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 Kill Bill: Vol. 2 Production NotesThe bride is back for the final cut.
The second film in the two-part "Kill Bill" series, the first being Kill Bill: Volume 1. Uma Thurman is going to "Kill Bill," in Quentin Tarantino's latest film about a former assassin betrayed by her boss, Bill (Carradine). Four years after surviving a bullet in the head, the bride (Thurman) emerges from a coma and swears revenge on her former master and his deadly squad of international assassins, played by Lucy Liu, Daryl Hannah, Vivica A. Fox and Michael Madsen.
After dispensing with former colleagues O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu) and Vernita Green in Kill Bill Vol. 1, the Bride (Uma Thurman) resumes her quest for justice in the series’ second installment, Kill Bill Vol. 2 With those two down, the Bride has two remaining foes on her 'Death List' to pursue – Budd and Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah) – before moving on to her ultimate goal… to kill Bill (David Carradine).
In Vol. 1 we learned that Bill, a broker of killers for hire, had assembled and trained a ruthless assortment of assassins, the so-called Deadly Viper Assassination Squad (DiVAS).
Each of these gifted murderers was code-named for a different species of poisonous snake: O’Ren-Ishii (Lucy Liu) was Cottonmouth, Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah) was California Mountain Snake, Vernita Green (Vivica A. Fox) was Copperhead, and Budd (Michael Madsen), Bill’s kid brother and the only other male in the Viper Squad, was known as Sidewinder.
The lethal weapon known as Black Mamba, played by Thurman, the most talented of them all, was also Bill’s lover, and she became a fugitive from the assassination game when she learned that she was pregnant with his child. At that moment her worldview shifted on its axis. She no longer wanted to kill or to put her life in mortal danger. She changed her name, hid out in a small town, and found herself a kind and stable man to a marry.
But Bill was not about to let this situation stand. We caught a few glimpses of the result early in Kill Bill Vol. 1 with the wreckage left behind when Bill and the Vipers assaulted a tiny rural chapel and slaughtered everyone in sight. Vol. 2 gives us, for the first time, a full account of the wedding rehearsal massacre that sets the plot of this two-part epic in motion. After fending off attacks from Bill’s trailer-trash kid brother Budd (Michael Madsen) and her chief rival within the Squad, Daryl Hannah’s Elle Driver, The Bride tracks her ultimate quarry to his lair in Mexico.
It might be a slight exaggeration to describe Kill Bill Vol. 2 as a “relationship movie.” But it may look like one, at times, in comparison with the wall-to-wall Asian swordplay action of Vol. 1 . Both films are still, as Carradine says, “kung-fu samurai Spaghetti Western love stories.” But as the actor noted in a recent published interview: “ The second one has got a lot more of what you're used to from Quentin; the quirky character stuff, the surprises, the funny stuff."
In Kill Bill Vol. 1 , actor David Carradine was almost entirely a sinister presence behind the scenes, a familiar, seductive, baritone voice murmuring on the soundtrack—despite the fact that he played the movie's title role. But along with Uma Thurman, who continues to cut a wide swath as the revenge-driven Bride, “David dominates Vol. 2 ,” according to writer-director Quentin Tarantino.
When I tell people the name of the movie is Kill Bill ,” Carradine says, “and that I'm Bill, they ask me: 'Well, what are you, the bad guy?' And I have to tell 'em, 'There are no good guys in a Quentin Tarantino movie. It's all about the bad guys.' The essence of a Tarantino movie is an inside look at the minds and hearts of violent people. That's what we go to see his movies for. It's climbing inside these people's psyches and showing what makes them tick. There's a nobility about Bill, yet you also know he's one of the most evil people you've ever met in your life. “Bill is more fun than anything," Carradine recently told The Associated Press. "Bill has virtually no human problems. He's just kind of put himself above it all.”
In Vol. 1 we learned that Bill, a broker of killers for hire, had assembled and trained a ruthless assortment of assassins, the so-called Deadly Viper Assassination Squad (DiVAS). Each of these gifted murderers was code-named for a different species of poisonous snake: O'Ren-Ishii (Lucy Liu) was Cottonmouth, Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah) was California Mountain Snake, Vernita Green (Vivica A. Fox) was Copperhead, and Budd (Michael Madsen), Bill's kid brother and the only other male in the Viper Squad, was known as Sidewinder.
