The legendary actor Quentin Tarantino “always wanted to work with” but never did
Following the release of Jackie Brown, Quentin Tarantino’s blaxploitation-inspired third film, he started to develop an idea that he had been sitting on for several years. The filmmaker had first worked with Uma Thurman a few years earlier on Pulp Fiction, and during that time, they’d both come up with the premise for Kill Bill.
The film was released in two parts in 2003 and 2004. Acting as a revenge tale, Tarantino centred the movie around Thurman’s The Bride or Beatrix Kiddo, an assassin who embarks on a quest for vengeance after she is almost killed by Bill, her former lover and the leader of the Deadly Vipers. What’s fascinating about the movie is that we don’t see Bill at all, not during Volume One at least. We only hear his voice and see certain parts of his body, such as his feet walking towards The Bride before he attempts to kill her.
The fact that we cannot see his face until the second film makes his presence in the first even more unnerving. He becomes this mighty, terrifying figure, a faceless voice that we can project our own fantasies (or nightmares, more like) onto. Bill is actually played by David Carradine, who rose to prominence in the ‘70s as the main character of Kung Fu. He plays a much larger role in the second film, which features several flashbacks to his relationship with Beatrix and their inevitable reunion, which results in the protagonist fulfilling her aim to kill Bill.
Yet, Carradine was not Tarantino’s first choice to play Bill, even though he ended up being perfect for the role. Rather, the filmmaker wanted to cast Warren Beatty, stating in an interview with the BBC that he’s “always wanted to work with him.” The veteran actor is known for his performances in movies like Bonnie and Clyde, Bugsy, Shampoo and McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Despite Tarantino’s hatred for the latter film – once calling it (via Pure Cinema podcast) “terrible” and the first reel of the movie “the worst-mixed reel in the history of Hollywood cinema” – he is a big fan of Beatty.
The director asked Beatty to star as Bill, explaining, “Before I got to know Bill 100 per cent, I said: ‘Hey, Warren, you could be really great…’ Then I started writing it, discovering Bill, and I thought David Carradine could really play this guy. He’d know where he was coming from. So I started moulding Bill towards David.”
Moreover, as Tarantino continued working on the script, he realised that he wanted to show more of Bill than he initially planned. “When I originally talked to Warren about it, I thought Bill really wouldn’t come into the movie until the end, almost like Brando in Apocalypse Now. But he wouldn’t stay put. You don’t see him, but you hear him three times in Volume 1, and he’s in Volume 2 from the first scene.”
Tarantino figured that Beatty just wasn’t the right fit for the role, “It was the whole combination – the time commitment, the fact that he had to do all this martial arts training… It was just a bigger deal than I had led Warren to believe. We decided this movie shouldn’t be our first marriage.”
The pair have still never worked together, but it’s not too late. Beatty hasn’t acted since 2016, but if anyone could get him back in front of a camera, it might as well be Tarantino.
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