Judging from Kill Bill, you seem like a natural athlete. How much training is involved in your being able to kick that much butt?
Well, I trained for a solid three months before I started shooting, pretty intensely, five days a week, all day long. [Laughs.] Which is a lot.
Is Quentin obsessed with your feet?
Well, no, I don’t think it’s me in particular. You know, he’s widely accused of having a foot fetish. And, in fact, many people commented, during shooting, that he could have released an entire version of the story solely on the foot shots that he shot of all actors. Shod, unshod — you know, that was just part of his storytelling to have a foot shot. [Laughs.] It was a little joke around set. I think he denies his foot fetish but he’s accused of it regularly. It started with Pulp Fiction with that foot massage. I think that was the beginning of the accusations hurled at him about his obsession with tootsies. [Laughs.]
How do you see the character of The Bride? What does she represent in terms of the voyeur? And what about the idea of a woman who is so abused being used as a spectacle for entertainment?
It has a classic structure of character. I’m not going to buy into the [idea of] “because it’s a woman, it has to be worse than if it’s a great male character”. You wouldn’t blink twice if you saw Mad Max in this position or Clint Eastwood in this position. It’s a revenge story. So it’s about someone being victimised, essentially, who, yes, was a woman assassin. Somebody victimised who then essentially claws her way back from the dead and seeks to avenge herself. It’s a very, very familiar story.
What is different is that I am a woman. And the person fighting their way back out of the grave, the person seeking revenge, the person taking the beating and coming back for more, fearlessly, is me, a woman, not your typical man. For people to find that anti-feminist is interesting to me because there are many people who find it exciting and inspiring to see a woman exhibiting as much strength and aggression and power as we expect from a male.
When I watched Kill Bill, what struck me was that I didn’t grow up watching movies where a woman was betrayed and is so tough and is so strong and so fierce and brave. But, like anything with Quentin, I think it divides people right down the middle. If you want movies to be sterilised and moral then you probably don’t like Quentin Tarantino’s movies.
What I find interesting about him, as a creative person, is that he doesn’t approach his material from the point of view of “I have a moral and now I’m going to build you a nice little tale to feed you my moral”. He is a very organic, very kind of dreamlike, creative person who has visions of these characters.
And that’s the mystery of Quentin’s work. It’s not safe. It’s dangerous, it’s dreamlike, it’s raw and organic and just comes out of him. He is somebody who is kind of dreaming some type of fantasy that is just put directly to you, to experience it. I think that’s why audiences respond so profoundly, whether they hate it or love it, because they’re actually experiencing something very, very raw and unedited from the psyche. There’s something very valuable in that, even in a fantasy, comic-booky, crazy sort of way.
Watching the first movie was like coitus interruptus. There was this long time we had to wait [for Volume II]. Did you and Quentin have a sense of trying to get on with it to have a sense of completion?
He’s the captain of unrealistic timeline goal expectations. He’s been working day and night, between mixing and cutting and all of the incredible detail that goes into finishing a movie. I didn’t feel urgency. When it’s something that’s such a long process and eats up so much of your life, I kind of gave up any relationship to urgency a long time ago.
And it took a year to start because you got pregnant, right?
Theoretically. When I was pregnant, the script wasn’t done. And, frankly, a little more pre-production probably wouldn’t have hurt us. It was a massive undertaking, between animation, character development, changes in the script up until the last moments of shooting.
How much of the film was shot in sequence and how difficult was it to expand the emotional scope of the character from this simple starting point of “girl revenge”?
Well, a lot of the film was shot in sequence. We started to train here [in the United States], then went to Beijing. We shot three months in Beijing, and the Asian section is primarily in the first movie. The majority of the second movie was shot after that, here. Then we finished the movie in Mexico. In regard to spanning the emotional universe of the character, she’s a very rich character yet so streamlined and so physical, so there’s much less time for expression than in your average drama or something. But you know, that’s what we women do, because our parts are usually underwritten. We kind of go in there and take what we get and fill it up and make something out of it.
There’s a great element of camp in the film — at the very end, you wink at the audience. How do you, as an actress, balance that camp aspect with making the character still real and believable?
It’s very scary! [Laughs.] Although the dance of it, with Quentin, is that he’s into these total dramatic and emotional shifts — and getting away with it. Usually in a movie the director establishes the tone in the first two or three scenes and that stays consistent. And they never shake you, they never break that reality.
One of the wild things about Quentin is that he sort of refuses that. He refuses to be leashed to a specific genre. Instead, what he really likes to do is the really scary business of tone-shifting dramatically, going from scary violence to absurdist violence to a real emotional moment. And then making fun of it the next second. So you have to be very trusting and very agile to keep up. You just have to be brave about it, assume that he has what he does have, which is skill.
Even allowing for the fact that Bill is a psychotic killer and a braggart and a general son of a bitch, were you able to muster any sympathy for him at all?
Well, one of the things when I first read the script, one of the things that really niggled me was that I wasn’t really convinced, reading it, that I really wanted just to kill Bill. [Laughs.] I wasn’t sure about killing Bill. I worry that if there’s ambivalence about killing Bill does that kill the movie? Ultimately, in the playing of the moment, I found that there was room for all those things. There was room for ambivalence. There was room for heartbreak.