Tarantino movies are textured both in style and in storytelling. He’s obsessed with movies – and he creates works that are both a celebration – and their own unique astounding inventions. Every film he’s done he’s attempted to move the needle forward in one way or another – expanding his capabilities and technique. There’s a quality in his work that I genuinely love – and one that is not as noticeable in other directors – you palpably feel the joy of creation that Tarantino is feeling. He’s the ultimate film geek. He’s also a terrific writer. His dialogue is phenomenal – and his speeches (something that you’d normally wouldn’t think as cinematic) become epic moments. In his fantastic worlds – history can be rewritten – as if cinema were an alternative universe (well, it is!). A wonderful assignment would be to sit and watch his 10 films in chronological order and study his evolution.
I recently watched “Kill Bill Volume 1” and “Kill Bill Volume 2” which were released separately. They’re distinct films that stand on their own – in tone and form. Experiencing them together back to back – as a saga is a thrilling event. You also get to see the full arc of Uma Thurman’s impressive physical and emotional performance.
In “Kill Bill Volume 1,” the character of “The Bride” (Uma Thurman) comes out of a coma after four years (a mosquito does the kissing.) At the wedding rehearsal, Bill and his gang had killed the entire party and left the Bride for dead. Now, she’s determined to get revenge. She has a list of those she needs to get to, and she systematically goes about it. But like he’s done in his previous movies – Tarantino will not move chronologically – and at times feels like he’s digressing – but he’s not. “Volume 1” is all frenzied and heightened action to a point that it feels you’re watching a movie musical. The episodes are these incredible choreographed sequences that are a summation and amalgamation of martial arts movies. There’s even one section that is animated in the style of “Ghost in the Shell.” There is poignancy in this choice. The animation makes it work not only as background story but also like a fable. The young girl in this passage witnesses the murder of her parent and becomes an avenger – just like “The Bride” was forced to do – and it also mirrors another scenario that happens earlier in the film which I shouldn’t divulge but it involves another young witness. I cannot enumerate all the influences and films Tarantino samples. You can go on the internet and find them. The storytelling is all in the style. “Kill Bill Volume One” has a propulsion that leaves you breathless, and gives you no time to process. Virtuosic.
“Kill Bill Volume 2” is deliberately slower. It’s pensive and introspective – it has a feel of a western– even going as far as doing an homage to “The Searchers” iconic opening shot. In Volume 1 the Bride got a legendary sword made by a Japanese master – Hattori Hanzo. In Volume 2 – we learned that she’d been schooled by another Asian master – Pai Mei – who has taught her about perserverance and commitment in very unrelenting ways. He’s also taught her patience – something that will come in handy. There’s not as much action and violence as there was in Volume 1. There’s a rebirth for our heroine is literally buried alive. In the first half she was reborn from her coma as an avenging angel – in the second half it is all about atonement and redemption.
Tarantino pays tribute to the grindhouses he loves so much. He matches lighting and music motifs He switches to black and white at times. He also switches ratios effectively in one particular moment. He’s not just showing off. His choices are tributes but also help him tell the story. The ratio switch for example is to make you feel claustrophobic. Where the fights in the first movie were all grand and epic – the couple of action sequences in Volume 2 are contained in tight spaces. Where the first half was breathless action the second half is breathless dialogue. The final confrontation or should I say – conversation – between Bill (played wonderfully by David Carradine) and the Bride is entrancing. And the final kill (I’m not spoiling anything – check the title of the movies) is done by breaking his heart (literally).
Tarantino is the most unique filmmaker of his generation – in a class by himself.
The Bride: “When fortune smiles on something as violent and ugly as revenge, it seems proof like no other that not only does God exist, you’re doing his will.”
Love,
Roger
Both available to stream on Hulu and Showtime and to rent on iTunes, YouTube, Vudu, Redbox and Google Play.
Written and Directed by Quentin Tarantino
Starring: Uma Thurman, David Carradine, Daryl Hannah, Lucy Liu, Vivica A. Fox, Michael Madsen
Vol. 1: 111 minutes
Vol. 2: 137 minutes
Director Quentin Tarantino
Quentin Tarantino, in full Quentin Jerome Tarantino, is an American director, actor, and screenwriter whose films are noted for their stylized violence, razor-sharp dialogue, and fascination with film and pop culture.
