Quentin Tarantino Once Vowed to Never Repeat The Mistake He Made With ‘Kill Bill’
Quentin Tarantino might’ve been a bit too excited when penning his Kill Bill script. So much so that he vowed to never get that wild when writing another movie again.
Quentin Tarantino accidentally wrote a novel when he wrote ‘Kill Bill’
Tarantino once shared that his writing process for movies changed a bit from his Pulp Fiction days. The director started including a bit more direction with his scripts, which presented a slight problem for Kill Bill. Tarantino realized that he was going a little overboard when fleshing out the feature.
“Well, you know, it’s funny because with everything I’ve done from Jackie Brown on, I got really into really writing more prose in the – in what you’re calling the stage directions, all right, and consequently my scripts have gotten bigger and bigger, and cut to Kill Bill Volume 1 and 2,” Tarantino once said in an interview with NPR.
Because of how creative he became with the film’s screenplay, the movie resembled a piece of literature than it did a potential film.
“But literally, by the time I was doing Kill Bill, it was so much filled with prose that, you know, I start seeing why people write a screenplay and make it more like a blueprint because basically I had written – in Kill Bill I had basically written a novel and basically every day I was adapting my novel to the screen on the fly, you know, on my feet,” he said.
Tarantino considered the process a mistake he’d never do again.
“So I didn’t want my script to get too out of control like that. So I actually made it a point not to do stuff like that, to pretty – to keep it more sparse than it’s been in the last few years, or the last decade,” he said.
Quentin Tarantino refused to squeeze ‘Kill Bill Vol. 1’ and ‘Vol. 2’ into 1 film
Kill Bill was originally supposed to be one long movie. Tarantino would later split it in half, giving more room for the script’s material breathe. After the suggestion was made to do so, Tarantino quickly realized it was the better idea. Mostly because it was better than condensing four hours’ worth of content into a shorter film.
“It wouldn’t have been a four-hour movie, you know? It might have been 2:50, 3:10, something like that,” Tarantino once told IGN. “That would have been all I would have really been able to do. And the thing is, while maybe you could have done that and squeezed it all down and maybe it would gain something else as far as forward momentum was concerned, that’s not what I spend a year and a half writing, all right? All the little nuances and character touches and, I think personally, this film is filled with a lot of little grace notes, that would have been the stuff that went away.”
The film and its fans benefited from the split, as it allowed Tarantino to keep all of his scenes in the movie. If Tarantino went with his original plan, some of the movie’s most iconic sequences would’ve been cut.
“The Esteban Vallejo scene wouldn’t be in the movie,” he said. “If you’re trying to tell your story in three hours or so, you don’t need that scene. I think that’s one of the most mesmerizing scenes in the movie. The anime scene that everyone likes, whoop!, it would have been just enough to get the point across. If I had to lose anything it would have been that. You always have to make those kind of choices like that. The Pei Mai scene would have shrunk dramatically.”
‘Kill Bill’ would’ve been a much different movie if Quentin Tarantino wrote it earlier
Tarantino and Uma Thurman first came up with the idea for Kill Bill shortly after Pulp Fiction. If circumstances played out differently, there was a chance Tarantino might’ve penned the film after his sophomore feature. Because of Thurman’s age, this would’ve had a significant impact on the film.
“If I had written it there, I probably would have based it on the Uma of that time: a 22-year-old girl,” Tarantino said. “So maybe none of these aspects would have fitted into it.”
Thurman being a bit older and a mother might’ve influenced the main plot driving the actor’s character. During the writing process, Tarantino shared that he was still discovering things about The Bride that he didn’t know about in the beginning.
“And I’ve gotta tell you that, in the writing process, I didn’t really know that B.B. [The Bride’s daughter] was alive for like the first year of writing it,” he said. “Because I write until I get to the end, all right? It was only in the last four-five months of the writing process that I realized that B.B. was alive. Until then, I was like Uma’s character. I didn’t know, and I was just going on getting revenge.”
