How Quentin Tarantino saved Uma Thurman’s career
Even though they haven’t collaborated in over 20 years, Quentin Tarantino and Uma Thurman will always be inextricably linked as colleagues and creative partners.
The filmmaker has voiced his sympathies and regrets over the end of their working relationship, which stemmed from Thurman being injured on the set of Kill Bill, but it’s telling that despite recruiting a number of familiar faces to appear in his projects, she’s been absent from his repertory since the release of Vol. 2.
Even though Thurman had been acting since 1987 and appeared in notable films, including The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and Dangerous Liaisons, during the formative years of her career, it was the role of Mia Wallace in Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction that made her a star, securing an Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Supporting Actress’ in the process.
Before that, Thurman was growing disenchanted with the industry to the extent she was considering stepping away from cinema altogether until she had a change of heart. Per ScreenRealm, it was her experience on Pulp Fiction and the tease of what’s to come that saw Tarantino not only change her mind, but end up as the person responsible for the two defining roles of her filmography to date.
“We were shooting Pulp Fiction, Uma said she’d had like two not-so-great experiences on movies,” Tarantino explained. “She was kind of talking, like, maybe she’s not going to do movies anymore. I was going to make sure Uma had a good time. We really hit it off and had a great time”.
Beyond that, the two-time Academy Award winner laid the groundwork for what would eventually be a two-part roaring rampage of revenge. “One night after shooting, I said, ‘I’m thinking about doing another movie Uma, and you’d be terrific for it’,” he continued. “You’d be the deadliest woman in the world, and these people have screwed you over and you’re going to track them all down and kill them”.
That’s basically Kill Bill in a nutshell, and while Tarantino eventually moved on to other stories and returned with Jackie Brown as his first post-Pulp Fiction feature, a chance encounter with Thurman got his creative juices flowing once again, as he noted: “I bump into her after not seeing her for two years, and I bump into her and she goes, ‘Hey, when are we doing Kill Bill?'”
The six-year gap between Jackie Brown and Thurman’s debut as The Bride marked the longest sabbatical of Tarantino’s directorial career but proved to be worth the wait when the concept he’d first pitched to his star almost a decade beforehand became a huge hit.
A decade on from almost giving up acting altogether, Thurman cemented herself as Tarantino’s creative muse, even if it would mark the beginning of the end for their fruitful professional dynamic.
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