Tarantino was born on March 27, 1963, in Knoxville, Tennessee. He is the only child of Connie McHugh and actor Tony Tarantino, who left the family before Quentin was born. Tarantino and his mother moved to Los Angeles, California when he was 4.
Tarantino worked in a video store in Southern California before selling two screenplays that became True Romance (1993) and Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers (1994). In 1992 he made his directing debut with Reservoir Dogs, a violent film about a failed jewelry store robbery. Two years later he established himself as a leading director with Pulp Fiction. The provocative film, which featured intersecting crime stories, won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes film festival, and Tarantino later received (with Roger Avary) an Academy Award for best original screenplay. For Jackie Brown (1997), he adapted an Elmore Leonard novel about a flight attendant entangled in criminal activities.
Tarantino subsequently wrote and directed Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003), Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004), and Death Proof (2007). Tarantino’s next three films took an irreverent approach to history. Inglourious Basterds (2009), set during World War II, follows a group of Jewish American soldiers trained to kill Nazis in German-occupied France. Django Unchained (2012), set in the antebellum American South, tells the lively tale of a freed slave attempting to rescue his wife from a cruel plantation owner. For writing the screenplay of that film, Tarantino won another Academy Award. The post-Civil War western The Hateful Eight (2015) chronicles the fisticuffs and verbal barbs exchanged by a group of travelers trapped at an inn during a snowstorm. His latest film, Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood (2019), centres on a washed-up actor (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his stuntman (Brad Pitt), both of whom cross paths with Charles Manson in 1969 Los Angeles. The movie received a standing ovation when it premiered at the Cannes film festival, was nominated for ten Academy Awards, winning two: Best Actor in a Supporting Role and Best Achievement in Production Design.
Kill Bill: paying homage to “old school” Asian action movies
“[Tarantino’s] three previous directorial projects — Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction(winner of the top prize at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival) and Jackie Brown — depicted quintessentially American underworlds and were shot entirely in Hollywood. In Kill Bill, Tarantino wanted to evoke the style, including the nearly whimsical violence, of the ‘old school’ Asian action movies he grew to revere during his now legendary years as a video-store clerk in Los Angeles.
To achieve this feel, virtually every element of the film, from cast to camerawork, borrows enthusiastically from combat cinema’s archives. One scene will be shot in the flickery black-and-white of the Godzilla genre, another will unfold entirely in Japanese animé. Tarantino even sent his cinematographer, Oscar winner Bob Richardson (Platoon, JFK, Wall Street), lists of must-see Samurai and Shaw Brothers’ classics like Five Fingers of Death and One Armed Swordsman as a pre-production crash course in the camerawork of the kick-flick canon.
Kill Bill’s Asian scenes, including those set in Japan, were shot in Beijing in a studio that Mao Zedong built to produce propaganda pictures. Lounging on a bar stool on the set of the House of Blue Leaves, Tarantino admits that realizing this sequence — in which Thurman eviscerates a grand total of 76 masked stuntmen — is the biggest challenge of his directorial career. ‘I want it to be to kung fu fights what the Apocalypse Now ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ scene was to battle scenes. I set up the sequence so that either it would be the greatest thing anyone’s ever seen as far as this shit’s concerned, or I would hit my head on the ceiling of my talent.’
Part of the challenge lies in the inherent complexity of martial arts scenes, which must be assembled from hours of carefully choreographed film snippets taken from multiple camera angles. ‘My movies aren’t usually difficult,’ Tarantino explains as Uma Thurman strides by clutching her infant son and the crew wet-vacs some blood puddles to the wails of Bob Marley’s I Shot the Sheriff. ‘They can be too easy. I write these meaty scenes and on the day, me and the actors, we eat ’em. And you feel great. You’ve just eaten a nourishing meal. But (shooting action) isn’t a nourishing meal. You do all these little bits and you never know quite what you’ve got.’
Tarantino has made his task all the harder because he’s resolved to make Kill Bill in what he calls ‘the Chinese Way’ — a phrase intoned with mantra-like frequency by the film’s nearly 300-strong cast and crew. Digital effects are out. ‘That shit looks good, but it looks like a computer did it,’ he shrugs. ‘I’d rather have it look good and look like a cool ’70s thing.’ He’s tried wherever possible to replicate the devices favored by his kung fu forbears, which means using such low-tech innovations as Chinese condoms filled with fake blood. The actors pop them at the critical moment — a nod to the recently deceased Chinese director Chang Cheh, who Tarantino says invented the technique for his 1970 film Vengeance. The impassioned cinEaste in Tarantino wants every drop of blood — this scene alone will require 100 gallons of it — to authentically recall the films to which he’s paying tribute. So his special effects team employs a selection of fake blood that rivals the cast and crew in its international diversity. ‘I’m really particular about the blood, so we’re using a mixture depending on the scenes. I say, ‘I don’t want horror movie blood, all right? I want Samurai blood.’ You can’t pour this raspberry pancake syrup on a sword and have it look good. You have to have this special kind of blood that you only see in Samurai movies.’