The lethal weapon known as Black Mamba, played by Thurman, the most talented of them all, was also Bill's lover, and she became a fugitive from the assassination game when she learned that she was pregnant with his child. At that moment her worldview shifted on its axis. She no longer wanted to kill or to put her life in mortal danger. She changed her name, hid out in a small town, and found herself a kind and stable man to a marry.
But Bill was not about to let this situation stand. We caught a few glimpses of the result early in Kill Bill Vol. 1 with the wreckage left behind when Bill and the Vipers assaulted a tiny rural chapel and slaughtered everyone in sight. Vol. 2 gives us, for the first time, a full account of the wedding rehearsal massacre that sets the plot of this two-part epic in motion. After fending off attacks from Bill's trailer-trash kid brother Budd (Michael Madsen) and her chief rival within the Squad, Daryl Hannah's Elle Driver, The Bride tracks her ultimate quarry to his lair in Mexico.
“When you put the two parts of the movie together,” David Carradine says, “it really is an epic, as big as the stuff that David Lean did. It's still the Quentin Tarantino world, but on a different scale.”
The film's central relationships between hunter and prey, which Carradine describes simply as a love story, has one of its strongest expressions in Bill's deceptively serene introduction scene in Vol. 2 : “I show up in Texas during her wedding rehearsal, outside on the porch, and I'm playing my flute. It's the sound that first tells you I'm about to appear. She hears this and comes out, and we have this very romantic reunion, which is also a goodbye. I mean, this scene just sings. The crew got choked up watching it. Quentin came over to me and said; ‘I think this is the best scene in the picture for you.' And I said, ‘I think it's the best scene of my career.'”
For a filmmaker as genre savvy as Tarantino, the touchstone for Bill's both Satanic and paternal character, and his intense relationships with The Bride and her sister Vipers, is not far to seek: “Bill is a pimp,” Tarantino declares. “He's a procurer in every way, except for him it's about death, murder, and killing as opposed to sex: seeing a girl who he thinks has a prostitute hidden inside her, but she doesn't know it yet. All he has to do is bring it out, to turn her and make her part of his stable.”
The relationships within the squad fit into the same psychological pattern, and one of the most fraught is the one that has been simmering for years between The Bride and Daryl Hannah's dramatically eye-patched Elle Driver (a.k.a. Sidewinder). Elle played a small but key role in Vol. 1 – attempting to deliver a chemical coup de grace to the comatose and hospitalized Bride – but in Vol. 2 , the rivalry comes to a head in an all-out “cat fight”.
“In the hierarchy of the Deadly Vipers,” Tarantino explains, “Uma's the top one. She's the one who has Bill's ear and heart. If Bill is the pimp, Uma's character is the number one lady in his stable, the girl who keeps the other whores in line, and Daryl Hannah is Uma's opposite number. They're both these amazons with long legs, long arms, and long whipping blonde hair. They've been at odds from the beginning, and when Uma went out, Daryl went in. She was The Bride's replacement in every sense.”
In fact, Hannah worked on the assumption in her performance that Elle Driver was a former Interpol agent who at some point caught up with Bill and tried to arrest him, only to be seduced and “turned.” “The Bride used to be Bill's girl and now Elle Driver is Bill's girl,” Hannah says. “So Elle really wants to see The Bride go. She wants to be the one to finish her off.”
Hannah was performing on stage in London in director Michael Radford's production of The Seven Year Itch , when Tarantino surprised her with a backstage visit, offering the role he'd written specifically for her. Hannah jumped at the chance to work with Tarantino, adding: "I'd never played a full-out villain before, so I was really excited when I realized what a bad ass Elle Driver was."
One of Quentin Tarantino's favorite actors, Michael Madsen, was asked to play Budd, a washed-up veteran of the Viper Squad who comes out a retirement and gets a new lease on life (at least briefly) in Bill's fight against The Bride. Madsen had not worked with Tarantino since 1992, when he created one of the most memorable characters in the director's debut movie Reservoir Dogs , the sardonic, ear-slicing Mr. Blonde. “He hasn't changed at all,” Madsen happily reports of his reunion with the director. “He's totally and absolutely the same guy he was before. But now he has bigger toys to play with.”
