October 16, 2003
In the Year 2003, Uma Thurman Will... Nearly KILL BILL
When we get our first full glimpse of Uma Thurman as The Bride in KILL BILL VOL. 1, she is at the doorstep of a quiet, modest suburban home, ready to blow open a can -- make that a barrel -- of hard-core, no-holds-barred whoop-ass on its unsuspecting resident.
When Thurman enters the designated conference room in the posh Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills, she is as sunny as the very serene scene she upsets in the film -- a quite literally glowing presence in a fairly grey late September morning as she makes individual, up-close-and-personal introductions to every journalist seated at the table. It's a bit difficult to grasp that this is the same woman who plays a blood-thirsty avenger who chops down legions of men with a single sword stroke, and Thurman feels the same way. "I'm not a violent person -- I can talk, so I usually get around a lot of stuff. I suppress [rage]."
This in mind, it's surprising that Thurman had a hand in the creation of the character with writer-director Quentin Tarantino. "We were bantering together him and I, just back and forth, him going on about genre filmmaking and revenge films and particularly female revenge films. In genre filmmaking, women were given these kind of [action-oriented] roles before they hit mainstream. The idea of the blood-spattered bride was born right then; it was in a back and forth between us. Right on the spot, he was like, 'Yeah, and the guy in charge of it all, his name is Bill and he's the agent for assassins. And the movie's called KILL BILL!' He got so excited about it that he went and wrote eight pages with this character and Bill. So that was the beginning of the movie, and that was 1992."
And so, like The Bride, Thurman would have to wait a number of years before she got her satisfaction. "[Tarantino] went and did JACKIE BROWN and this and that, and I went and did my life. It was about seven years later that I ran into him and asked him what he was doing, and he was writing a war epic film. And I said, 'Oh, whatever happened to those pages that you wrote? Did you lose them?' He was like, 'No, no, I didn't. I still have them.' And I was like, 'Oh, that's good. Anyway, blah blah blah blah blah blah.' For some reason, he went home, and he dug them up. We read them and became infused with enthusiasm to go back to it. It was a few months later then we were in touch again, but little did I know he was there squirreling away with his little felt tip pens and his little legal pads, writing away. And then on my birthday, he wrote to me saying that he wanted to give me the script for my birthday -- but it was two weeks away from being done."
Once he was done, Thurman, despite knowing of the character's occupation as an assassin from the get-go, still wasn't quite prepared for the athletic and all-around physical demands of the role. "[In the past] I did a bit of dance, did snowboarding -- nothing to really set me up to handle this avalanche. In the very beginning, earliest idea, she was an assassin, and she was going around wasting people in all these fun LA FEMME NIKITA kind of ways. The samurai stuff came much later, in the last three years. It was not part of the original thought. It came from [Tarantino's] inspiration, Hong Kong film and Japanese cinema. I went through three months of training with master [Yuen] Wo-Ping and his team. They trained me five days a week for three months from nine in the morning until five o'clock at night, and we were not to be late, and I never got to leave early. I'm the last person that would've thought that I would be ever asked to be so tough. So, it was a big reach to kind of go through all that. It was very empowering to make it out alive from the House of Blue Leaves with my joints semi-intact."
Even with all the extensive training under her belt, Thurman found it a bit difficult to do the dirty work on the set. "I think particularly as a female, you're taught to be defensive your whole life. You're taught not to be aggressive; you're taught not to provoke violence because you're instructed from such a young age that you will be the recipient of it, and you will lose. This message comes down the pike from this big [gestures a short height with her hand] -- 'Don't start a fight, girl, because you're going down.' And for me, just having to make contact with these guys training me and having to actually contact a body with a sword [was difficult]. The stuntmen always want to be tough, and you can feel it. You make the contact, and you can feel that you're hitting skin -- you're hitting a body, not hitting a pad. And I'd get so mad. 'I can't do my job if you don't put those pads on. I don't care how tough, you're tough already. Okay? Just get some pads on so I can hit you with abandon.' It upset me to make contact. All those instincts, all that stuff was a struggle. Also, you've got to be really precise because I'm swinging those swords -- even the stunt sword is still a wooden spike with a tip on it, and you're swinging it within inches of eyes and things that can't be protected, and it caused me tremendous anxiety."
