How Quentin Tarantino saved Michelle Yeoh’s career with his irksome enthusiasm
Quentin Tarantino once said, “I steal from every single movie ever made.” When it comes to Kill Bill the main loot for this filmmaking magpie came from Jackie Chan’s classic 1992 comedy, Police Story 3.
The film starred the legendary actress and martial arts performer Michelle Yeoh. Tarantino was so enamoured with her work that he set out to create a similar character and that’s how he arrived at Uma Therman’s track-suited badass in Kill Bill.
He also became friends with Yeoh in the process. Why then, didn’t he cast her? “I asked Quentin the same question,” Yeoh said in a new interview with Town & Country. “He’s very smart. He said, ‘Who would believe that Uma Thurman could kick your ass?’ ”
Nevertheless, he did intervene in her career in another way. When Yeoh suffered a fall on the set of The Stunt Woman, the Pulp Fiction director convinced her to get back on the horse. “I thought I broke my back. I thought I was paralyzed. Every breath was agony,” she recalled.
However, the beaming face of her movie-loving friend was enough to convince her to irk her back onto set. “I must say, Quentin, he’s persistent,” Yeoh said. “He is who he is today because he’s full of passion and love, so he wore me down.”
At the time she wasn’t wanting to receive strangers, but Tarantino was like a kid in a candy store when he came to see her, so she begrudgingly let to excitable hero into her presence.
All of sudden, he was asking the recovering star to give a blow-by-blow recount of her best stunts. “Suddenly we became animated,” Yeoh recalled. “So then I thought, ‘Maybe I’m not ready to give up on this.’” The rest is history.
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