2000) had knocked his socks off. Her flair in hard-bitten action roles was then confirmed by her scene-stealing turns in Payback (1999), Charlie's Angels (2000), and Ballistic: Eks vs. Sever (2001).
Tarantino had originally intended to cast an actress from Japan or China as O-Ren, but when he realized that Liu had exactly the qualities he always wanted in the character, the role itself was reconceived: "O-Ren's not just going to be Japanese, alright, she's going to be a half Japanese, half Chinese, Asian-American. And she's still going to rule the crime world in Tokyo. And I wrote a scene to deal with her background, the Boss Tanaka scene.
Tarantino had initially imagined O-Ren as somewhat cold and androgynous. As Liu learned more about the language and culture of Japan, however, she suggested making her character more apparently feminine: "I like the idea of her being feminine," Liu says, "if only on the surface. She is superficially very doll-like, not what you would expect of a ruthless killer. This is a form of camouflage for her. It puts her enemies off guard."
One of the things that makes O-Ren Ishii different from other on-screen killers, Liu believes, is the way the character has been written, the insight Tarantino offers into her horrendous formative years. "You see where she comes from," Liu says, "and how she develops emotionally and why it was that she became so cold. Usually you just get the darker side of a character like this. Quentin reminds you that she's a human being who has been transformed, hardened, by what has happened to her."
O-REN ANIME
This information is provided with one of Tarantino's most strikingly stylistic flourishes: an interpolated Japanese anime sequence in which O-Ren witnesses the bloody rub out of her gangster father. The sequence was sub-contracted to one of Japan's leading animation studios, Production I.G., which has been associated with some of the most original anime of the past decade, including Mamoru Oshii's Ghost in the Shell (1995) and Hiroyuki Okiura's Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade (1999). But Tarantino was closely involved at every stage.
"I love anime," he says, "so there was no way I was going to just turn my script over to these guys, as great as I think they are. I wanted to have the fun of directing anime." Tarantino wrote a very detailed shot-by-shot script for the sequence, then in meetings with the animators he acted out the movements in every shot ("Every little bit, every gesture; it took six hours."), and worked with the animators to produce a final set of detailed storyboards.
Tarantino's close involvement with the process helps makes the transition to a new medium effective. "One of the things that helps it to work," he suggests, "is that if I had shot the sequence in live action it wouldn't be all that different. It's basically the same movie that you're watching."
DAVID CARRADINE
As an undisputed global icon of the Kung Fu Craze of the 1970s, and a boyhood idol of Quentin Tarantino, David Carradine clearly deserves a prime niche in a film designed, in large part, as the writer-director's tribute to the martial arts genre. No less an authority than Shaw Brothers great Gordon Liu has acknowledged the importance of Carradine's performance as Caine on the ABC-TV series Kung Fu in popularizing the Chinese Marshall arts around the world.
Although he plays the title role, however, Carradine's role in Kill Bill-Vol. 1 is mostly a matter of a familiar, lulling, murmurous voice on the soundtrack that sets the movie's ominous mood. He is seen only briefly here but dominates Vol. 2, along with Thurman. "He is all over Vol. 2," Tarantino says, "which is really all about the confrontation between the two of them."
For co-star Julie Dreyfus (Sophie Fatale), Carradine was a fascinating, understated presence on the set. "He has this incredibly calm and wise aura about him," Dreyfus says. "He speaks slowly and calmly and tells the most interesting stories."
CASTING THE VIPERS
"She gave my favorite female performance of 2001," Tarantino declares, recalling Vivica A. Fox's performance in the hit comedy Two Can Play That Game. "She carried that picture on her shoulders, and as funny as the movie was, I couldn't imagine it without her." He had originally planned to cast an unknown in the crucial, scene-setting role of Vernita Green, aka Copperhead. The first ex-Deadly Viper The Bride fights on film in Kill Bill-Vol. 1. The audition process was already well underway when he realized that Fox was perfect for the role.
Tarantino was amazed by how hard the actress worked to prepare for a role with a relatively modest amount of screen time. "It's one scene," Tarantino says, "and she studied for it for three months. She went to China even though her scene wasn't shot there, just so she could continue training with us. She trained five days a week, eight hours a day, for three months."
Daryl Hannah was performing on stage in London in director Michael Radford's production of The Seven Year Itch, when Tarantino surprised her with a backstage visit, offering a role he'd written specifically for her. Hannah jumped at the chance to work with Tarantino, adding: "I'd never played a full-out villain before, so I was really excited when I realized what a bad ass Elle Driver was. I just loved the idea of getting to play such a tough and physical character."
Michael Madsen, a Tarantino favorite, was asked to play Budd, a washed-up veteran of the Viper Squad who comes out a retirement and gets a new lease on life (at least briefly) in Bill's fight against The Bride. "It's a character every bit as memorable as Mr. Blonde in Reservoir Dogs," Madsen says, "but it's a hundred and eighty degrees a different way."