Tarantino's relentless, go-for-the-jugular style didn't exactly ease Thurman's anxiety. "Quentin is relentless -- 'Harder, harder, more, more, more, harder.' Everything had to be tough. I mean, the character [of The Bride] goes through an ordeal. It goes on and on and on, and he needs to feel that it's real. He doesn't want shortcuts. He wants to see it real. He wants to see it tricked. He wants to see it every which way. And I don't think he believes in the easy hit. He would laugh to me about the scene where I'm in the car, I'm struggling. He goes, 'I was watching this footage, and you were struggling, and I see your tears run down your face, and you've got this weird muscle you've developed in your hand -- I never saw that. I loved when you're sweating, and you look awful -- it was so great! And then I realized I made you do it 15 more times!' He doesn't always necessarily do that many takes unless it's really physically difficult, and then it sort of thrills him to make it happen again and again. [laughs] So we explored every single moment to the nth degree."
Such exploration extended beyond the mere physical stunts and into other aspects of the material. "With the drama, he actually gets in and gets out, especially when he knows he's got you -- you're together; you're sort of dancing. Sometimes he would do more, sometimes less. He's improvisational. He always wants to do something differently; he always wants to reinvent the wheel. He always wants to re-experience something, and he gets bored really quickly. So even if something is really good, if you've seen it before, it's boring. He wants to destabilize a situation. He wants to do something to make it hard again, so it's thrilling."
Another thrilling degree of difficulty for Thurman was learning to speak Japanese. "Months before we started shooting, I had a Japanese tutor come. So before I even had the lines that I was going to say in Japanese, I just took general sort of colloquial lessons, just to get a sense of the sound and to be able to feel comfortable acting while I'm also memorizing the lines. Also I had to learn the old, old style samurai language. It's very difficult. [Tarantino] didn't give me any walks on this one. I had to really not cheat. I had to really, really know because particularly when you're acting in a language that you don't really understand, that is not familiar to you, you really have to get so comfortable with it that you are very much honest in your performance when you're using the lines, that you mean what you say. Just because you're saying it in another language, it doesn't separate for you."
One thing Thurman has separated herself from in recent months, however, is the martial arts training -- though perhaps not for long. "I haven't been training in a while. [Maybe] as soon as I have some time, and I put this movie out -- it did give me a kind of pleasure from the physical activity and exerting myself and pushing myself that I'd never had before."
But did that pleasure translate into a self-image that was more, shall we say, alluring? "Sexy? [laughs] Well, it depends on how much you like long, sharp instruments in your romantic activities I guess. I can't quite say that that would be my weapon of choice in bed."
Fox Force Four
The Bride is but one of the badass chicks that populate Quentin Tarantino's KILL BILL universe -- in fact, before meeting that titular objective, she has to make it past three equally fatale femmes on her "Death List Five," two of whom she confronts in VOL. 1.
The first person we see The Bride face is actually the second name on said list, Vernita Green, codenamed Copperhead. Their heated -- to put it mildly -- confrontation sets the tone for the rest of the film, which is brutal, uncompromising, and, as such, all the more exciting. According to Vernita's portrayer, Vivica A. Fox, the experience of making the film was not dissimilar. "It feels good to come to work and kick some ass. It did; I’m sadistic. I thoroughly enjoyed it; I’d done comedies back-to-back-to-back, and I wanted something dark, gritty and physical."
Of course, something as dark, gritty and physical as KILL BILL requires a lot of preparation -- even if it is all concentrated in one scene, as Fox found out. "It was five long months [of training]. You don’t know how many times I told [Tarantino] how much training it was. 'You guys, it was one scene!' But they were like, you have to be [prepared]--but when we filmed it, I got it."
And Fox definitely had to get it, as she couldn't rely on stunt doubles. "[Uma Thurman and I] did 95 percent of our scene. There was one part of the scene that I didn’t do, and that’s when I go crashing through that glass table -- wasn’t going to happen. And there was another time when she flipped over-I was like why wouldn’t you guys let me do it-I don’t know. We pretty much did everything else though."
