Saint Quentin

Quentin Tarantino describes his much-anticipated new film, Kill Bill, as a ”duck press of all the grindhouse cinema” he has seen in his life. A duck press, for non-culinary readers, is a kitchen device used for extracting the juice of a duck or chicken.

And a grindhouse? ”Grindhouses were like the run-down theatres in the more urban areas of any given city all over the world,” he says, in an animated and cheery interview in the back garden of the Four Seasons hotel in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles. ”All the exploitation movies that would just play for a week in a town would play there, and all the big movies, on their way out of town, would play there. That is where I got my first big blush of all world cinema: Godzilla movies, Italian and German sex comedies, the German Edgar Wallace thrillers.”

London, said Tarantino, possessed its very own ”queen’s jewel” of a grindhouse in the Prince Charles cinema off Leicester Square. ”I was so honoured when Reservoir Dogs hit so big there that they started playing it at midnight and all the lads would show up in the black suits with little squirt guns,” he says. ”I couldn’t have been honoured more.”

While few local cinemas were playing foreign films, the grindhouses provided the young Tarantino — he is now 40 — with an education in world cinema that continued during the five years in the 1980s when he worked in a Manhattan Beach video store.

”People didn’t know that they were being fed a diet of foreign cinema, but they were,” says Tarantino. ”What was billed as Teenage Enema Nurse on the poster was a well-respected German sexual comedy that played in big cinemas in Germany. Or Spanish horror films — in America they would slap The House That Vanished or Blood-Spattered Bride on them and you think you’re seeing a grungy movie and all of a sudden, you see this terrific movie, lurid as hell, but really terrific.”

”Blood-spattered bride” is a perfect description of Uma Thurman’s role in Kill Bill, which is essentially a spectacular martial arts revenge movie put through a duck press and smothered with the sauce of a spaghetti western. Thurman’s character, the Bride, is a former member of an assassination team who has just emerged from a four-year coma after being shot while heavily pregnant on her wedding day in Texas, one of the most memorable of the many visually extraordinary scenes in Tarantino’s first film for six years.

”She was like my muse,” says Tarantino of Thurman, who co-starred in Pulp Fiction, the second of his four films. ”I was inspired by her. I thought the way she looked, with her long body and her long blonde hair and her Game of Death outfit and her long arms and long legs, just flailing around with a samurai sword — it’s striking.” (The Game of Death outfit, a yellow jumpsuit with a black racing stripe, was what Bruce Lee was wearing in the film of that name, which was left unfinished on his death in 1973.)

Kill Bill Volume 1, which is just over an hour and a half long, will be followed a few months later by Kill Bill Volume 2, it having become clear to Tarantino and Miramax’s Harvey Weinstein that, even with a duck press, they would have problems squeezing everything from eight months of shooting — in Beijing, Tokyo, Mexico and Pasadena — into a single film. What if Weinstein had told him that the film, which had been budgeted at $39-million and ended up costing $55-million, had to be a single entity? ”It would have been a good movie, I would have made it work, but it would have been less unique. I wrote it on a big canvas and it was always meant to play out on a big canvas.”

Crucial to the width of the canvas had been the decision to work in China, with a multinational crew, and to ensure that the cast were as familiar as possible with the genres in which they were working. Before filming started last year, a Kill Bill training centre was set up in Culver City where the cast could learn not only how to speak some Japanese but also Kenjutsu samurai sword skills from Sonny Chiba, the legendary Japanese star who also appears in the film.

The whole production is an ambitious undertaking, with experts being called in for aspects of the film. For instance, the back story of the sinister O-ren Ishi, played by Lucy Liu, is told in anime and made by the Japanese animation studio, Production IG, which also worked on Hiroyuki Okiara’s Jin-Roh: the Wolf Brigade. The martial arts adviser on the film, Yuen Wo-Ping, who worked on Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and The Matrix, taught the cast ”wire work”, the technique that allows them to fly over their opponents’ flailing blades.

Tarantino resisted the temptation to use CGI to accomplish his special effects. ”I’m not a big fan of CGI,” he says. ”When it’s done really well, it’s fantastic. The Titanic going down was amazing, truly movie magic. And, for that matter, I thought the use of CGI in Terminator 3 was great. But that’s those guys. Now every time I see a trailer, it’s like I’m watching a special effects CGI reel. What’s even worse is that now they’re not using CGI to create what is impossible, but what people did as a matter of course in the 1970s: car chases. What’s that about? When you do stuff with CGI that people have done for real in other movies, you are not going to impress me. I decided it would be more exciting to do it old school, to know it was real human beings doing those tumbles, with no CGI sweetening it.”