 Budd is Bill's wastrel younger brother, Madsen says, “and there's nice progression of Budd as a character. There's the younger Budd in the early Viper days, then there's the older Budd that has gotten lost, who works as a bouncer in a strip club and lives in a trailer. We called him ‘Budd in a Bottle.' He's a character that I think is equally as memorable as Mr. Blonde.”“My character's relationship with his brother, with Bill, is very complex. I've got four sons myself, and David obviously grew up with several brothers, so I think we understood the dynamics of brothers. David has certain, uh, nuances of character, and I'm a bit of a quirky character myself. We had a sort of bantering relationship going on the set. So when they stick us together I think it's easy to buy that we're brothers.”
Kill Bill is still a movie strongly influenced by Asian martial arts films, and in that universe no relationship is more crucial than the one between student and teacher, master and disciple. In fact, Kill Bill has two masters. Each of the two volumes has its own tone and narrative strategies, and in terms of its Asian influences Vol.1 was clearly dominated by Japan and the code of bushido , as personified by Sonny Chiba ( The Streetfighter ), who played the samurai sword maker Hattori Hanzo and served as the film's kenjutsu choreographer.
Vol. 2 , on the other hand, is strongly influenced by the martial culture of China, as personified by martial arts movie legend Gordon Liu Jia-hui ( The Master Killer ). “My two favorite things in the course of making this movie,” he says, “as far as goose bump moments, was doing scenes with Sonny Chiba and Gordon Liu.”
Tarantino cast Liu initially only as Johnny Mo, a leather-clad leader of Lucy Liu's Crazy 88's bodyguard squadron in Tokyo in Vol. 1 . Until well into pre-production he was intending to play the Bride's draconian martial arts instructor himself, a variation on a popular bad guy from several vintage Hong Kong martial arts films of the 1970s, the “white eyebrow monk” Pei Mei. Tarantino joined the rest of his cast on the training floor in the early days of the lengthy martial arts training camp sessions that were held during pre-production, working hard to get ready to play Pei Mei. “I had been watching these movies for years,” he says, “and admiring the performers and thinking how cool they were. There was no way I was going to let the girls have all the fun!”
But when he began to understand how demanding the pre-production chores on this complex film would be, Tarantino realized that he simply didn't have time to act on top of all that, much less to train arduously for eight hours a day. He turned to Gordon Liu as the obvious choice to assume the role, a performer who had, in effect, been in training all his life to portray a steely martial arts master.
In a sense, Tarantino was casting against type when he asked Gordon Liu to play Pei Mei. Liu had always portrayed stalwart, or occasionally comic, heroes in his classic Shaw Brothers films. He became an international martial arts star, second in fan status only to Bruce Lee, as the redoubtable shaven-head martial monk San Te in Liu Jia-liang's The 36 th Chamber of Shaolin (1978), known as Master Killer in it's English-dubbed incarnation.
Pei Mei, on the other hand, while also a monk, was one of the Shaw studio's darkest villains, betraying his martial brothers of the Shaolin Temple to the Manchu tyrants in pictures like Liu Jia-liang's Executioners From Shaolin (1977). Pei Mei was such a popular baddie, in fact, that several semi-sequels and prequels were quickly created, even though the evil one had died decisively in his very first screen outing. “But,” says Liu, “I understand why Quentin wanted me, even though I've always played righteous heroes. He was looking at me for my martial arts skills, and also I think because of my understanding of this very Chinese character.”
Liu admits that one thing he did not know much about when he was first approached to appear in Kill Bill was Quentin Tarantino or his films: “But I asked some friends in the entertainment business, and they recommended Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction , and I watched them and I was impressed. His work is unique and very interesting; something you have never seen before. And I heard that Quentin knew a lot of Hong Kong movies and martial arts movies.”
Tarantino continued to cast a wide net in Kill Bill Vol. 2 using performers whose work he had been enjoying for years. He described Michael Parks, for example, as one of his favorite American movie actors. Parks won the young Tarantino's allegiance when he starred in the classic ‘70s television series Then Came Bronson , and was later cast by writer-producer Tarantino in From Dusk Till Dawn (1996), directed by Robert Rodriguez. Here, Tarantino has cast Parks in two more roles, one in each of the two volumes of Kill Bill . Parks is small town Texas Sheriff Edgar McGraw in Vol. 1 , investigating the grisly wedding rehearsal crime scene. In Vol. 2 he is the elderly Esteban Vieho, a brothel owner and Bill's mentor who helps The Bride locate her arch-nemesis in Mexico.