Of course, despite however much training they may have received, accidents were inevitable on the set. "There were a lot of close calls," admits Fox. "There were times when you kind of missed or nicked each other, when Uma cocked it a little bit too hard. She biffed her knee really hard on the couch trying to go over. I got cut with a little bit of glass. Landing on that table -- oh my God -- I think that that was the one day I wanted to choke Quentin because he didn’t realize how hard the table was."
Whatever nicks, bumps or bruises she suffered, Fox feels they were all worth it. "When I saw the product, I was so proud of it."
O-Ren Ishii is the first mark on The Bride's "Death List Five," but their "Showdown at the House of Blue Leaves" forms the climax of KILL BILL VOL. 1. Despite the a huge build-up to what most would perceive to be a clash of two fierce, battle-ready titans, Lucy Liu only thinks that The Bride exactly fits that bill. "I actually didn't think [O-Ren] was tough. I thought she was a really cool character to play because she was a survivor. She had so many reasons why she had become what she was. She had to continue fighting all her life to basically stay alive, from the moment that her parents were killed. [Tarantino] gives you all of that; he pretty much lays it out for you. O-Ren Ishii wasn't the type of person who was ever gonna die peacefully in her bed; she was going to die fighting and that was how it was gonna be."
Similarly, Liu feels the role of O-Ren and the whole of KILL BILL is distinctive from her previous action-oriented projects, such as the wire-fu-heavy CHARLIE'S ANGELS franchise. "This particular movie was different because I was doing something I'd never done before ever. Working on the samurai sword is very different because your body position has to be very still; it's a much quieter way of fighting. Not particularly in the House of Blue Leaves scene with Uma, but the scene that I have with her in the end -- you notice that it's actually much quieter. There's a lot of movements, but they're really cool and it's very stylized."
Not cool -- in a literal sense -- was the costume Liu had to wear for the bulk of her fighting scenes. "The kimono was really hot because we were shooting in Beijing, and it was 100 degrees. Obviously it's very tight, and you have to keep a certain posture which helps the fighting scenes in the end. But women who wear kimonos, when they fight they have to keep their knees together, and when they use a sword, they have to move the sleeves otherwise it gets caught. Once we had all of the choreography, once I put the kimono on, it was a whole different ball game because the would get twisted up in there."
Perhaps just as demanding on Liu than learning to fight in a kimono was mastering the Japanese language -- a challenge she took on by choice. "The research that I did for myself was to learn the language as much as I possibly could and understand the language. First I learned the language through the dialogue, and then I learned the language. Originally [Tarantino] had written it in Japanese, and then I got the rewrite and it was in English. I said, 'Is it okay if we go back to the Japanese version because I think it really brings a special quality to the film and to her?' He said, 'Yeah... I was trying to make it easier for you.' So, that was really important to me, to have the language be dead on. He said, 'You know, you realize that when she does speak the Japanese, she does have to speak it perfectly? She can't just speak it like I'm learning it.' I learned the dialogue thoroughly, and then I started learning it from first grade, like when you're a child -- everything from like I, me, you, we, that sort of thing. Then the numbers, and 'I live at,' the address sort of thing. That was sort of the key to her character. Once you embody the language, the character comes really naturally, especially when you put the costume on and stuff."
Liu can put on O-Ren's costume whenever she pleases, as she kept it as a souvenir from the shoot. "I have the kimono from the set. I put it in a box, and it's been hermetically sealed because I don't know when I'm going to wear it next. It is something that was important because it represented everything about that character." On second thought, perhaps the specific kimono she took home didn't exactly represent everything about O-Ren. "I didn't get the bloodstained one because I didn't think it was going to be as nice to hang up if I ever did at one point."
