Quentin Tarantino
Kill Bill: Volume 1
The interviewer: Michaela Latham
Kill Bill is an eclectic movie, stitched
together from samurai movies, Yakuza movies, spaghetti westerns...
I just grew up watching a lot of movies. I'm attracted to
this genre and that genre, this type of story, and that type of story. As I
watch movies I make some version of it in my head that isn't quite what I'm
seeing - taking the things I like and mixing them with stuff I've never seen
before.
You describe Kill Bill as your
"grindhouse epic". Aren't you worried that Western audiences won't
get what you're doing?
I'm a little hesitant about saying this out
loud - I'm not trying to crow - but I'm influenced by movies from all different countries. I don't
really consider myself an American filmmaker like, say, Ron Howard might be
considered an American filmmaker.
If I'm doing something and it seems to me to
be reminiscent of an Italian giallo, I'm gonna to do it like an Italian giallo.
And if I'm gonna do
something that begs to be done in the vein of a Japanese Yakuza movie, or Hong
Kong Triad movie, I'm gonna do it like that. I understand a lot of
audiences from a lot of different countries and, to me, America is just another
market.
A market that'll be threatened by the graphic
violence in Kill Bill...
Yeah, well I don't feel the need to justify
myself. Violence is a form
of cinematic entertainment. Asking me about violence is like going up to
Vincente Minnelli and asking him to justify his musical sequences. It's just
one of those cinematic things you can do, and it's one of the funniest things.
I love it. It's fun.
The striking use of music is one of your
trademarks. There's a very interesting, and eclectic, selection of music in
Kill Bill...
Thanks. I've always thought my soundtracks do
pretty good, because
they're basically professional equivalents of a mix tape I'd make for you at
home. To me, movies and music go hand in hand. When I'm writing a
script, one of the first things I do is find the music I'm going to play for
the opening sequence. I can't go forward until I figure out how I'm going to
start - what the opening mood music will be.
I'm a big collector of vinyl - I have a
record room in my house - and I've always had a huge soundtrack album
collection. So what I do, as I'm writing a movie, is go through all those
songs, trying to find good songs for fights, or good pieces of music to layer
into the film. Looking for that music is finding the rhythm that the movie has
to play in. It's me finding the beat.
Warren Beatty was originally down to play Bill.
Why did he drop out?
I've always wanted to work with Warren. So,
before I got to know Bill 100 per cent, I said: "Hey, Warren you could be
really great..." Then I started writing it, discovering Bill, and I
thought David Carradine could really play this guy. He'd know where he was
coming from. So I started moulding Bill towards David.
Also, when I originally talked to Warren
about it, I thought Bill really wouldn't come into the movie until the end,
almost like Brando in Apocalypse
Now. But he wouldn't stay put. You don't see him, but you hear him three
times in Volume 1, and he's in Volume 2 from the first scene. So it was the
whole combination - the time commitment, the fact that he had to do all this martial arts training...
It was just a bigger deal than I had led Warren to believe. We decided this
movie shouldn't be our first marriage [laughs].
You were ready to start filming when Uma
Thurman became pregnant. Did you ever consider going ahead with a different
leading lady?
She got pregnant and I was like, "OK, do
I wait or do I not?" But I can honestly tell you that I didn't have a
choice. The way I look at it is: yes, this is my samurai movie; yes, this is my
badass chick movie; yes, this is my spaghetti western and my comic book movie.
Yeah, it's all that stuff... but it's also my Josef Von Sternberg movie, and if
Josef Von Sternberg is getting ready to make Morroco and Marlene Dietrich gets
pregnant, he waits for Dietrich!
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