Quentin Tarantino, Uma Thurman and David Carradine talk Kill Bill Vol. 2–and possibly Vol. 3.
The much-anticipated second volume of director Quentin Tarantino‘s fourth film, Kill Bill , opens this weekend, and if the action in Vol. 1 was any indication, Vol. 2 should be a knock-down, drag-out extravanganza. In Vol. 2, Uma Thurman returns as The Bride, seeking vengeance on her remaining two enemies in the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, Budd (Michael Madsen) and Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah) and, above all, their leader, Bill (David Carradine). Could we resist a chance to talk to Tarantino and his cast? Not on your life!
CHAPTER 1: Movies, Myth and Realism, Violently
Quentin Tarantino loves movies–but perhaps almost more than that, he loves to talk about movies.
In discussing Kill Bill Vol. 2, the conclusion of the action opus that can best be summed up at the Ultimate Tarantino Experience, the director drops references to countless other films, from Jackass: The Movie to an obscure Japanese action flick titled They Call Her One Eye. He even has praise for his box office competition, The Rock’s Walking Tall. “It was really fun.” Then Tarantino the shrewd self-promoter speaks up. “But I thought, ‘The Bride and Elle Driver’s fight is more brutal than this. It’s more hardcore than this.’ Those girls are really f***in’ each other up.”
“Two skinny blonde girls, one covered in garbage and the other one all decked out with an eye patch, beating each other up inside a trailer?” Uma Thurman chimes in, laughing and shaking her head as she recalls the brutal brawl between The Bride and one of the objects of her long-coming vengeance, Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah) “You knew we were out there at that point.”
“He told me when he started making this movie, he didn’t want to just make a movie; he didn’t even want to just live a movie,” adds David Carradine, aka Bill, aka the Snake Charmer. “He wanted to get lost in a movie.”
“It’s my most far-out-movie,” Tarantino agrees. “It doesn’t take place in the real world. It takes place in this movie-world of my own universe, with my own mythology.” Yet this film–even more than Vol. 1–is loaded to the brim with emotionally loaded moments and the kind of ripe, rich, stylized dialogue that the writer/director practically invented, so no matter how outrageous the epic fight scenes become, the film is weighted in a unique but firm reality.
Whether real or far-out, Thurman doesn’t shy away from contemplating the movie’s ultra-violence, believing that it’s all part of what makes Tarantino films so compelling and fascinating. “What I find interesting about him as a creative person is that he doesn’t approach his material from the point of view of ‘I have a moral and now I’m going to build a nice little tale to feed you my moral,'” she says. “He is a very organic, very dreamlike, unconscious creative person who has voices telling stories in their head and has visions of these characters.
“Like in Pulp Fiction,” she continues, “how surprising was it when Samuel Jackson turns the entire movie in that one moment, this movie that’s operating on wonderful, character-driven behavioral acting, and without you seeing it coming, it sort of pivots and has this strange sort of depth and poetry to it. That’s the mystery of Quentin‘s work. It’s dangerous, it’s dreamlike, it’s raw and organic. He’s not somebody who’s run everything through ten bleach cycles before it hits you.”
But, like many of its characters, Kill Bill did undergo a few major cuts–whether by choice or by Miramax, Tarantino was eventually compelled to split his magnum opus into two parts. The director was surprised that having to make, and then promote, two movies derived from one didn’t really affect Vol. 2. “Ultimately the movie was what it was. I couldn’t have changed anything if I wanted to, and I wouldn’t have wanted to.”
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CHAPTER 2: The Long, Hard Journey of The Bride
Indeed, for the cast and crew, the Kill Bill universe sometimes felt even realer than reality itself. Says Tarantino, “It took us about as long to make it as it took The Bride to go on this journey, about a year, and Uma was going through comparable trials and tribulations with all of the stuff she had to physically accomplish, that it felt like a certain aspect of it was like, ‘Is this a documentary?’ It was the realest movie I ever made, as far as the mountain-climbing expedition to make it.”
For Thurman, the reality was undergoing intense training and long, grueling hours on the set–all worth it in the end. “I realized I didn’t grow up watching a movie where a woman was trained to be so tough and so strong and so fierce and so brave,” she says. “If there was one thing I got back from all the work and pain that went into it, it was that it gave me something back. Like it or not, there is an example of that.”