Julie Dreyfus, who plays O-Ren's right-hand woman Sofie Fatale, became an expert in screen blood during the film's shoot. No, this was not because she is ever an active participant in any of KILL BILL's brutal fight scenes -- actually, Dreyfus had to wallow on the floor in blood for the duration of VOL. 1's climactic "Showdown at House of Blue Leaves" sequence. "I was on the floor for the whole eight weeks -- a special viewpoint for that fight. It was a new experience for me to be covered in blood, day-in and day-out. When we did the scene, it was pretty challenging because there are so many elements. You know, he doesn’t use CGI at all. It’s all old-fashioned special effects, makeup. So, you know, I had tubes running down my dress, with a couple of guys pumping blood. It was pretty surreal, I must say, because it was like, you know, at the very end [of the scene], the owner of the restaurant - she’s ther,e and she’s screaming and she’s slipping in the blood. On that last day, that’s how you would get to your spot. You'd get a break and go to the bathroom or whatever, and then you’d have to just pick your way through the bodies and not slip in the blood. It was exactly like that. It was very surreal; it was bizarre."
Also bizarre was the encyclopedic knowledge of movie blood Dreyfus picked up along the way. "It’s all different recipes, they all look different and they all feel different. They have different colors. So, we had to do a test for the camera to see how it looked. I mean, this is stuff you discover when you do a Tarantino movie. The depth of knowledge about blood in movies -- I had no idea. I got to roll in American blood, mostly. Actually, I saw one of the makeup/special effects guys a couple of days ago and I said, 'By the way, how much blood did you guys use?' And it was 450 gallons -- just the American blood -- for that scene. And the American blood is very sugary; they’ve got some kind of syrup. So, it really nicely sticks, and it kind of hardened -- sticks you to the floor. Then you have to put some kind of greasy cream on your skin, then you put [the blood] on it, and you can wash it right off."
Although she's only seen at length in one scene in VOL. 1, Daryl Hannah promises that her eye-patched Deadly Viper character, Elle Driver, will make as lasting an impression in VOL. 2 as all the blood in both halves.
"I don't want to tell you about our surprises, but [VOL. 2] will make you hate me a lot more," she teases. "[Elle] is the first villain that I've played in a movie that has absolutely no vulnerability and no innocence, nothing whatsoever that is likeable about her other than she's so bad. All the other Deadly vipers have some empathetic quality: O-Ren Ishii has this horrible past; Vivica [Fox]'s character just wants to be a mom; the Bride has been abused. But my character is just bad all the way through; there’s nothing to like about her, and you’re going to hate her so much in the second one because she does horrible things."
Needless to say, one of the horrible things includes facing down The Bride in a knock-down, drag-out tussle -- but nothing of the same vibe as the confrontation with O-Ren. "The fighting is the antithesis of the snow garden fight -- it's not beautiful, "raise the red lanterns" kind of choreographed ballet. It’s a messy, gruesome, gross brawl -- two cats in a bag trashing everything; it’s horrible."
Beyond that, Hannah simply advises viewers to just wait and see. "You guys don’t even know her yet, but she’s just raw, she’s just so bad. You like Bill, you do not like Elle Driver, and then there are a couple of secrets I really wish I could tell you but I can’t that are really good."
Tarantino, the Tornado of Talk
Not even the might of influenza can dampen Quentin Tarantino's famously manic demeanor. Although he was noticeably red in the face and audibly struggling to not lose what remains of his voice the day of the press junket, his mile-a-minute speech was not slowed down in the slightest, and one was best advised to simply sit back and stay out of his way as he discussed various aspects of his latest opus. In keeping with the experience of facing down the whirling verbal dervish that is Tarantino, here is but a choice sampling, with minimal interruptions, of what he had to say to he assembled online press about KILL BILL:
QT on...
...the high expectations for the film
"I wouldn't have it any other way. I don't have to work for a living. I get to be an artist, and I get to be respected as an artist, and my stuff is viewed that way. It could be bad art or good art, but that's where I'm coming from anyway, and my favorite aspect about having that situation is anticipation of the new work. 'How do you deal with the pressure?' Well, that's the name of the game. If you can't handle pressure in directing, then you can't handle it. You can come up with all the groovy shots in your head, but [if] you can't handle the pressure, you can't handle. The equation that I would use is if you're a cook. You can cook a meal for yourself, or you can cook a meal for your family who you cook for everyday, and they're waiting for it. But if you've got fifty people outside the kitchen, and they're hungry, and they're holding the silverware in their hands, and I'm in the kitchen, and I'm stirring the pot and I'm adding this, and going, 'Just wait, you'll have to get a load of this'--it just makes it all the more exciting. It makes me want to do more. Now, especially with a movie like this, it's almost essential. I want to top expectations. I want to blow you away--it's that kind of movie.