Of course, there are other, less auteurish reasons for eschewing the ways of Hollywood. For starters, the Chinese Way is the cheap way. Tarantino’s longtime collaborator, the producer Lawrence Bender, is tight-lipped about the budget for Kill Bill but allows that vastly lower personnel costs and the absence of labor union restrictions mean a day of shooting in Beijing costs as little as half of what it would cost in Hollywood. Equally critical, choosing to work in China made it easier — financially and logistically — to assemble the region’s finest martial artists. Yuen Wo-ping — a master known to international audiences for his wire work on recent martial arts blockbusters Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and The Matrix, was hired to choreograph the fight scenes, reviving material that appeared on his résumé 20 years ago. Venerable Japanese screen idol Sonny Chiba is both cast member and combat coach.” (Time, Sept. 2002)
Meticulously planned, relentlessly improvisational
“Tarantino’s trademark bouts of verbal incontinence and off-color humor are reserved for the script’s meticulously detailed stage directions. One scene has The Bride ‘goin’ Krakatoa all over whoever’s ass happens to be in front of her at that time.’ Another calls for ‘the most disgusting jar of Vaseline in the history of cinema.’ Whereas in other screenplays the words ‘they fight’ would suffice, Tarantino devotes most of the script — which took him nearly two years to complete — to outlining the action. He lays out precise requirements, dictating which historical genres are to be evoked (‘a Shaw Brothers’ snap zoom … a spaghetti western flashback’) and when exactly ‘the squirting, spewing geysers of blood’ must turn ‘from crimson red to oil black.’
Despite these detailed prescriptive passages in his screenplay, Tarantino is almost relentlessly improvisational on the set itself. While in China, Kill Bill is shot six days a week instead of the five allowed in Hollywood. That and the varied skills of the multinational crew give him more flexibility. ‘It’s really cool, because the Chinese way of doing action is there’s not really a schedule,’ he says. ‘There’s no shot list. I have certain shots in my mind that I know I want to do from like a year and a half of writing about them. But now, me and the master (Yuen), we come up with new things as we’re doing it. Cool gags, funny gags, gory gags. They make movies here so cheap that you actually can do that.’ Says Fish Fong, Yuen’s assistant: ‘The hardest thing for us as choreographers is having to remember all of these fighting styles we haven’t used in over 20 years and trying to bring them back to life.’ But ‘Quentin’s got an unbelievable eye for this stuff.’
Thurman has similarly complimentary things to say. ‘It’s unusual for someone to be willing to think on their feet this way,’ she gushes, ‘rather than to be hanging by their fingernails to their script, or to their little thing that they wrote, or to the decision that they thought was the right one yesterday in the shower.’ But today’s biggest beneficiary of Tarantino’s gift is Hu Xiaokui, a 17-year-old wushu student and the youngest of the 76 yakuza on the House of Blue Leaves set. ‘I was supposed to die today,’ he says, ‘but when Wuma (what the Chinese call Thurman) was about to kill me, the director saw something in my face that made him change his mind.’ He saw an innocent kid who provided a means of adding a sympathetic layer to The Bride’s ruthless character. ‘I thought, ‘There’s no way she’d off a kid with a mug like this,” says Tarantino, cuffing Hu on the shoulder. So he devised a new ending for the scene. Hu becomes the last man standing at the massacre’s end.
Granted a moment in the spotlight, Hu beams as if his life has actually been spared. As for Tarantino, he’s clearly having a ball. When the movie is released, audiences might not catch all of the allusions in this loving ode to Asian films, especially to the kung fu genre. And will Hollywood-reared audiences really appreciate the absence of horror-film blood in Kill Bill’s Samurai-style scenes? Tarantino isn’t worrying about that. ‘I’m making this film for me,’ he grins. ‘Everyone else is along for the ride.’” (Time, Sept. 2002)