The movie that perfectly captures the madness of filmmaking, according to Quentin Tarantino
In a sense, it’s a wonder that any movie ever gets made. Pulling together the disparate aspects of production into a cohesive whole and then packaging it up nicely for an audience or a financial backer is no mean feat—it’s the culmination of a million smaller tasks that appear to fall most heavily on the director’s head.
That’s at least the impression Quentin Tarantino gave when speaking about his experience working on his dual-volume revenge thriller Kill Bill. Representing a swerve from his dialogue-heavy crime capers into a more expansive action tableau, Kill Bill also meant nearly a year of aggravation for Tarantino.
Speaking about the experience around the release of his next film, Death Proof, Tarantino explained that there was one movie that most succinctly summarised the harried director’s experience: Hollywood Man, the 1976 Jack Starrett-directed picture about a desperate director taking mob money to finish production on a motorcycle movie. While the lead character, played by William Hill, has his blood pressure raised by scene-sabotaging bikers and mafia death threats, the agitation Tarantino appears to relate to comes in the form of a never-ending cavalcade of questions.
“At one point, they’re on location, and they are having a production meeting in the kitchen of the motel they are staying in, early in the morning,” Tarantino told Movies. “The director is saying that the motorcycles are not working that the stunts are going to cost too much, they talk about the time and the footage. At one point, the director is shouting: ‘That’s it. I have had it. I have fucking had it.’ I had watched the movie a couple of times, but after I had made Kill Bill, I laughed so damn hard because I thought that this was the perfect expression of a director who loses it.”
It’s a point Tarantino said he found himself driven to twice during the marathon production of Kill Bill. “We shot Kill Bill for almost a year, about nine months. It really was a situation like I had it. I was just sick of making the fucking movie, of getting up so fucking early, working so damn hard, of not having a life, of answering questions. I was that fucking grumpy asshole the whole day. It happened twice and eventually I come to my senses. Every once in a while you just want to prove to yourself that you can be like that, that you are human and just don’ have to do what you are supposed to do all the time.”
It’s a bit of a monkey’s paw situation for the iconic director, who wanted nothing more than to helm his own cinematic creations as a youth working in a Los Angeles video store, only to eventually have to bear the stress of the puppeteer with not enough arms to keep his creations alive. But while the job’s not easy, Tarantino appeared to find his way out of his bad mood thanks to the eagerness of New Zealand stunt artist Zoe Bell – a Tarantino mainstay who was just working her way into the idea of acting at the time at the director’s behest.
“I was just pacing around, looking like a tiger in a cage, saying ‘I am an artist and I am doing what I want to do.’ Zoe [Bell] was my stunt cast, she was Uma Thurman’s double. I had been teaching her to start feeling like an actor, not just to jump through the window but also to know that she is the character; that she isn’t jumping through the window to get money but that she is my actress. I wanted her to know the context so she wasn’t in a void.”
Tarantino explained that it was during a night shoot where Bell was standing in for Thurman’s Bride while riding a motorcycle that Tarantino’s temper ran out of runway. “I was having my little ‘disgust’, people were scared of me. Somebody came to me saying, ‘Zoe needs to talk to you.’ She was sitting on the motorcycle in her yellow jump suit and I go, ‘You want to talk to me? What about?’ And she said, ‘I’m getting ready for the scene acting-wise – is there anything you want me to know, anything you want me to think about?’ And I just knocked it, it just all went away, because now she was starting to act like an actress – though you can’t see her face under the helmet anyway!”
It’s a moment of earnestness that suggests why people take on the mammoth job of directing a Hollywood production despite the loss of sleep and the stomach ulcers. And like William Smith’s Rafe, the titular Hollywood Man, it all seems to begin and end with a motorcycle on the set. Perhaps it’s Tarantino’s early viewing of the 1976 film and following self-awareness of the difficulties of wrangling a movie into existence that has seen the man set his own limits. He has famously stated that he will only direct ten feature films before retiring. With the two volumes of Kill Bill considered one picture, that gives us just one more Tarantino if he stays true to his word.
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