After studying such prototype Brides as Pam Grier in Coffy and Gena Rowlands in Gloria {whom she calls “the only two women I think I’ve ever seen on film holding a gun and still being really women”), Uma‘s pleased to see her character now held up as an icon of female power.
“I know that some high school girls were referring to defending themselves as saying they were gonna do an ‘Uma‘ on that person. They were going to go ‘Uma‘ on them. Not that I want people to fight or anything. There’s that thin line between self-confidence and aggression.”
CHAPTER THREE: Charming the Snakes
And then there’s Bill, the leader of the viper squad. By delaying the entrance of the Bride’s nemesis to the beginning of the second film, the character’s debut into the story is all the more effective, and Carradine gives what he considers the performance a director’s ever gotten out of him He sums it up succinctly. “Quentin got some stuff out of me that I didn’t know I had.”
However, Tarantino famously courted Warren Beatty for a very different interpretation of the role. The director, without naming names, explains:
“I had another actor in mind–I was writing the character with that actor in mind and having conversations with him about it. I was also reading David Carradine‘s biography, Endless Highway. I felt extremely close to him, I was just kind of falling in love with this guy that I always was a big fan of, as an actor and his iconic stature. So as I’m reading it, I’m thinking ‘Wow, he’s a complete opposite direction for Bill, but he could be terrific as Bill.’ So he was on my mind, but I was going to continue on with this other actor that I’d been talking to. But then it just became obvious this was just not the right movie for us to do together, so I should move on. And I had somebody to move on to.”
Carradine offers some more pointed insight.” Warren is a consummate actor. As the bad guy and the action guy–he’s Clyde, for God’s sake! But when Uma got pregnant, delaying the movie by a year, that is a long time for Quentin Tarantino and Warren Beatty to sit in the same room with each other. And I think Warren got restless. The romance between he and Quentin got old before even starting the movie. [Quentin]’d used me as a template for writing the character, and he kept telling Warren things about me, and Warren said, ‘Why don’t you just give it to David?’ And that gave Quentin his out.”
It was the culmination of Carradine‘s long-standing desire to work with the director. At the 1996 Toronto Film Festival, Carradine‘s wife put him on the phone with a professional psychic, who told the actor he needed to work with a “Generation X” director. “I said, ‘What the hell is that?'” says Carradine. “He said, ‘Like Quentin Tarantino.’ And I said, ‘Oh, yeah–that sounds like a great idea!’
“I knew Quentin was at the festival,” he continues. “I was going to call every hotel in town, but I started with the Four Seasons because it’s at the top of the heap, and that’s where he was. I said I wanted to talk to Quentin Tarantino, and he answered the phone!
“I told him straight out this psychic said we were supposed to work together. And he bought it. When he called me in about Kill Bill, he said, ‘Do you remember when we met in Toronto, the psychic?’ I said, ‘I know it sounds weird…’ He said ‘No, it doesn’t sound weird. The psychic said we were supposed to work together. Now’s the time.’ It was that simple.”
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CHAPTER FOUR: Vol. 3?
Mythological or real or not, the director is still a little reluctant to leave the world of Kill Bill behind, because he’s already noodling around the notion of a Vol. 3.
“I’ve thought about doing another volume of this movie,” says Tarantino. “Not right now–for one, Uma couldn’t handle it. But I thought about the idea of doing it like 15 years from now, and The Bride wouldn’t be the star. Vernita’s daughter [Nikki, in the first film] would be the star. And I’ve got it all figured out–not everything in the story, but the whole mythology of her growing up and what would happen. It’s quite complex, and I think it’s pretty cool.
“Sophie Fatale from the first movie is a big part of it. She’s the one who ends up raising her…without any arms. So the thing is, I would even go in at some point in the next couple years and shoot a couple scenes with Julie Dreyfus [Sophie] right now while she’s at this age and just stick them in a vault until I need them. But Nikki would go on her journey of revenge. It would be 15 years later. She’d be 20 and she’d go to kill The Bride, Uma, 15 years older. And now you’d see the story from a different point of view.”
Now that, to use Tarantino‘s parlance, sounds cool. We can’t wait to see those girls really f***in’ each other up.
Kill Bill Vol. 2 opens in theaters nationwide April 16.
