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What is your perspective on women and violence? UMA THURMAN:
“The scope of the journey my character goes through in Kill Bill, you wouldn’t blink if you saw Mad Max or Clint Eastwood in this position. It’s a revenge story, so it’s about someone being victimized essentially, who yes, was a former professional assassin. Someone being victimized who then claws her way back from the dead and seeks to avenge herself. It’s a very familiar story. What is different is that the person taking the beating and coming back for more fearlessly is a woman and not a man.”
Did you and Quentin have a sense of impatience to conclude the story? THURMAN:
“I know that he was working so hard to get this film out at this time. He’s captain of unrealistic timeline goal expectations. He’s been working day and night between mixing and cutting, and all of the incredible detail that goes into finishing a movie. I didn’t feel urgency. I gave in any relationship to urgency a long time ago, because we shot this movie for two days and were told we were a week behind schedule! So it broke me down of all expectations of gratification. All that was gone for me a long time ago. Instead, I feel sort of strange that it’s upon me, that this is actually going to be finished, because it’s taken so long.”
How did you balance the level of camp in it? THURMAN:
“Usually you watch a movie and the director establishes the tone in the first two or three scenes, and they never shake you, they never break that reality. But one of the wild things about Quentin is that he refuses to do that. He refuses being leashed to a specific tone. Instead, what he really likes to do is the really scary business of tone shifting dramatically in moments, and going from scary violence to absurdist violence to a real emotional moment, and then making fun of it the next second. So you have to be trusting and very agile to keep up, and hope if it falls flat he won’t use it. So you have to be brave about it and assume that he has what he does have, which is skill.”
Did you have any sympathy for Bill? THURMAN:
“One of the things that really niggled me when I first read the script was I wasn’t really convinced that I wanted just to kill Bill. I think it was dramatically complicated by the presence of the child obviously. I worried that if there was ambivalence about killing Bill, would that kill the movie? Ultimately, in playing the moment, I found that there was room for all those things. There was room for ambivalence, heartbreak and revenge. There was room for, ‘Goodbye Bill.’”
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THE CONCEPT:
