While Kill Bill may not quite be the greatest Tarantino movie, it just might be the Tarantino-iest Tarantino movie. (And the director does consider it to be one film, despite marketing concerns forcing him to split it up into two theatrical releases.)
It introduced us to Tarantino’s penchant for chapter-based narratives, weaved together his most eclectic combination of genres (Shaw Brothers kung fu movies, spaghetti westerns, Chinese wuxia films, and blaxploitation movies, to name a select handful), and has more cartoonishly bloody violence than the rest of his films combined (except for maybe Django Unchained). So, here are 10 behind-the-scenes facts about Kill Bill.
Quentin Tarantino delayed filming because Uma Thurman was pregnant
Just when everything was in place to start shooting Kill Bill, Uma Thurman became pregnant, so she couldn’t do the movie. Quentin Tarantino delayed filming until she’d had the baby and was ready to come back to work. He didn’t even think about replacing her.
The director reasoned, “If Josef Von Sternberg is getting ready to make Morocco and Marlene Dietrich gets pregnant, he waits for Dietrich!” In other words, if a director is setting out to make a passion project and the perfect lead actor becomes pregnant, the director should wait, because they’re not going to find anyone better for the role.
It took Tarantino six years to write the script
From initially putting pen to paper to map out the Bride’s story to completing a coherent draft of the screenplay, Quentin Tarantino spent six years in total writing the script for Kill Bill. The first draft came in at around 220 pages long. An average screenplay is around 90-120 pages long, so it’s no wonder that Kill Bill eventually had to be split into two parts at the studio’s behest.
Initially, the director wanted to make it as one film, but eventually realized that not enough mainstream moviegoers would buy a ticket to see a four-hour movie. Of course, when the two were cut together and released under the title The Whole Bloody Affair, plenty of fans turned out.
Several Big Name Stars turned down the role of Bill
David Carradine ended up being the perfect choice to play Bill, delivering his unwieldy monologues at his own pace and not losing the audience’s attention for a second. But before he was cast, the role was offered to Jack Nicholson, Kurt Russell, Mickey Rourke, and Burt Reynolds, who all turned it down.
Russell would end up regularly collaborating with Tarantino, appearing in Death Proof, The Hateful Eight, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Reynolds had been initially cast to play rancher George Spahn in the latter film but passed away before shooting began and was replaced by Bruce Dern.
Quentin Tarantino actually owns that truck
One of the most iconic props from any Tarantino movie is the “P***y Wagon,” a car that the Bride steals from her would-be attacker when she awakens from her coma. This car is actually the personal property of Quentin Tarantino. He drove it around town to promote Kill Bill: Volume 2 when it first hit theaters.
He has since lent it out for use in two music videos: Lady Gaga and Beyoncé’s “Telephone” and Missy Elliott’s “I’m Really Hot.” This isn’t the first time Tarantino’s personal property has been used as a prop in one of his films; he actually owned Jules’ “Bad Mother F****r” wallet from Pulp Fiction.
$60,000 of the budget was spent on swords
The financiers of Kill Bill reportedly spent $60,000 on just swords and sword accessories. Each volume of Kill Bill reportedly cost around $30 million, making the two films’ total budget $60 million. This means that on this Hollywood action movie with paid employees spending a studio’s money to bring Quentin Tarantino’s imagination to life, 0.1% of the budget was spent on swords alone.
A lot of these swords probably went towards decorating the set for the scene set in legendary swordsmith Hattori Hanzō’s workshop. Hanzō was played by Sonny Chiba, whose iconic work Tarantino had previously praised vicariously through the Clarence character in True Romance.
The blood squibs were Chinese condoms filled with fake blood
When he was directing the action scenes for Kill Bill, Quentin Tarantino didn’t want to use any computer-generated effects or even professional-grade practical effects. He wanted to recreate the very specific look of Chinese wuxia films of the ‘70s.
This meant using Chinese condoms filled with fake blood, a technique that was first popularized by Chang Cheh, instead of high-end blood squibs that any other Hollywood action movie would use.
In addition to Cheh, the strongest influence on Tarantino’s collaboration with his cinematographer, Robert Richardson, was the films of the Shaw Brothers Studio. The director provided Richardson with a list of visual reference points before shooting.
Robert Rodriguez co-scored Volume 2 for $1
While Kill Bill: Volume 1 was scored by RZA alone, Volume 2 was co-scored by RZA and Robert Rodriguez, a fellow filmmaker and close personal friend of Quentin Tarantino’s. Rodriguez co-composed the score for Volume 2 for a minimal fee of just $1, as a favor to Tarantino to help him save some money on the budget.
Tarantino would later return the favor when he directed a scene in Rodriguez’s film Sin City for $1. RZA said of Rodriguez’s contributions to the sequel’s soundtrack, “He took the electronic stuff and kept it there, then built the orchestrations on top of it.”
Pai Mei almost had a bad English dub by Quentin Tarantino
One of the interesting backstory sequences in Kill Bill: Volume 2 shows us the Bride training with Pai Mei, a legendary martial arts master with a long, thin, white beard. The character was played by Chia-Hui Liu, speaking Cantonese that’s subtitled in English.
Originally, Quentin Tarantino envisioned playing a bad English dub in his own voice over Pai Mei’s dialogue. Eventually, he scrapped it and let the actor play the part in his own voice. It’s an interesting idea on paper, but it would probably come off as weird in execution, and it would limit Chia-Hui Liu’s ability to really embody the character on-screen.
Uma Thurman and Daryl Hannah didn’t get along on-set
On the set of Kill Bill, Uma Thurman and Daryl Hannah didn’t get along. They reportedly asked hotel staff to keep them apart during the press tour for the first film. When they won the Best Fight award at the 2005 MTV Movie Awards, only Hannah turned up to collect it. Thurman had appeared to accept the same award one year prior when she won it for her fight with Chiaki Kuriyama in Volume 1.
If anything, Thurman and Hannah’s indifference to each other on the set just fueled the on-screen hatred between their characters, the Bride and Elle Driver.
Quentin Tarantino and Uma Thurman created the Bride on the set of Pulp Fiction
Quentin Tarantino and Uma Thurman conceived “the Bride” character on the set of their first collaboration, Pulp Fiction. Tarantino told Thurman he had a basic idea for a revenge movie that would begin with a shot of a woman lying beaten and bloodied while her attackers stand over her.
Thurman told him the shot should widen to reveal that she’s wearing a bridal gown. Thus, the Bride was born, and Tarantino spent the next few years figuring out her story. While the screenplay for Kill Bill is credited to Tarantino alone, the creation of “the Bride” character is credited to “Q & U.”