Kill Bill: Vol. 1 & 2

Kill Bill: Vol. 1 & Kill Bill: Vol 2 were never intended to be two separate movies - but Quentin Tarantino’s vision proved too expansive and the production too unruly. Join Chris and Lizzie as they explore how The Bride was born, why it took 10 years for her to make it to the screen, and how a reckless car accident on set temporarily destroyed Tarantino’s complicated relationship with Uma Thurman. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Winterbauer?

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• 0:31Lizzie Bassett?

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• 1:15Lizzie Bassett?

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• 1:54Chris Winterbauer?

  Hello, dear listener, and welcome back to What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast full stop that just so happens to be about movies and how it is nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone a samurai revenge exploitation, hyper-stylized Tarantino flick for the ages. As always, I am one of your hosts, Chris Winterbauer, joined by my co-host, Lizzie Bassett. Lizzie, how are you doing this evening?

• 2:24Lizzie Bassett?

  I'm good. I'm overwhelmed. Just like Quentin Tarantino, I thought that I would be able to get both Kill Bill, Volume One and Two into one episode, no problem. I may have been wrong about that. We're gonna find out over the course of this, but I'm gonna try. Perhaps, unlike Quentin Tarantino, I will succeed in having this be one piece of content. Because, spoiler alert, it was not supposed to be two movies. But that's the least of the problems on this, as we will learn today. Before I say anything, Chris, had you seen this before? And what was your experience upon viewing it for the podcast?

• 3:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes, I believe I've seen all of Quentin Tarantino's movies. Although I think I've seen most of his movies only once. So even though I consider myself a Tarantino fan, I don't know a lot about his movies. I know a little bit about him. So I'm really excited for today's episode. This actually, for a long time, Kill Bill, Volume Two, was my favorite Quentin Tarantino film. I really loved this movie. And Pulp Fiction, I maybe was a little too young for. And this movie came out 2003. I was 14. You were probably right around that age, Lizzie. It was kind of the perfect age, I feel like, to really embrace the enfant terrible. Is that how it's pronounced? Of Quentin Tarantino at the time, this provocateur. And I really loved it. There was a kind of grindhouse poeticism to the movie that I

• 3:44Chris Winterbauer?

  really appreciated. And I had not seen it since becoming a parent. And when I rewatched them, I had kind of the reverse reaction that I did upon the last time that I'd watched them, which is I liked Volume One more upon rewatching. I really loved Volume One. I just thought it was so stylistically frenetic and propulsive and funny and over the top, but in just fantastic ways. And I really like the final showdown with the crazy 88s.

• 4:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Great.

• 4:14Chris Winterbauer?

  And obviously, Orenishi. And it's maybe Lucy Liu's best role. I was going through her filmography.

• 4:19Lizzie Bassett?

  I agree.

• 4:20Chris Winterbauer?

  And so I really loved Volume One. I really liked Volume Two. But since having a kid, the third act was a lot harder to watch than it had been when I was younger.

• 4:32Lizzie Bassett?

  It's a bummer.

• 4:33Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, it's tough and I know that's intentional and it's done very well and Uma Thurman's performance is magnificent, but what I'll say, and we can dive more into this, you know, Tarantino is kind of the master of exploitation films in the modern, current film era, I would argue. The Tito's Prestige exploitation, or Prestige Grindhouse, or Prestige Revisionist films, whatever you want to call it. And as I've gotten older, I've found that there are moments in these movies, moments of violence, physical violence or emotional violence, that make me flinch a lot more than when I was younger. And again, I think that's very intentional and it can be very effective, but it definitely made volume two a tougher watch. And my daughter recently discovered what death is. She's

• 5:15Chris Winterbauer?

  like three and a half. She's only a little younger than Beatrix Kiddo's baby in the film. And so the whole scene where they're talking about the goldfish and deaths and this idea that mommy was dreaming of you and, you know, her child was alive and kind of being held hostage and in a way groomed for this other life that she didn't want for her, really just hit in a very different way this time. And I'm just excited to talk more about the film and hear more about it. So that was my reaction.

