Quentin Tarantino Once Revealed How the TV Series ‘Jackass’ Inspired This Gross ‘Kill Bill’ Scene
Quentin Tarantino began conceiving Kill Bill years before he wrote the movie. While developing the revenge tale, he’d find further inspiration for the films from an unlikely source.
Quentin Tarantino wanted to top expectations with ‘Kill Bill’
According to a 2003 interview Tarantino did with IGN, Kill Bill was a movie several years in the making. The concept for the film was born out of a conversation he had with Uma Thurman when the two did Pulp Fiction together. Much later, he’d return to the project after Thurman reminded him about it.
Since he hadn’t made a film since 1997’s Jackie Brown, Tarantino acknowledged the high expectations audiences had for Kill Bill. But he didn’t mind the expectations. Instead, he welcomed them.
“I want to top expectations. I want to blow you away. It’s that kind of movie. That is the right goal,” he said.
Tarantino also enjoyed creating Kill Bill since the story allowed him to experiment with a variety of his favorite genres.
“Forget the fact that it crosses all of the genres that I’m dealing with: spaghetti Westerns, kung fu, Samurai… It crosses all of those genres. But not only that, it crosses every genre,” he added. “Hamlet is a revenge story, but the bottom line is that we’ve all seen this before. So, since you already even know the story before going in, all right? Five people did this to her, she’s going down the list and is going to wipe them off.”
How ‘Jackass’ inspired a ‘Kill Bill’ scene
Tarantino pulled from many different influences to create his Kill Bill world. But perhaps a source some might not have expected him to use was the raunchy Jackass series. As many know, Jackass was a cult-hit comedy reality show following a cast of young adults doing painful and sometimes brutal stunts.
The antics of the show’s cast managed to help Tarantino through a temporary creative problem he had with Kill Bill. Vol. 2 features a fight scene between Thurman’s sword-wielding assassin and her nemesis played by Daryl Hannah. But it was a scene Tarantino originally felt was missing something.
“This is like a brutal b**** fight, all right? It’s white trash like you wouldn’t believe. It happens in a trailer and it’s just banging heads in the wall… It was already brutal and they’re so beautiful, it hurts all the more actually, it’s even more painful,” he said.
Still, however, the Oscar-winner felt the fight needed more.
“It was always brutal, but it wasn’t ever gross. And then, I saw Jackass and I saw what I’d been missing and so, I didn’t tell anyone, but I showed up on Monday and there’s like a character that lives in this trailer that dips snuff,” Tarantino explained. “In the South, old women and guys would have coffee cans, and you’d spit the snuff in the coffee can. At some point, Uma grabs the snuff coffee can and throws it in Daryl’s face, and now she has to fight with all of this crap on her, and that was Monday. On Thursday, I got a print of Jackass and I screened for the whole crew. Daryl is watching it and she goes, ‘That’s where the snuff juice came from! Oh my God!'”
Daryl Hannah was worried she was going to be cut out the film after Quentin Tarantino changed her fight scene
The fight between Hannah’s and Thurman’s characters weren’t initially going to take place in the trailer. Instead, Hannah once revealed Tarantino had perhaps a more predictable approach for her fight scene.
“It did seem like an unlikely location because originally it wasn’t meant to be in a trailer, it was meant to be outside in the desert, and we were going to have this much more classic spaghetti western,” she once told Phase 9.
But when the Django Unchained director changed the scene, Hannah was concerned what it meant for her character.
“I was a little bit worried at first, I thought he was gonna cut me off because he had spent so much time in China in The House of Blue Leaves and he had run over schedule and wanted to cut it short, but it turned out that he just wanted a complete mess of a bar room brawl, a sort of Godzilla gone wrong, two cats in a tin can kind of situation; and then that’s what it turned out to be, and I think ultimately it was probably the funnier and more entertaining decision,” she said.
