In December 1994 Harvey Weinstein was woken at 2am by the telephone ringing beside his bed. Grumpy and befuddled, the Miramax chairperson reached for the receiver and prepared to scream blue murder at whoever had dared to disturb his sleep.
As Quentin Tarantino would later recall: ”Harvey went, ‘Who the hell is this?’ And I said, ‘It’s Quentin. I just wrote the first 30 pages of my new script. You wanna hear it?’ And there was this long pause and then Harvey said, ‘Uh … yeah.”’
Nine years on, that fledgling script is about to see the light of day.
Scheduled for United States and United Kingdom release in October, Kill Bill will be Tarantino’s first feature since 1997’s Jackie Brown. In the meantime, his 30 pages have mushroomed into a 200-page screenplay and a movie that is reportedly more than three hours long.
So great was this mushrooming, in fact, that Weinstein announced recently that he had decided to take the risky step of cutting Kill Bill in two. The October release will be followed by a further instalment, due out early next year. Typical: you wait years for a new Tarantino movie, and then two show up at once.
When he wrote those opening pages, Tarantino was arguably the world’s most in-demand filmmaker — fresh from winning the Palme d’Or for Pulp Fiction and poised to scoop an Oscar for best original screenplay (shared with Roger Avary) at the following year’s Academy Awards.
Since then, however, he has become the Marie Celeste of American cinema, his absence blamed variously on writer’s block, chronic laziness and bloated rock-starrish debauchery.
All of which means that there is a lot riding on Kill Bill, a kung-fu thriller that dispatches Uma Thurman’s angel of vengeance on the trail of the gangster (David Carradine) who ordered her dead. And with each twist in the production history, the stakes have been raised just that little bit higher.
Certainly Kill Bill has suffered its share of hiccups. First, production was stalled for a year after Thurman became pregnant and Tarantino decided to stick with her. Then, when the cameras finally began rolling, it became apparent that the film was running way over schedule.
Originally intending to film in China for eight weeks, they wound up staying there for four months. One sequence alone reportedly took longer to film than all of Pulp Fiction put together.
For better or worse, then, Kill Bill looks set to be regarded as the work of a pampered auteur with too much time and money on his hands.
And yet behind each story of a pampered auteur lurks the story of the producer who indulged him.
In his dealings with other film-makers, Weinstein has a reputation as a hands-on hard-man. His reported penchant for trimming films in the editing suite has earned him the nickname Harvey Scissorhands, and he was rumoured to have squabbled furiously with Martin Scorsese over Gangs of New York.
By contrast, Weinstein has been a kitten where Tarantino is concerned.
Even given the director’s gift for hyperbole, his account of that long-ago phone call seems peculiarly telling. There can’t be many film-makers who’d have the audacity to ring up Weinstein in the small hours. Even fewer would dream of doing so to read out a screenplay they’d barely started writing.
But then the bond between Weinstein and Tarantino has never been your traditional producer-director pairing. Insiders liken it more to the relationship between an amiable father and his wayward, genius son.
Ultimately it all comes back to the Pulp Fiction effect. The film’s influence is hard to overstate. On the wider, cultural level, its critical and commercial success repositioned the goalposts of American cinema, blurring the boundary between mainstream Hollywood and the independent fringe, and paving the way for a rash of other iconoclastic pictures made within the studio system — the likes of Being John Malkovich, Solaris and The Royal Tenenbaums.
More specifically, it positioned backer Miramax as the leading player in this brave new world.
Discussing Kill Bill with The New York Times recently, Weinstein was happy to acknowledge the debt. ”Miramax,” he admitted, ”is the house that Quentin Tarantino built.” Because of that, he said, the director has carte blanche on whatever film he chooses to make.
It remains to be seen whether that carte blanche comes with a shelf life. In agreeing not to cut Kill Bill down into one manageable-length feature, Weinstein is taking a sizeable gamble with his $55-million budget.
In the first place, he’s flying against the prevailing Hollywood wisdom (prompted by recent box-office returns) that suggests the movie sequel may have had its day.
Moreover, he is banking on the box-office pull of a filmmaker who has largely slipped out of the public imagination. Do today’s film-goers still care about Tarantino?
More crucially, do they care enough to buy two tickets to see his long-time-coming opus?
Rich beyond his wildest dreams, Weinstein is not quite staking the house on Tarantino. But he is taking an uncharacteristic risk for the sake of auld lang syne.
If Kill Bill crashes and burns, he may decide that his debt has been paid in full. He may also regret ever picking up that telephone. — Â