http://www.kill-bill.com/
What I read in Entertainment Weekly while sitting on the pot. Copied and pasted from EW.Com:
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Quentin Tarantino's sanity has been debated more than once in the past couple of years. In fact, nearly everyone who has been questioned about his first film in six years, ''Kill Bill'' -- a production that was so prolonged, freewheeling, and downright goofy that the crew called it ''the traveling circus'' -- has responded with a bemused question of their own. And that question is: Has Tarantino, the star filmmaker behind such cultural touchstones as ''Reservoir Dogs'' and ''Pulp Fiction,'' lost his mind?
''He has this free style and it's terrific, but the movie was totally out of control,'' says Uma Thurman, who stars as an assassin called ''The Bride'' in ''Kill Bill,'' a two-part revenge thriller (''Volume 1'' opens Oct. 10, followed by ''Volume 2'' on Feb. 20). ''It was a wild ride. But that's Quentin.''
Actually, it was his old friend Thurman who inspired Tarantino, 40, to pen the script that became ''Kill Bill.'' At the Miramax Oscar party in March 2000, the actress asked Tarantino, who'd virtually disappeared after making 1997's ''Jackie Brown,'' about an old revenge movie they had cooked up in a bar while shooting ''Pulp Fiction.'' Tarantino's interest flared -- for her 30th birthday, he promised Thurman that she'd have a screenplay in three weeks.
A year and a half later, he was done.
Thurman's birthday gift turned out to be a doorstop of a script (222 pages) that told the story of a character named only The Bride, who takes a bullet to the head on her wedding day, recovers, and goes on a kill-happy rampage, visiting revenge on her former lover Bill and his team of sexy hired guns, the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad (DiVAS). (The similarity between the DiVAS and ''Fox Force Five,'' the fictitious martial-arts TV show Thurman describes in ''Pulp Fiction,'' is far from unintentional.) It was a thin, bloody story with near-endless action sequences and countless stylized touches.
''A cruel older brother, that's what he's like,'' laughs Thurman. ''Me, in the dirt, with blood everywhere is his favorite thing in the world. He wants to rough me up every day. He wants to see me mad. But she's just a great part: She's a fierce, heartbreaking American girl who's very good with a sharp-edged weapon. What's not to love?''
''In one scene, I'm in a car trunk,'' says Julie Dreyfus, who plays a DiVAS associate named Sofie Fatale. ''And the makeup artist was spraying my face with a few droplets of blood and Quentin just stood there saying, 'More.' And she puts on a little bit more and he's like, 'NO! MORE!' Finally, he picks up -- I swear -- five gallons of blood and pours it over my head. It took weeks to get off.'' (The body count in ''Kill Bill'' is staggering. Tarantino himself says it's virtually incalculable, which created a bit of a ratings problem with the MPAA. ''You don't have that many directors saying, 'It was really great working with the MPAA on my really f---ing violent movie!''' says Tarantino. ''But I respect where they're coming from. They asked me to tone it down and I did.'' The movie -- or at least the first installment of it -- ultimately earned an R rating.)
Of course, not everything went as smoothly on set. Miramax suits were beginning to notice that Tarantino, fight master Yuen Wo-ping (''The Matrix,'' ''Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon''), and cinematographer Robert Richardson (an Oliver Stone vet, who won an Oscar for ''JFK'') were showing an expensive tendency to scrap well-planned, elaborate action sequences to improvise on the spot. After much debate, the budget -- originally $42 million -- was bumped up to a reported $55 million. But as production dragged on, it became clear that there was no way that what Tarantino had shot could be contained in a single film.
''If you look at that script, it was massively overwritten, especially for a movie that he said he wanted to be 90 minutes,'' says Thurman. ''You suspect various things. Quentin had gone mad, or was playing with lives, or playing with money. It made no sense. Whether he had intentions to separate the movies from the beginning or it was unconscious, I don't know. But it would have been difficult to include even half that material in one movie.''
Soon whispers started to be heard on the set that ''Kill Bill'' had actually been planned all along as a two-movie epic. Weinstein made an appearance in Los Angeles and suggested the idea himself -- but really, what else could he do, having already gone on record saying that Tarantino built Miramax and could have whatever he wanted? And, besides, there was absolutely no way they could release ''Kill Bill'' at three-plus hours. It was too violent. Too intense. Too giddily over-the-top.
''I didn't ever bring up splitting it up because I had to wait for it to be Harvey's idea for it to ever work,'' remembers Tarantino. ''But the minute it happened and Harvey suggested it, all right? It was, like, within an hour I had it all figured out. Literally an hour. It wasn't hard at all.''
