Hollywood Flashback: In 2003, ‘Kill Bill: Vol. 1’ Took No Prisoners

Ryan Gajewski
·3 min read
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Quentin Tarantino had a single epic film in mind when he set out to create what became Kill Bill: Vol. 1 and its follow-up.

The lead character of the Bride originated in conversations between Tarantino and star Uma Thurman during their first collaboration in 1993. “I came up with the idea of doing Kill Bill on the set of Pulp Fiction with Uma,” Tarantino told The Hollywood Reporter in 2003. “‘Bang Bang’ set to Uma for the opening credits was in my mind [back then],” the director said of using Cher’s song “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)” to open the film, although he later opted for the Nancy Sinatra cover.

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Kill Bill: Vol. 1 centers on Thurman’s erstwhile assassin seeking revenge against her former team and their leader, Bill (David Carradine), after they tried to kill her and her unborn child on her wedding day. Tarantino envisioned Warren Beatty for Bill and had pitched it to him before deciding Carradine was a better fit. Lucy Liu, Vivica A. Fox, Michael Madsen and Daryl Hannah co-star as the Bride’s former associates in the bloody martial arts flick that pays homage to the grindhouse titles Tarantino loves.

To prepare for the action-heavy project, the cast underwent three months of training with fight choreographer Yuen Woo-ping, whose work included The Matrix and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. After a production delay due to Thurman’s pregnancy, they filmed in Beijing, Tokyo, Mexico and L.A.

“I remember calling Uma and said, ‘You’re giving birth in January, and we’ll give you two months to recuperate and to come back, and then we’ll start the training for three months,'” producer Lawrence Bender tells THR. “She goes, ‘Lawrence, it’s not like baking a loaf of bread. There’s no guarantee that my baby’s gonna come on x date.’ And we laughed, and I said, ‘OK, thank you for reminding me.'”

Bender recalls warning Tarantino during the shoot about the lengthy runtime, and that this didn’t fully hit the director until the postproduction process.

“In the beginning, I was saying to Quentin, ‘We’re never going to get this in under two and a half hours,'” Bender says. “And he argued with me, and he said, ‘It’s going to be fine.’ We had these arguments, and finally he says to me, ‘You just have to trust me.’ I said, ‘OK, I trust you.’ And as the shoot went on and on and on and on and on, it became clear toward the end that there’s a possibility this could end up being two movies. We didn’t go into it as two movies.”

He continues, “Toward the end of the shoot, we all started having the same idea [about cutting it into two movies], and then we just left it. We just finished shooting the movie as it was. We didn’t change anything. And then it was in the edit room that Quentin and the editor, Sally Menke, made that choice to actually do it and see how it worked. He showed it to us, and obviously, it worked.”

Miramax released Kill Bill: Vol. 1 on Oct. 10, 2003, and it collected $180 million worldwide ($301 million today). THR’s review deemed the film “hugely watchable” but noted that it felt incomplete without Vol. 2, which hit theaters six months later. (Thurman later revealed she sustained permanent injuries from a car stunt gone wrong during the filming of Vol. 2.)

The cultural impact lives on, as SZA topped the charts this year with her song “Kill Bill,” with a narrative mirroring the movie’s plot. Bender says, “Each generation seems to discover it and really love it.”

A version of this story appears in the Oct. 11 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.

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