Quentin Tarantino has called his new film Kill Bill, but you can bet your last
ninja throwing star that it’s not just Bill who’s pencilled in for a
spectacularly sticky end. Right now Tarantino, beetle-browed director of
Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs, is locked in his Los Angeles editing suite
battling to meet the deadline for a release in October.
Starring his willowy chum Uma Thurman in a kitsch yellow-and-black tracksuit,
Tarantino’s latest is a super-violent, retro kung-fu film with spaghetti
western undertones.
It may not be Sense and Sensibility, but stories from the set indicate that
Tarantino — of whom little has been heard in five years — has been having
fun in his own peculiar way.
With no releases since the polished but dull Jackie Brown in 1997, there were
those that worried King Geek may have become a Hollywood recluse, just
another West Coast eccentric. Was he blocked? Had he lost his touch? Or was
he just depressed?
But now the one-time wunderkind — he was 40 in March — is readying to hand
over Kill Bill, his tale of an assassin turned bride (Thurman) who is shot
by Bill, her former boss and lover. Bill is played by David Carradine, star
of the 1970s television series Kung Fu. Five years later Thurman wakes from
a coma — a bullet lodged in her brain — and sets out to wreak revenge on
Bill and his crew, the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad of Lucy Liu, Daryl
Hannah and Vivica Fox.
In one eye-popping scene set in a Tokyo nightclub, Thurman dispatches 76
yakuza gangsters on a glass dancefloor before finishing off another three
with a samurai sword. “Pow! Very, very cool!” beamed Tarantino as he wrapped
the sequence and jumped from his director’s chair to hug Thurman.
In another delicately balanced scene Tarantino’s script calls for Thurman’s
character to be “going Krakatoa all over whoever’s ass happens to be in
front of her”.
Filming mainly in China, in studios built for making Maoist propaganda films,
Tarantino has taken advantage of rock-bottom costs to indulge himself.
Harvey Weinstein, head of Miramax films, decreed Tarantino could film all
222 pages of the script he wrote himself — about a third longer than most
Hollywood scripts.
“Miramax is the house Quentin Tarantino built — he has carte blanche,” said
Weinstein.
The director has hired coachloads of veteran Far East technicians, known to
him from his love of martial arts flicks, to help give Kill Bill the feel of
a 1970s kung-fu film. And he has, gleefully, developed various kinds of
blood for different scenes: “I’m really particular about the blood . . . you
have to have this special kind you only see in samurai movies,” he said. One
scene uses 100 gallons of the red stuff.
But the blood-fest was just so enjoyable that he overdid it. After 155 days of
filming he ended up with so much footage of killers “going Krakatoa” that he
can’t cut the film down to under three hours.
This is the sort of problem that bedevils most filmmakers at some time. One
imagines Tarantino, in the middle of the night, dressed in Spider-Man
pyjamas and surrounded by empty burger wrappers, wondering, “What do I cut?
The 96 ninjas in the meat-grinder or the 56 foxy assassins at the swimwear
pageant?”
But unlike most filmmakers, Tarantino has a hotline to Weinstein, regarded as
a god west of the Rockies. And so, with Solomon-like wisdom, Harvey handed
down his decree. Kill Bill will be released as two separate films, with a
possible gap of up to six months between them. “Wow”, “Huh?” and “Eh?” are
the noises that have heard in Hollywood, all the more so because Weinstein
is also known as “Harvey Scissorhands” for his editing skills.
Getting special favours from Weinstein is a long way from Video Archives, the
video rental shop where Tarantino spent five years joking around and
watching thousands of films, from kung-fu to French art house. But that
Tarantino ended up in the movie business is no surprise at all, because film
is the central thread running through his life.
Born in Knoxville, Tennessee, the son of a teenage nursing student and a
father who was not around very much, he was named after the character Quint
played by Burt Reynolds in the television series Gunsmoke.
His childhood in California revolved around being taken to films by his
movie-loving mother — no matter what the rating. Aged nine, Tarantino had
seen Deliverance, the shocking tale of a hunting trip gone wrong in which
the hunters are forced to undergo sexually degrading acts by depraved
hillbillies.
When it came to toys, Tarantino admits that time spent with his GI Joes — the
American equivalent of Action Man — was time the toys would probably have
preferred to spend elsewhere. “With GI Joes, if you were ever unlucky enough
to be assigned to my battalion, it was pretty much a suicide mission.
“You lost your head? I don’t give a f***. You lost an arm? Amputees? I don’t
give a f***. Cripples fight just like everybody else. That was just the
way.”
Black culture played a key part in his early years — he later sparked liberal
ire by sprinkling the word “nigger” through his films.
“At 13, 14, I was completely influenced by black fashion. There was a black
guy that lived in the house with us, renting a room. He was kind of a conman
kind of guy, a father figure for a little bit, and I would wear his shit.”
By 14, Tarantino was keeping a diary of the films he’d seen. His results at
school were poor, so he dropped out and got a job as as an usher at an
adult-movie cinema. “I hated porno movies. It was the most ironic situation.
I finally get a job at a movie theatre and it’s at a place I don’t want to
watch the movies.”
Eventually he landed his job at Video Archives, where he could watch films all
day for free while working on plans to become a great auteur.
And after a stint as a production assistant on a Dolph Lundgren exercise
video, and an appearance as an Elvis impersonator on The Golden Girls,
success did come.
He sold a script — which became True Romance starring Christian Slater — and
made the hugely violent and successful Reservoir Dogs.
Pulp Fiction followed, giving him a bigger canvas and a host of stars
desperate to tap into his hipness, such as John Travolta and Bruce Willis.
The public and critics adored him, but since releasing the film in 1994,
things have been rather quiet.
He appeared in, wrote and produced From Dusk Till Dawn, and then wrote and
directed Jackie Brown. But since then, he has barely made a flicker on the
radar screen. What’s he been up to? There were reports that he had been seen
wandering around old LA haunts and two restaurant brawls helped build a
bad-boy image.
But friends insist he has just been obsessing over films, watching screening
after screening in the cinema at his house in the Hollywood hills and
building his collection of 35mm prints of genre movies to make sure they are
not lost for ever.
He’s been hanging out, if at all, with fellow left-field film geeks like
directors Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights), Richard Linklater (Dazed and
Confused) and Robert Rodriguez (Desperado).
“Except filmmakers, I don’t really know too many people,” he said on the set
of Kill Bill, which one might guess from seeing his films, however
enjoyable.
He appeared, alone, at the wedding of comedian Adam Sandler last month, and in
the spring turned up in the studio audience of American Idol, a version of
Pop Idol.
Tarantino has said that the past few years have been about “pieces of paper”,
and it seems likely he has spent his time writing scripts. As well as Kill
Bill, he has been trying to get Inglorious Bastards, a second world war
film, off the ground, plus numerous other projects.
There have been cameo appearances and the odd interview, but after the more
mellow Jackie Brown, Kill Bill is a return to favoured ground.
Based on an idea Tarantino and Thurman came up with in 1993 while shooting
Pulp Fiction, he even delayed filming for a year after the actress fell
pregnant.
He has surrounded himself with friends and long-time collaborators, like
Thurman, Michael Madsen and Samuel L Jackson, and describes the film as “30
years of grindhouse movie-going in a duck press” — grindhouse movies being
those that feature “kung-fu, sex, revenge, murder, blood-gorged frames, fast
cars, fast women and a pumping, pulsating soundtrack”.
But as he said on set: “I’m making this film for me. Everyone else is along
for the ride,” adding with a grin: “This is the movie of my movie-geek
dreams!”