One of the motives for the big finale fight scene, the Showdown at the House of Blue Leaves, was to see whether he was capable of it, says Tarantino. ”It was, ‘Let’s see if you can do some of the best action ever filmed and, if you can’t, then you’ll know you’re not as good as you think you are, you have limitations, stick to dialogue.’ I was daring myself to hit my head on the ceiling of my talent.” The scene took eight weeks to film — only two weeks fewer than the whole of Pulp Fiction. The entire film took eight months to shoot.

Another impetus behind Kill Bill was to make it feel international, he says. Using the famous Beijing Film Studio, which was created by Mao’s wife for rather smaller budget ventures, was seen as crucial.

”I’m an American but I really feel like a citizen of the world,” says Tarantino, who is wearing a black jumpsuit with a white racing stripe. ”I don’t have much of a family so when I make a movie the crew is my family. I’m the conduit who can make it all work.

”When we were shooting in the Beijing Film Studio, we had a big American crew and a big Japanese crew and a big Chinese crew and I wanted to do the movie the Chinese way. I didn’t want to do it the Hollywood way,” he says. He assembled the entire crew and gave them ”a big Patten speech” simultaneously translated into Japanese and Chinese. ”I said, ‘Just know that if you’re from the Beijing Film Studio, you’ve got the job. If you screw up, I’m going to yell at you, but it’s not like there’s an American waiting to get on a plane to take your job the minute you screw up once. We’re a family and we’re going to love each other and we’re going to work completely together.”

The musical score encompasses everything from the opening Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down), sung by Nancy Sinatra, to Ennio Morricone at his most haunting, to Quincy Jones’s title track from the television series Ironside, to the Japanese surf guitar trio, the 5.6.7.8’s, who also appear in the Showdown.

The reason for the six-year gap in film-making was partly to charge up batteries, says Tarantino, partly to work on the script for his next major venture, Inglorious Bastards, which is set in the second world war, and partly because Uma Thurman’s pregnancy delayed shooting — to the film’s benefit, he reckons. In his time away, he performed on stage in 1998 in New York with Marisa Tomei in Wait Until Dark and was given the equivalent of a samurai disembowelling by critics. The six-year itch led to speculation that he had lost — literally — the plot. Kill Bill, he trusts, will answer his critics.

His actors sometimes found themselves asked to carry out some odd preparation work. Daryl Hannah’s part as Elle Driver is based on a character from a 1970s triple-X revenge movie called Thriller, about a woman who is forced into prostitution, hooked on to heroin and has her eye poked out when she tries to leave the profession. Tarantino gave Hannah the Thriller video to watch to prepare herself for her role. ”Daryl said, ‘Quentin, you had me watch a porno movie for homework!”’ he cackles.

Tarantino thinks it is an advantage that audiences have already seen films like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon as this will have made them more familiar with the genre. He is not too concerned that every homage should be spotted.

”The references are there but they’re very glancing, there’s no giant thing that it was all meant to be a homage to Kurosawa. If it’s going to work, it’s going to have to work on its own, but hopefully you’ll be inspired to check out some things,” he says. The three biggest influences, he says, would be the old school Shaw brothers films from the 1970s, the pop samurai movies — ”not the Kurosawa stuff” — and spaghetti westerns. The many amputations during fight scenes, all accompanied by veins spurting blood like hosepipes, may remind some of the Black Knight in Monty Python’s Holy Grail. Tarantino is happy to have his audience laughing one moment and revolted the next.

”If I do have a special talent as a director, it is an ability to turn on a dime, to change the emotion you’re feeling as an audience like that” — he snaps his fingers. ”Most of my movies could be put in the comedy section of the video store and that would be appropriate. Even Reservoir Dogs, which isn’t a comedy per se; when I’m watching it with the audience I’m listening to it as a comedy because I’m hearing the laughs. It’s funny – till it’s not funny, now you’re going to stop laughing, now you’re going to laugh again. You’re making them laugh and then it’s horrifying and they become a conspirator in your own sickness and that’s really wonderful!”