• 5:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I think I had sort of the opposite reaction to you, which is that I remember, maybe because I was seeing this as when volume one came out, I would have been a 14 year old girl. So I was freshman in high school, very beginning of freshman year. And it felt like the most shocking thing I could possibly be watching. And I remember, we snuck into the movie theaters to see this several times. I don't know what we actually bought tickets to. It was not this. And there was a group of friends that I was hanging out with. A lot of them were guys and they loved this movie. They loved, like, we watched Pulp Fiction. We watched, I think I've mentioned this before, for some reason, The Rules of Attraction a lot.

• 6:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Okay.

• 6:19Lizzie Bassett?

  But I really wanted to seem cool enough to like Kill Bill. And I remember watching this at 14 years old and just feeling internally horrified, but completely unwilling to admit that out loud.

• 6:30Chris Winterbauer?

  Sure.

• 6:31Lizzie Bassett?

  I had the reverse experience rewatching this as an adult. I found it so much more fun than I remembered from then, maybe because I felt so much pressure to sort of perform in my own experience of watching it. I was much more Familiar with volume one because that's the one that we apologies to the short pump town center AMC snuck into many times to see. I'm with you that I think I preferred volume one to volume two on this rewatch for the same reasons. Volume two is really hard to watch that last like, what 20, 30 minutes with her and Bill in the Mexican villa. I mean, it's amazing. She and David Carradine.

• 7:10Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, it's an amazing set piece. Fantastic performances.

• 7:13Lizzie Bassett?

  It's so good and I, I loved that it's so tense and intense and it kind of keeps relieving you a little bit. Like you think they're going to have a fight and then he ends up letting her spend a couple of hours with her daughter, just watching a movie. And then they come back and they have this final conversation at the table. And then when the physical confrontation between them finally happens, it's so fast. And then it's just over. And I thought that that was brilliant, but it made me cry. I mean, it really, it really got me upon this watch.

• 7:44Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, me too. It really, it wrenches your heart in a way. And upon rewatching it, I thought, is Bill maybe Tarantino's actual most sadistic villain?

• 7:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, yes, I think so.

• 8:00Chris Winterbauer?

  I know Hans Landa is who we would think of, I think, on face value from Inglourious Basterds.

• 8:07Lizzie Bassett?

  I think Bill is grosser because there is an emotional violence.

• 8:10Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, Bill hides it under this charm and charisma and.

• 8:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, what he hides it under is the idea that he loves her. And that's the one thing about this movie that I'm, and it's going to be an interesting theme over the course of this episode. There's like, does Tarantino think that he loves her? I think the answer may be yes.

• 8:27Chris Winterbauer?

  I can't tell. I'm excited to debate it and why don't you tell me more about the movie before we spoil any further thoughts?

• 8:34Lizzie Bassett?

  I should have said this at the top. I'm also an enormous Quentin Tarantino fan.

• 8:37Chris Winterbauer?

  I think we both are. I think because of that, it's going to be a tough episode. Yeah.

• 8:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Before we go any farther, Chris, I actually want to give you a couple of definitions.

• 8:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Please.

• 8:46Lizzie Bassett?

  And I was once told that you should never begin a podcast with a definition from Webster's Dictionary, because it's been done too many times. But Webster's Dictionary defines sadomasochism as "the derivation of sexual gratification from the infliction of physical pain or humiliation on oneself or another person." The S part of that, of course, refers to sadism, pleasure from other people's pain, and the M, masochism, or a taste for suffering, your own suffering specifically.

• 9:12Chris Winterbauer?

  Which is referred to in the film specifically, right?

• 9:15Lizzie Bassett?

  It is, but I'm telling you this because I want to read you a quote from Quentin Tarantino himself. "The audience and the director, it's an S and M relationship, and the audience is the M."

• 9:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Okay.

• 9:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Chris is still processing.

• 9:30Chris Winterbauer?

  If I may, for our slower listeners, which may include me, the director is a sadist, meaning he is inflicting pain upon the audience.

• 9:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Correct. He's enjoying inflicting pain.

• 9:41Chris Winterbauer?

  Right.

• 9:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Meaning the audience is there to enjoy the pain.

• 9:44Chris Winterbauer?

  The infliction of pain.

• 9:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Correct.

• 9:47Chris Winterbauer?

  This is really interesting that you bring this up because I have been preparing a primer.

• 9:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Really into sadomasochism.

