The 200(ish)-page screenplay was the hottest read in Hollywood circa early 2002. It bore a black-and-red promise on its white cover, written in the distinctive chicken scratch of its creator: “Uma Thurman is going to KiLL BiLL.”
The script was an event, the first original screenplay Quentin Tarantino had completed since he’d transitioned from the indie wunderkind of Reservoir Dogs to the Oscar-winning mastermind of the surprise blockbuster Pulp Fiction eight years earlier. This film would be an even bigger event. Or, as it turned out, films. That phonebook-sized screenplay was the last time the story of Bill, the bride, and the deadly viper assassination force would be told as one continuous narrative—until now.
This week’s theatrical release of Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair marks the first time a wide audience has had the opportunity to see Kill Bill as Tarantino originally intended it, and as it was shot over 155 days in mid-2002 to mid-2003. The story was cooked up by Tarantino and star Uma Thurman during the production of Pulp Fiction, a riff on “Fox Force Five,” the television pilot her character discusses with John Travolta’s Vincent Vega. Over more than a few beers, Tarantino and Thurman hashed out an elaborate revenge plot exacted by a bride-to-be, shot in the head and left for dead in her wedding dress. (Hence, one of the film’s most curious credits: “Based on the character of ‘The Bride’ created by Q & U.”)
Tarantino wrote a few pages of the script before putting them in a drawer to focus on Jackie Brown, adapted from a novel by Elmore Leonard, and his long-gestating World War II epic, Inglourious Basterds. But when he ran into Thurman at a party in 2000, she reminded him of the vehicle he’d promised her. So he put Basterds aside and returned to Kill Bill.
Tarantino imagined this as “the movie of my movie-geek dreams”—a freewheeling, genre-juggling mash-up of kung-fu, Blaxploitation, revenge thriller, Western (both spaghetti and American), horror, and even anime. It was a cross-pollination of genres, some with nothing more in common than the simple fact that Tarantino thought they were cool. Watching his epic would be like taking home a pile of tapes from his “employee picks” shelf at Video Archives and shotgunning them over the course of one long night.
