The ‘Kill Bill’ mistake Quentin Tarantino said he would never repeat
The career of Quentin Tarantino is littered with quality, but one of his films that stands apart in terms of its uniqueness is Kill Bill. Tarantino’s homage to the great martial arts films of yore, released across two parts in 2003 and 2004, is a visual and visceral treat in which the director continued his path to become one of contemporary American cinema’s most significant names.
Uma Thurman plays ‘The Bride’, an assassin who swears revenge on her former associates who massacre her family and friends on the day of her wedding. Also starring Michael Madsen, Lucy Liu, David Carradine and Daryl Hannah, Kill Bill saw Tarantino dive into his passion for samurai, blaxploitation and spaghetti western cinema.
Kill Bill was actually meant to be one long film, but the story became so extended that Tarantino had to slice it into two separate pieces. Around that time, Tarantino started filling his scripts with more direction, but this led to Kill Bill becoming way bigger than he would have liked it, almost to the point of being a novel.
In an interview with NPR, Tarantino explained how he had started writing more detailed prose, or “stage directions”, in his scripts ever since Jackie Brown. “But literally, by the time I was doing Kill Bill, it was so much filled with prose that I start seeing why people write a screenplay and make it more like a blueprint,” the director/writer said. “Basically, in Kill Bill, I had written a novel.”
The result was that when it came time to shoot Kill Bill, Tarantino was adapting the novel for the screen “every day on the fly.” While the film undoubtedly worked, Tarantino vowed to keep his scripts under control from then on. “I actually made it a point not to do stuff like that,” he said. “To keep it more sparse.”
Still, despite the regret of writing the film in so much detail to the point of a novelisation, Tarantino refused to cut down the overall length of Kill Bill and make it a single feature movie. This largely came down to the fact that several brilliant moments of the film would have been cut out, like the brothel scene with Esteban Vallejo, the anime sequence and even the parts with Pai Mei.
Tarantino once told IGN, “The thing is, while maybe you could have done that and squeezed it all down, and maybe it would gain something else as far as forward momentum was concerned, all the little nuances and character touches, that would have been the stuff that went away.”
Thankfully, Kill Bill remained in two separate parts, with both providing countless classic moments in the history of Tarantino’s filmography. Perhaps it was because he’d written so much into the script that he was not prepared to do away with any of the extra pieces to the story of ‘The Bride’.
As far as Tarantino’s claim that he would never make the mistake of writing such a novel for a script, as he had done in Kill Bill, perhaps his following films were shorter in page number. Interestingly, Tarantino had gone the other way when it came to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, adapting his movie and screenplay into a novelisation, which was released separately.
So perhaps Tarantino, the novelist, still exists. Throughout his career, he’s proven to be one of the best writers in Hollywood, persistently delivering some of the most alluring narratives in the film industry. While he might have vowed never to make the same mistake as he did with Kill Bill, the film world would never be against more stories from his creative mind.
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