After six years, Quentin Tarantino is back, and Kill Bill Volume One is so outrageous that “it definitely does not take place on planet Earth”, he said today.
Tarantino, flanked by Kill Bill stars Uma Thurman, Daryl Hannah and Julie Dreyfus, said the film was a feminist statement, “a film about girl power”.
Kill Bill, Tarantino’s fourth film and first since Jackie Brown was released six years ago, follows one-time elite assassin The Bride as she wakes from a five-year coma to get her revenge against Bill, played by David Carradine, the man who wronged her, and his murderous associates.
Tarantino said that he wanted the making of the film to take him on a journey.
“As important to me as making a cool movie was that I wanted to go on an adventure,” he said.
“Those two things are equally important to me.”
Much of the film was shot in Beijing, using a Chinese crew in order for Tarantino to “get the Chinese way”.
“I wanted to go to China because the vibrancy of Beijing is what I wanted to capture.
“There is a vividness and invigoration in Chinese cinema that I wanted to get at.”
The award-winning director revealed that it took him a year to write just one fight scene, which he wanted to ensure was the best fight sequence ever made.
The scene, in which Thurman tackles 88 adversaries, took eight weeks to shoot.
“I wanted to think up every way I could for her (Thurman) to disband and put an end to those bastards,” said Tarantino.
“I wanted to make the most exciting sequence in cinema.”
Tarantino described in graphic detail a gang rape scene which he said was a “sequence of hell” of which he was very proud.
He described some of the ways in which he achieved the original action shots and graphic violence, which included filling Chinese condoms with blood and spraying it over the actors.