"In the case of something like JACKIE BROWN-- maybe [the high expectations] worked against me. When I say 'working against me,' I'm talking about the Friday it was released--not now, but the day it was released. You have to remember, movies are not about the weekend that they're released, and in the grand scheme of things, that's probably most unimportant time of a film's life. The thing is, I wasn't trying to top PULP FICTION with JACKIE BROWN. I wanted to go underneath it and make a more modest character study movie. So, if you were waiting for PULP FICTION PART 2, you were going to be disappointed. I made JACKIE BROWN like the way that I always felt about RIO BRAVO, which is a movie that I can watch every couple of years. It's just like, 'I know those people now.' Once I saw it once, I got the story line out of the way, and I just hang out with them. Then, it's like, hopefully, if you liked JACKIE BROWN, every three years or so, you can put it in, and you're having screwdrivers with Ordell, and you're taking bong hits with Melanie, and you're drinking white wine with Jackie, and it's all good."
...the fight training
"[The actresses] went through all of this training and study and everything. But we'd get all of this choreography and everything and then, on the day, we changed it every single day, almost every moment. That's the kind of person that I am -- I'm totally going to do that, and actually Yuen Wo-Ping is very much that way too. The gals got so good, Uma in particular because everyone else had to get specialized; Uma didn't have the luxury of specializing. She had to do it all and do it all for months, and Uma got so good that she learned choreography, and you could completely change it and just work. She [would be] up in her dressing room; you'd work out what you wanted; you'd bring her down and go through it with the fight team about three, four or five times. She'd practice it one, two, three times, and then you could shoot. Wo-Ping was blown away by it. He goes, 'Quentin, seriously, most of the Hollywood actors that I work, some of them are really terrific, but most of them, it's like, one move, two moves, cut. Uma is able to execute six point moves.'"
...the balance of "fun" and "reality"
"You do have a little bit of license when you do such a basic story as a revenge story. Forget the fact that it crosses all of the genres that I'm dealing with -- Spaghetti Westerns, Kung Fu, Samurai -- it crosses all of those genres, but not only that, it crosses every genre. HAMLET is a revenge story, but the bottom line is that we've all seen this before. You already even know the story before going in: five people did this to her, she's going down the list and is going to wipe them off, then -- you know, it's easy to follow. Thus you can go off in all these other directions, but you're always staying on course with the objective of the movie, to be truthful to Uma's character; she's not flippant. The movie is having fun. The movie is a 'movie movie.' You're meant to see it and have a great time and be blown away -- 'Wow, I just saw a movie tonight.' Uma's portrayal never had that luxury. She's never winking at the camera once in the film. I might wink at the camera every once in a while, but she never does. Her journey is for real in this, and her pain is for real. She keeps it on course, and she's not asking for any sympathy in this."
...creating a movie world mythology
"I come up with all of the mythology of the characters. I don't think that I need to explain it to the audience, tell the audience everything that I do, but I think that you need to know that I know the answers to everything that's happening inside this world; I don't need to tell it to you, but you need to know that there was thought in there. Now, one of the thoughts in there -- it's never talked about; it's never suggested; and maybe you get it, and maybe you don't -- but when you see Lucy Liu's character, O-Ren Ishii, as a Deadly Viper, she's dressed like the rest of them, with the turtleneck and everything. In the anime scene, she's in the red leather and stuff, but then, from the point on where you see her as Queen of the Crime Council of Tokyo, she has a complete change in look. She's never dressed as modern ever again. It's like, in public, she's only traditional, presentational Japanese. Back in the Deadly Vipers, she talked English and kicked around and everything. Now, until she does her little English speech and she breaks her character for a moment to get her point across, everything is controlled and it's related to Japanese; everything is proper and in its place. That's what I wanted. Once she became Queen of the Crime Council, she was only traditional in every sense of the word. There was an aspect with the kimono, especially in the snow garden -- it was just a wonderful combination of bouncing off of Uma and her yellow jumpsuit splashed with blood and Lucy in this beautiful white kimono and a black undershirt in there. To me, she just looked like a snowbird -- she blends in with the snow, and it made her even more delicate, even more of a figurine, and contrasting the two looks makes Uma look towering and tall and makes her look even smaller, even more fragile like a blown glass snowbird."
