The martial arts movie Quentin Tarantino called “an absolute masterpiece”
Any cinematic artist, like Quentin Tarantino, knows how to play the game of the industry.
The version of the movie that a director has in their head might be fine, but it only takes one disgruntled higher-up to ask if things can be changed around behind the scenes. And while Tarantino did have the option to do whatever he wanted to do with his films, he knew he needed to fight for those that couldn’t fight for their own films.
Because when you’re a struggling director, you’re going to say ‘yes’ to any kind of change that the big company has for you. There are many ways that people have tried to get their films off the ground, but even if people have to find ways to get the best parts of their movie over the line, ‘compromise’ can also be a blessing and a curse depending on what kind of story you want to tell.
And when Tarantino wanted to make his masterpieces, he never wanted to hold back. Pulp Fiction might be spotless thanks to its snappy dialogue and non-linear structure, but looking through the entire film, Tarantino needed to have a lot of guts to demand that some of the more grizzly elements of the film stay in. But that only comes from him being an avid fan of all kinds of action cinema.
Despite being a student of the greatest cinematic minds of the Western world, it’s hard to look at the details in a movie like Kill Bill and not the influence from the martial arts films in the kind of choreography Uma Thurman was doing. The whole film was meant to have that kind of operatic structure to it, but when the rest of the US turned their back on movies like Hero, Tarantino wasn’t going to roll over and watch it happen.
While an action film with Tony Leung and Jet Li in it would have been a no-brainer today, this kind of martial arts film was still a bit of a gamble at the turn of the 2000s. It was certainly one of the biggest movies in China at the time, but the American market needed a bit more incentive, and Tarantino was willing to do whatever he could to make sure that people saw it.
After agreeing to introduce the film to American audiences, Tarantino insisted that no part of the film be cut for the American market, saying, “I had to fight for it with Miramax. I think they lost faith in it and everything. And I thought that Hero was an absolute masterpiece, so I fought with them not to cut it. Not to bring it down, but to keep it the same length as when I saw it. And finally they agreed if I would present it. So I got in touch with [director] Zhang Yimou and he was cool with that.”
Although there are some pieces of martial arts movies that could get a little bit more grizzly than most people are used to, it’s not all that different from a Tarantino flick these days. That kind of action is coated throughout everything that he has touched, and despite some people labelling it as violence for violence’s sake, all of them serve to enhance the scene rather than throwing in some action-packed fan service.
And when looking at many of Tarantino’s films, hearing him stand up for this movie wasn’t about simply being a fan of martial arts movies. He wanted to give young film lovers access to seeing the kind of movies that lit his world on fire when he was a kid, even if it meant getting in the way of the traditional American releases.
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