Relationships matter in Kill Bill Vol. 2, both behind and in front of the camera. But it is worth pointing out that the new film still displays some signs of what Tarantino described as a “duck press” approach to absorbing the influence of his favorite “grindhouse” genre films.
“When I come to do a scene that's like something you might see in an Italian gialo [slasher movie] or in a kung fu film,” he says, “I know how they would have done it over there, so I'm going to shoot it that way . This is why my films play so well all over the world. I don't really think of myself as solely an American director. People in just about any country can see things in my films that they can understand and enjoy.”
This overall approach to the film was a key determining factor when it came to picking the crew for this unusual project. Academy Award winning Director of Photographer Robert Richardson was chosen for Kill Bill precisely because he had proven himself adept at achieving a wide variety of looks. He has been a frequent collaborator with Oliver Stone, on films such as Natural Born Killers and JFK , which cut back and forth between different looks and even film stocks within a single sequence. The concept of Kill Bill involved shifting the pictorial and cutting style of each episode, in keeping with its mix ‘n' match genre roots, therefore Richardson was an obvious choice.
In Vol. 2, the impact of two particular genres is especially evident. “If my life had two sides,” Tarantino says, “one side would be the period martial arts pictures made by Shaw Brothers in the 1970s, and the other side would be Italian Westerns. Actually they both have influences on each other. During the 1970's, movies from these two genres often used the same plots, similar images and shots, even some of the same music. There are many things in Shaw Brothers movies which were borrowed from Italian Westerns. There's a fairly deep kinship.”
The on-screen relationship between the film's two formative genre styles is straightforward: The present time sequences, set in the American Southwest and Mexico, adhere to the style of the Italian Westerns. The flashback sections, set mostly in China, where Bill takes The Bride for a period of training with his own former master, Pei Mei, have the "training-for-revenge" structure of a classic kung fu picture.
As befits the stress of the second Kill Bill film on western American and Mexican locations, the movie's soundtrack features a raucous number by the Southern rockabilly great Charlie Feathers, “Can't Hardly Stand It,” along with classic cuts from Ennio Morricone's score for Sergio Leone's classic Spaghetti Western The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966), and “Urami Bushi” (“Love Song of a Warrior”), originally performed by leading lady Meiko Kaji in the Japanese samurai picture Lady Snowblood 2: Love Song of Vengeance (1974).
Tarantino's fans know that he is almost as passionate about music as he is about movies. Tarantino has said that when he was a young film fan, before the advent of video, movie soundtrack albums were the only way available to re-capture the experience of a film. He says that re-imagining scenes from his favorite films, and sometimes improvising in his head as he listened to the music, was his first experience of thinking like a director. And now his choices about music enter into the creative process right from the beginning. “I can't really go forward with the writing,” he says, “until I find out what the opening music is going to be, the music that will put people in the mood. It's the music that helps me find the rhythm of the movie, the beat the movie will play to.”
This process continues on the set, as Tarantino plays music to put people in the mood for a scene, or in this case to set the beat for a fight. As Gordon Liu told Ain't It Cool News.com, “Quentin already has a music tempo in his head for each fight sequence.”
For work on the score, Tarantino again turned to The RZA (pronounced “Riza”), the groundbreaking producer of several albums for the hip-hop group Wu-Tang Clan, an outfit that drew much of its inspiration (and many sound bites) from Chinese martial arts films. The RZA had also produced solo albums, including two under the name Bobby Digital. He created the score for the Jim Jarmusch film Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999) and for Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2003).
Tarantino's friend and occasional collaborator, writer-director Robert Rodriguez, with whom he collaborated on the south of the Border vampire tale From Dusk Till Dawn (1996), was recruited to compose some appropriate music for the Mexican sequences in Kill Bill Vol. 2 . Rodriguez composed a full score for his 2003 action film Once Upon a Time in Mexico , with Antonio Bandaras, and for all three films in his hugely popular Spy Kids trilogy (2001-2003).
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Uma Thurman as The Bride in Kill Bill: Vol. 2
