Quentin Tarantino on Bill’s Killer Camerawork
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| Quentin Tarantino directs Julie Dreyfus in Kill Bill Volume 1. |
Answer: If you’re smart, like Quentin Tarantino, you don’t even try. After all, Pulp Fiction, which turned its writer-director into a star and spawned countless imitations, grossed over $250 million worldwide, making it the most successful independent release in the history of film and an impossible act to follow.
That may explain why it’s taken Tarantino six long years since his last film, Jackie Brown, to get behind the camera again. But now he's back with a vengeance with Kill Bill Vol.1, a spaghetti-western/kung-fu gore-fest starring Uma Thurman as a vengeance-bent assassin. Tarantino talked with Film & Video about making the film, its unique look, working with Oscar-winning DP Robert Richardson, and his philosophy of cinema.
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F&V: How come it took you six years to make Kill Bill? There were all these rumors that you’d burned out or had writer’s block.
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| Tarantino (left) with Master Wo Ping |
F&V: But didn’t you start writing Kill Bill 10 years ago?
Yes, I wrote the first 30 pages and the basic idea on the set of Pulp Fiction, but then it was put away, and I don’t really consider that a 10-year process because I mean, that’s part of being a writer. You write something, and it’s not ready yet, and so you just put it in the incubator and wait until it’s done.
F&V: How do you go about writing scripts? Is it true you write them all in longhand?
One of the great things about being a writer is it gives you complete license to have rituals. I’m not superstitious in my daily life but I get that way about writing, even though I know it’s all bullshit. But I began that way, and so that’s the way.
My ritual is I never use a typewriter or computer. I just write it all by hand. It’s a ceremony. I go to a stationery store and buy a notebook — and I don’t buy, like, 10. I just buy one and then fill it up. Then I buy a bunch of red felt pens and a bunch of black ones, and I’m like, “These are the pens I’m gonna write Kill Bill with.” Then when that happens, it’s literally just me taking that fucking notebook everywhere. It’s right there in my pocket, so it’s easy to sit down anywhere and write.
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| “When it comes to a great action sequence, that’s pure cinema.” |
[Laughs] I hope so. There’s a definite downside of getting too settled into shooting your movies your way. They can get boring and you start limiting yourself, out of laziness. That’s why part of this was just to throw my hat in the ring and see, “Can I do these huge action scenes?” I know the ones that rock my world, and if this doesn’t rock my world, then I failed.
F&V: Kill Bill has all these very different looks, from black-and-white to anime and super-saturated color. What were you going for?
I’ve never really believed the conventional wisdom that a film should have this one look from start to finish, and that you hire a composer to get one sound from start to finish. Who gives a fuck about that, alright? If you’ve got a strong voice and story, that’s the look! That’s the personality that holds it together. So we’re dealing with all these different genres, and I love that. I’m a film collector, so I’d been watching all these different prints in 35mm and 16mm and comparing the quality, so when I first sat down with Bob Richardson, I said, “I want every reel in this film to look like it’s from a totally different movie.” So much so that at one point I was even thinking of using three different DPs.
F&V: So what made you change your mind and just hire Bob Richardson?
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| “If you’ve got a strong voice and story, that’s the look!” |
F&V: It’s ironic that he’s the DP who shot Natural Born Killers, which you publicly disowned and swore you’d never watch.
I don’t hold it against him, and no, I still haven’t seen it — just little bits here and there. I could never watch that Rodney Dangerfield sequence ever again. Once was too much.
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