LAWMAN
Another veteran actor in Kill Bill, Michael Parks, starred in the classic '70s television series Then Came Bronson, had appeared in writer-producer Tarantino's From Dusk Till Dawn (1996), directed by Robert Rodriguez. Parks was cast by Tarantino in two roles, one each in the two volumes of Kill Bill. He reprises his role as Texas Ranger Edgar McGraw from the Tarantino-scripted From Dusk Till Dawn, investigating the grisly wedding rehearsal crime scene, and as an elderly Mexican pimp who helps the Bride to locate her arch nemesis in Vol. 2.
THE YAKUZA
Tarantino's view of the Tokyo underworld would not be complete without Go Go Yubari, the fetching and ferocious teenaged bodyguard to O-Ren Ishii. Tarantino had written the role for actress Chiaki Kuriyama after seeing her in the cult classic action film Battle Royale (2000), the final film directed by the late Kinji Fukasaku. (A song from an earlier Fukasaku film, the gangster drama Battles Without Honor and Humanity, is featured on the Kill Bill soundtrack.) Battle Royale is a black satire about a near-future Japan in which teams of uniformed high school students are forced to fight to the death.
Tarantino's underworld also has its male bosses: men resisting the threat to the patriarchal structure that O-Ren, Go Go and Sophie Fatale represent. Tarantino handpicked some of his favorite Japanese film actors for these key roles, including Jun Kunimura (from Takeshi Miike's Audition and Ichii: The Killer) as the headstrong Boss Tanaka, and Kazuki Kitamura as Boss Koji. For additional casting, Tarantino relied on his Japanese producer, Koko Maeda.
One of the recalcitrant patriarchal bosses ended up being played by Zhang Jin Zhan, who also served as the film's Chinese first assistant director. This was an appropriate development, since Zhang was one of the true bosses on the Beijing set of Kill Bill, a crucial liaison between the various linguistic groups and working styles.
ASIAN CREW
It was also in this period that Tarantino began traveling to China to scout locations, and to hire Asian department heads. One of the first to sign on was the widely admired Japanese production designer Yohei Taneda (Sleepless Town, Swallowtail Butterfly), who would build a full sized nightclub/restaurant set, the future arena for one of the most ambitious action sequences ever filmed, on a mammoth soundstage in Beijing.
"I started talking with Quentin in January 2001," Taneda says. "We began constructing the sets in April of that year. It took about 2 months to complete all the sets that we wanted. I was impressed by Quentin's rough sketch of the House of Blue Leaves. It was like a child's drawing and our design gradually deviated from it. Yet, eventually, the final version became close to his original idea."
THE PREGNANCY
Kill Bill was ready to get under way. It was at the Cannes film festival in 2001, when Miramax was poised to make the announcement about the imminent commencement of production, when Tarantino broke the news to Harvey Weinstein and Lawrence Bender that Uma Thurman was pregnant.
With a major production all set up and ready to go, with crew hired and sets built, the normal reaction would be to re-cast the role and move on. But this was not a normal situation.
"I've said that this was my grindhouse movie," Tarantino explains. "But it's also my Josef Von Sternberg movie. If you're Josef Von Sternberg, and you're about to start shooting Morocco in 1930, and Marlene Dietrich gets pregnant, what do you do? Do you go ahead and make the movie with someone else? Of course not. You wait for Dietrich. And film history will thank you."
In the end, the director says, the delay was probably good for the movie. "We probably shouldn't have gone at that earlier date," Tarantino says now. "With a movie that was shot in China, Japan, and the US, we really needed the extra pre-production time. In the end I think Uma's son did us a favor. He made the movie better."
Thurman gave birth to her baby right on schedule, in January of 2002, and reported for duty at the Kill Bill training center on March 2,right on schedule.
TRAINING
"[When I was doing the TV show] I made no secret of my ignorance of kung fu. When asked I'd say, 'I know nothing.' And then make some subtly dazzling move. I was being funny, sure. What I also meant was that what you see, what I do, although graceful, fast and effective, is as nothing compared to what there is to be learned."
-- David Carradine, The Spirit of Shaolin: A Kung Fu Philosophy (Tuttle, 1991).
The Kill Bill training center was set up in a warehouse near the production offices of the brand new company Super Cool Man Chu Productions in Culver City, south of Los Angeles. Training was to proceed on several fronts: The performers would study the Japanese language from instructional CDs while learning Kenjutsu samurai sword technique from fellow cast member (and veteran Japanese film star) Sonny Chiba, and Chinese movie martial arts from the celebrated martial arts choreographer and film director Yuen Woo-ping (Drunken Master).
Master Yuen's action choreography has been featured to great acclaim in The Matrix and its sequels, and in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. But Tarantino had been a Yuen fan long before he achieved his Hollywood breakthrough. In fact, Tarantino was instrumental in arranging the domestic release of Yuen's Iron Monkey (1993) which was distributed under the "Quentin Tarantino Presents" banner by Miramax Films in 2000.
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