...the differences between VOL. 1 and VOL. 2 (due out in February)
"It's still pretty fucking violent, but there's not a fourteen-minute sequence [like "Showdown at the House of Blue Leaves"] there. Remember Sonny Chiba's little speech that he gives at the very, very end where he goes, 'Revenge is never a straight line, it's a forest. It's easy to get lost and forget where you came in.' Well, VOL. 1 is the straight line. [In] VOL. 1, it was hard for her to do what she had to do, but it's like, 'Kill old man, take on the army, burn Tokyo to the ground, did that, done that. Kill Vernita, did that, done that.' [VOL. 2] is the forest. Now, human stuff starts getting into [it]. Now, it's not just killing them all the way down the list -- it gets more complicated, it gets complex now. It's not quite as easy. The whole first half is just complete viscera and eye popping action and just meant to blow you away, and then the resonance comes in the second half. [VOL. 1] is just about the good time, fun movie, movie aspect of the movie and the second one will be the deeper exploration of [the story]."
...directing animation
"That was so much fun. It was great. I'd had a little experience with animation before; I helped design the animated opening for FOUR ROOMS, and what was really cool about that was that I did it with Chuck Jones. This one, I didn't want to just write a script and hand it to a production guy and say, 'Okay, take it and make it.' No, no, this is important to me and I want to have the fun of doing anime, and I love anime, but I can't do storyboards because I can't really draw, and that's what they live and die on. So, what I did is that I took a script and I wrote it exactly, like shot for shot, because it's all about shots. I wrote it shot for shot for shot, every visual connected with this and this and this. So, I wrote a big, long, detailed script broken down into shots like you would do with a storyboard. Then, I got together with the animators, and proceeded in six hours to act out all of the cartoon. I was like, 'Here are all of the shots,' and I acted out each of the shots. 'She's hanging on this, tear drops down, and the blood' and so -- I acted it all out so that they would know exactly what I was talking about. Then, they went away, did the storyboards, gave them back to me, and I went, 'Okay, I like this. I don't like this, that's not really what I meant with this,' and this, that and the other. So, they fixed that, and once the storyboards are done, that's kind of done and they go off and do it and they give it back to you."
...the influence of... JACKASS: THE MOVIE?!
There's a huge fight between Daryl [Hannah] and Uma that I think audiences have been waiting for. It happens towards the end of VOL. 2, and it had to in it's own way match the House of Blue Leaves fight [in VOL. 1]. It can never match it in terms of scale, but it can match it in terms of emotion because we're really waiting for these two girls to go at it. All of the fineness that you've seen in the snow garden fight and everything -- throw that out the window. This is like a brutal bitch fight; it's white trash like you wouldn't believe. It happens in a trailer, and it's just banging heads in the wall and so. It was already brutal, and they're so beautiful, it hurts all the more actually, it's even more painful. It was always brutal, but it wasn't ever gross, and then, I saw JACKASS, and I saw what I'd been missing. And so, I didn't tell anyone, but I showed up on Monday and there's a character that lives in this trailer that dips snuff. In theSsouth, old women and guys would have coffee cans, and you'd spit the snuff in the coffee can. At some point, Uma grabs the snuff coffee can and throws it in Daryl's face, and now she has to fight with all of this crap on her. That was Monday; on Thursday, I got a print of JACKASS, and I screened for the whole crew, and Daryl is watching it and she goes, 'That's where the snuff juice came from! Oh my God!'"