• 9:56Chris Winterbauer?

  As I delve into S and M. By the way, whatever feeds your cat.

• 9:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, it's fine.

• 10:00Chris Winterbauer?

  I have been working on this primer about bugs, because we're going to be covering a movie where bugs are the villain, and learning about the fear and disgust responses, and trying to figure out why people like horror movies. And the release of pleasure, dopamine after being relieved from discomfort, is not dissimilar from, you could say, certain masochistic tendencies or

• 10:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Totally.

• 10:24Chris Winterbauer?

  interactions. So, anyway, please, that's an interesting tie-in.

• 10:28Lizzie Bassett?

  I think it's a very interesting quote. I fully believe that that's the way that he views the relationship and the way that he makes his movies. And I think to your point about there being moments of violence, both emotional and physical, that hurt you to watch, that's the intention, for sure.

• 10:46Lizzie Bassett?

  So as I said, we are going to be covering volume one and two in this episode because they were shot together as one movie. A little bit of information on both. Volume one was released October 10th, 2003, obviously directed by Quentin Tarantino, written by Quentin Tarantino, but based on the character, The Bride by Q and U, more on that later, starring Uma Thurman, Julie Dreyfus, Michael Madsen, Sonny Chiba, Lucy Liu, Vivica A. Fox, Daryl Hannah, David Carradine, Tetsuro Shimaguchi, Chaki Kurayama, Chia Hui Liu, also credited as Gordon Liu, Michael Parks, and so, so many more. The IMDb logline is, "After waking from a four-year coma,

• 11:28Lizzie Bassett?

  a former assassin wreaks vengeance on the team of assassins who betrayed her." Now, volume two was released just a few months later, on April 16th, 2004, again, directed by Quentin Tarantino. The credits essentially stay the exact same here because, again, it's one movie. It's two movies, but it's one movie. The IMDb logline for part two is, "The Bride continues her quest of vengeance against her former boss and lover, Bill, the reclusive bouncer Bud, and the treacherous, one-eyed L." By the way, as you noticed, that the chapter on L is titled, "L and I."

• 12:01Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm-hmm.

• 12:01Lizzie Bassett?

  So rude.

• 12:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm-hmm.

• 12:04Lizzie Bassett?

  Poor L. Now, since this is the first time we are covering Quentin Tarantino, I want to give a little bit of background on him. Obviously, Kill Bill, not his first film, not his last. We are going to continue to cover him because there's quite a lot here. So I'm going to keep this somewhat brief, maybe more brief than we would have done in other episodes. And the background, I think, is particularly relevant to both Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. So I would say you will get more of a deep dive in those. But for now, he was born March 27th, 1963, in Knoxville, Tennessee, to Connie McHugh and Tony Tarantino. His mom, of course, took young Quentin to movies all the time, even ones that many said were not appropriate for an eight or nine-year-old, like Dirty Harry or Cardinal Knowledge.

• 12:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Hey, Steve Winterbauer worships at that church, let me tell you.

• 12:49Lizzie Bassett?

  So did my mom. So did Maggie Bassett.

• 12:52Chris Winterbauer?

  Chris got that upbringing, too.

• 12:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, I love this. At one point, he asked his mom why she let him watch these movies. And she said, Quinton, I worry more about you watching the news. A movie is not going to hurt you.

• 13:02Chris Winterbauer?

  And that wasn't even today's news.

• 13:04Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. So she moved him to Manhattan Beach when I think he was pretty young, and that is where he grew up. Though he took his father's last name, they really never had a relationship, mostly because his mother had had Quinton at 16. She was married to Tony, but it was only to become an emancipated minor and go to college. There's a whole weird thing here where I believe he had sworn that he was sterile. He was not. She got pregnant. She was pissed and she divorced him very quickly. Couple of quick things about Quentin Tarantino and his mother, just because a mother-son relationship may be indicative of other relationships. Who knows? Every year for Mother's Day, he would write her a new story and she would always die at the end of it. But he assured her that he felt bad, that that was how it had turned out. It's just the way the story went.

• 13:49Chris Winterbauer?

