“A completely different journey”: the movie that allowed Uma Thurman to break every rule of cinema
Even though it was her Academy Award-nominated performance in Pulp Fiction that made her a star, Uma Thurman was already a veteran of the film business before she’d even entered Quentin Tarantino’s orbit.
She took top billing in her first-ever feature when she headlined co-writer and director Peter Ily Huemer’s psychological thriller Kiss Daddy Goodnight, which premiered when she was only 17 years old. While still in her teens, she co-starred in Terry Gilliam’s fantasy The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and Stephen Frears’ romantic period drama Dangerous Liaisons, so Thurman was hardly an unknown before Mia Wallace.
Tarantino was left so enamoured by their first collaboration that he began concocting an idea that would place Thurman front and centre in a rip-roaring revenge epic inspired by everything from the exploitation era to classic martial arts cinema, with the actor instrumental in the development process for what would eventually become Kill Bill.
It took a long time to come together, though, with the filmmaker’s six-year sabbatical from directing in the aftermath of Jackie Brown ensuring that almost a decade would pass between the germination of the concept and the release of the first volume, which immediately turned Thurman’s Beatrix Kiddo into one of the 21st century’s most iconic action heroes.
Slicing and dicing her way through the opposition on a quest to make it all the way to the top of the food chain and a showdown with David Carradine’s title character, Kill Bill required intensive training and months mastering the choreography, something Thurman made look easy in a tour-de-force performance.
Vol. 1 ends with a snow-capped showdown between The Bride and Lucy Liu’s O-Ren Ishii that paid homage to Toshiya Fujita’s 1973 classic Lady Snowblood, albeit much more labour intensive. “On the schedule, that sequence was meant to be two weeks,” Thurman told the BBC. “In any normal movie is a sequence were to go a third, or 50%, or double in time, that would be considered a cataclysmic failure.”
This being Tarantino, the scene taking four times longer than expected was hardly a hindrance, with the epic House of Blue Leaves exchange stretching on due to Tarantino’s insistence on practical effects and his desire to create what he wanted to be known as “one of the greatest, most exciting sequences in the history of cinema.”
By the time Thurman completed the scene, she knew that Kill Bill was going to be something special. “Eight weeks later, when I walked of that set covered in blood with my sword and my beautiful fight team behind me, I realised that I had been involved in something that was going to break every rule of cinema,” she continued. “I was on a completely different journey.”
Kill Bill may not have turned the medium upside down in the strictest sense, but it was a breath of fresh air for Thurman, Tarantino, and the action genre at large, with the auteur’s insistence that he take his time to capture exactly the footage he wanted in the way he wanted to capture it reaping huge rewards.