How Uma Thurman and Quentin Tarantino created a 21st-century hero from the depths of 1970s cinema
Some film nerds might argue that Quentin Tarantino creates his best work when collaborating with others and working with restrictions, with his last film Once Upon A Time In Hollywood feeling like a project in which he was never told ‘no’, leading to an often convoluted and meandering plot that drifts between all of the director’s favourite past times, whether it be feet shots or references to other movies.
From his creative partnership with Roger Avary on the script for Pulp Fiction, to which he later paid Avary to take full credit for the script, to his long relationship with Leonardo DiCaprio, the director’s work has been indelibly shaped by those he worked with.
However, there is one film of his in which he worked very closely with the lead actor to create the character the story is based on, knuckling down with Uma Thurman to come up with the concept for one of his most beloved characters, The Bride.
Kill Bill follows an assassin who seeks revenge on her former employer, Bill. Starring Thurman in the lead role, her character goes through an endless number of trials and challenges in order to prove her physical strength and be taken seriously as a ruthless killer, becoming an infamous addition to Tarantino’s world and heralded as one of his greatest female characters.
However, this is something that Thurman and Tarantino worked very closely on, essentially creating he character together after many lengthy conversations before the director took to the page and wrote it all down.
When discussing this, Thurman said, “Together, we talked about The Bride forever. We were out one night talking and he was telling me about genres and filmmaking, and Coffy and different movies. We got going back and forth and cooked up the character of The Bride together. Like, wouldn’t it be great to play this woman… assassin… wedding chapel massacre… and da da da da dah. Usually, that kind of talk is cheap, but not with him”.
After going back and forth about ideas for her character, they eventually had the bones for a full-blown movie, with Thurman saying, “He went and sculpted the seed ideas of the movie. Somehow or another, he got completely excited about the idea again and went and found the pages and started writing again. He just put it somewhere, on some yellow legal pad, somewhere in his files. I just asked out of interest, in case he lost them. That led to his two years of writing.”
Sometimes the best ideas come from cramming our heads together with other creatives and finding something that is a fusion of many different ideas, leading to one of Tarantino’s most iconic characters and another instalment to the story of The Bride. While the production might have been fraught in other areas, particularly after Thurman’s accident on set after being asked to perform an unsafe stunt, perhaps one of the most fulfilling aspects of the experience was everything that came at the beginning.
