Quentin Tarantino was forced to cut his “favourite” scene from ‘Kill Bill’
Whenever there’s a discussion about arthouse action, one of the most frequently cited examples is always Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill series. Undoubtedly among the greatest achievements of the American auteur’s illustrious filmography, it is an immortal love letter to the wonderful genres that have shaped Tarantino’s cinematic sensibilities. Inspired by the grindhouse gems he grew up watching, it’s one of the many apogees of his directorial journey.
Starring Uma Thurman in a career-defining role as the Bride, it’s a dynamic revenge story following the bloody exploits of an assassin who attempts to task down her highly skilled and extremely dangerous former colleagues. Oscillating between various genre frameworks while working with a unique visual language, the Kill Bill films continue to draw newer audiences while introducing them to Tarantino’s network of brilliant references.
Since his days of working at a video store, Tarantino has always championed the works of Japanese directors and the country’s vibrant film history. Ranging from Akira Kurosawa’s masterful samurai films to Takeshi Kitano’s yakuza flicks, Tarantino has an extensive knowledge of Japanese cinema – including anime. That’s exactly why he chose to pay tribute to the beautiful art form with a striking anime sequence that caught everyone’s attention.
While the scene was undoubtedly among the standout ones, Tarantino revealed in an interview that there was a 30-minute version of it. He said: “What’s going on with that is originally back when Kill Bill was going to be one movie, I wrote an even longer anime sequence… [Japanese Anime Studio] IG, who did Ghost in the Shell, said we can’t do that and finish it in time for your thing. And you can’t have a 30-minute piece in your movie.
While recalling the details of the incident, the filmmaker explained that the studio had worked on the segment themselves to complete the project. Tarantino added: “I said okay. It was my favourite part, but it was the part you could drop. So we dropped it, and then later, when IG heard we were talking about doing Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair, they still had the script, so without even being commissioned, they just did it and paid for it themselves.”
When it was first announced that Tarantino was working on the final movie of his career, many assumed that it would be the third addition to the Kill Bill saga which could have contained another fantastic anime sequence. However, the Pulp Fiction director later denied the reports and admitted that he was working on a completely different project called The Movie Critic, based on the life of a real writer who worked for a “porno rag” in the 1970s.
Watch the scene below.
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