The ‘Kill Bill’ scene that brought Quentin Tarantino full-circle: “Man, I love your movie!”
While Quentin Tarantino is known for taking inspiration from a wide array of classic movies, citing everything from spaghetti westerns to niche B-movies as influences on his own work, the man has also had quite the impact on popular culture himself.
Tarantino’s love of paying homage to other pieces of media is no secret. Take his revisionist western Django Unchained for example, which he named after the classic 1966 movie Django, even getting the movie’s lead actor, Franco Nero, to cameo. Then there was his casting of Pam Grier – the star of 1974’s Foxy Brown – in his 1997 film Jackie Brown, as an homage to the blaxploitation genre.
The filmmaker never tries to hide his influences, which is why he can get away with so much. His movies are each love letters to cinema, as exemplified by his most recent film, Once Upon A Time in Hollywood…, a movie about filmmaking which borrowed its title from Sergio Leone’s Once Upon Time in the West, no less.
Naturally, then, Tarantino is often asked if certain scenes from his movies are actually homages to other pieces of cinema, which happened upon the release of Kill Bill. The film actually featured various references to a range of genres, like martial arts cinema and blaxploitation, while the iconic line “My name is Buck and I’m here to fuck” was borrowed from Tobe Hooper’s Eaten Alive.
The revenge thriller, which saw Uma Thurman play a former assassin who seeks vengeance on her former associates after she was left nearly for dead, is one of Tarantino’s most popular movies. In an interview with Tomohiro Machiyama, Tarantino was asked if the scene in which “Gogo Yubari stabs a guy who approaches her for sex” was inspired by Battle Royale, which emerged just three years before Kill Bill.
However, this gave Tarantino the chance to talk about a rather full circle moment that happened to him involving one of his earlier films and Battle Royale. The movie was based on the 1999 novel by Koushun Takami, and upon the film’s release, Tarantino heralded it as one of his favourite modern pieces of cinema. It makes sense that Tarantino liked it so much – the novel actually took inspiration from one of his own movies.
The filmmaker revealed to Machiyama, “I went out to dinner with Kinji Fukasaku [director of Battle Royale] and Kenta, Kinji’s son, and I was going, ‘Man, I love your movie! It is just so fantastic! I love the scene where the girls are shooting and shooting each other.’ Kenta starts laughing. He goes, ‘The author of the original Battle Royale novel would be very happy to hear that you liked that scene. Because it’s from Reservoir Dogs!’ Well, when I was watching it, I was thinking, ‘God, these fourteen-year old girls are shooting each other just like in Reservoir Dogs!’”
So, Tarantino might have taken inspiration from Battle Royale for the fight scene in Kill Bill, but funnily enough, the novel had already been influenced by Tarantino’s classic debut film.
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