The Guy Behind the Guy
While it's hardly difficult to get Tarantino to talk, his chatterboxing ways make it difficult to get too much information out of him, particularly when only given a fairly limited amount of time to talk. Thankfully, Tarantino's longtime partner at the A Band Apart production shingle, producer Lawrence Bender, was available to fill in any blanks and address any dangling issues.
Q: Will there eventually be a DVD with all of it put together?
LAWRENCE BENDER: I don't really know. We haven't really thought about that. We really want each movie to be seen as a separate entity; that's primarily what we're focused on, and then at some point maybe we'll do that.
Q: How did Uma Thurman's pregnancy have an effect on the start of production?
LB: When Uma got pregnant, Quentin wasn't really finished with the script. You never know how these things go -- if she didnít get pregnant, would he have gotten it done quicker? Maybe. But, it was kind of a blessing in disguise because I don't know if he would have. So, that gave him a little more time to finish. We have a massive pre-production schedule. When he handed me that script, I had no down time. You have to crew up in four different countries. It's just a massive amount to pull of, so it ended up helping us. If she didn't get pregnant, could we have pushed back a couple of months? Maybe. But I sort of don't know how we would have done it in that short amount of time.
Q: How did you arrive at the decision to split the film into two?
LB: When we were working on the movie, the idea of this VOL. 1/VOL. 2 thing came up labout a month before we ended shooting. Quentin wrote the script in chapters, so it kind of lends itself to that idea, not that we thought about it before. Quentin came up with a way to do it -- actually pretty quickly, then we just dropped it. And, of course, that created rumors. Everyone on the set talked about it, and the actors started talking about it. and then it hit the press. But it wasn't like we were going back and forth with what we do; it's just we thought about it, and we dropped it. We finished [shooting] the movie, and then we got into the editing stage, and we were working through it, and then, at a certain point, we got to basically where it is now. We called [Miramax co-chairman] Harvey [Weinstein] into the editing room and said "Let's just watch the movie now. You're looking at the first half of one movie, or it's going to be part one of two parts. Have an open mind, and let's see." We basically watched what you guys watched, only in a much rougher form -- and we felt like that totally works. It felt like you have a full meal. It's not over because you haven't killed Bill, and it's called KILL BILL, so you know there's more to come. I think you feel relatively satisfied, but you're yearning more.
Q: Why not go with CGI effects?
LB: Quentin really wanted to go old school this way. There's a few CGI shots -- kind of seamless, but very few. We actually used the biggest Asian computer company to take the wirework out. It is called Centuro. So, during our post-production here in the United States, we've been shipping all our material back and forth to Hong Kong as they've been taking out all the wires from all the wirework. But I think part of the charm of the movie is that it is a in-camera stunt-type movie. And Quentin, because he's taken all those different genres -- you know, Shaw brothers, Spaghetti Western, Mu-Shu Kung Fu, Samurais -- that wasn't computer-generated stuff, and he really wanted a tribute to that.
Q: What are the difference between the American version and more graphic Japanese cut?
LB: I don't like to talk about the differences. You're going to have to figure it out. You're going to have to see it somehow. I love the Japanese version too. It's just different, and I don't really want to talk too much about the differences at this point -- at some point when everyone's seen both.
Q: Is there still going to be a KILL BILL video game?
LB: What happened with the video game is that Universal Games called us up a little while ago and said, "We're not going to be ready." And then, number two, we really feel like this movie and this game needs more attention. It needs to be a bigger, better game. I'm not sure when itís going to come out. It's on their timeline.
Q: Is Tarantino working on that World War II project next?
LB: Because he's been working on [KILL BILL] for three years, he hasn't, I donít think, thought that much about that movie. You could ask him, of course, but honestly, whatever he does next, he's not going t really know until he finished VOL. 2 and emotionally goes through. As a director, you're so emotionally involved with the movie until you're through it and you've promoted it and released it. It's hard to know what you're going to do next.
Q: Will we learn The Bride's real name in VOL. 2?
LB: No. I mean, you could guess. It's like "What's in the briefcase?"
Next time...
...back to a normal column, with more reviews. As usual, check out my home site, the soon-to-be relaunched Movie-Report.com, for my longer takes on older releases.
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