  My daughter recently has been, as I said, Lizzie, very fixed, just very fixated on me, not like, when are you going to die? Not for a long time. But when you die, who will be my dad? Well, your mom will be here. And no, she's going to die too. And I'm like, well, no. And then you have your brother. And then she kind of perks up because she's like, oh yeah, he's younger than me. Like, I'm gonna be okay. Yeah, I've been in this a little bit with my kids, so I.

• 14:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Interesting.

• 14:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I can understand it a little bit.

• 14:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, hopefully you don't have this interaction with your child. One other story about Quinton and his mother that made the rounds a few years ago, thanks to his appearance on the Moment podcast, is this. Apparently, his mom, at one point, chastised him for focusing on writing for fun when he should have been doing schoolwork. He was a notoriously bad student. She made a comment about his little writing career being over. It was a very sarcastic comment. And he vowed at that point to never give her any money, any monetary support from any of his projects if he ended up being successful. And reportedly, outside of helping her with some taxes, once, he stuck to that promise. Despite his single mom having raised him and like worked overtime to do so.

• 15:01Chris Winterbauer?

  Listen, this is why you always support your kids' dreams because you never know.

• 15:07Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right.

• 15:08Chris Winterbauer?

  When Nora says she's going to be the queen, I say, yes, you are, and I will get a percentage.

• 15:13Lizzie Bassett?

  I know Nora and I believe her. So as I said, not a good student. He dropped out of school at 15, briefly took acting classes. And then, as he told Terry Gross on Fresh Air, quote, "As the acting class was going on, I realized I knew more about cinema than the other people in the class. I cared about cinema and they cared about themselves." So he needed to be a director and a writer. Famously, he worked at Video Archives, a video rental store, where he started to make a name for himself. There's a lot of fun quotes here about former coworkers who basically said that he was like the star of the store because he just knew everything about everything. So he then meets producer slash, at that point, actor Lawrence Bender. The two plan to shoot a heist film with their friends, also including Bender on camera,

• 15:55Lizzie Bassett?

  for $30,000, about $3,000 of which Chris Tarantino had scratched together from residuals from Golden Girls where he'd played an Elvis impersonator. But something unexpected happened. Bender gave the script to his acting teacher, who gave it to his wife, who gave it to, do you know this?

• 16:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, Harvey Keitel, right?

• 16:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, that's right. So suddenly Harvey Keitel, who was a big star at that point, had signed on as a co-producer and he helped them raise $1.5 million to make the movie. That film is Reservoir Dogs. It is a critical darling, Sundance hit premiering in 1992. So I know we're blowing through this fast, but here we go. From here on out, Tarantino has an absolutely bonkers run. True Romance comes out in 1993, which of course Quentin Tarantino wrote, but Tony Scott directed. He co-writes and directs Pulp Fiction in 1994. This is what really blows him up big time in Hollywood. So Natural Born Killers comes out the same year as Pulp Fiction, 1994, though Tarantino famously only has a story by credit on this because he removed his screenplay

• 16:54Lizzie Bassett?

  credit due to how much it deviated from his script. There's From Dust Till Dawn in 1996, Jackie Brown in 1997, and then there's this six-year gap between Jackie Brown and Kill Bill.

• 17:05Chris Winterbauer?

  From Dust Till Dawn, or as it should also be known, Sinners, the prequel.

• 17:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Mmm, good point. I love Sinners, by the way.

• 17:13Chris Winterbauer?

  I like both of them. Give me a vampire midpoint turn. I'm in.

• 17:17Lizzie Bassett?

  We both also love vampires.

• 17:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm-hmm.

• 17:19Lizzie Bassett?

  We were just talking about how much we love True Blood.

• 17:21Chris Winterbauer?

  Way to out me in front of the internet. I'm just kidding.

• 17:25Lizzie Bassett?

  Sorry, guys.

• 17:26Chris Winterbauer?

  It's the best.

• 17:27Lizzie Bassett?

  It's the best. It's terrible, but it's good.

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• 18:41Lizzie Bassett?

  So I want to take a moment to talk about Tarantino's longtime producing partner, Lawrence Bender, who I mentioned just a few minutes ago. Bender produced basically everything Tarantino did, from Reservoir Dogs up to and including Kill Bill. After that, the only other thing they produced together is Inglourious Basterds. Now Bender was initially a dancer. He worked his way up to producing some low-budget horror, including Intruder, which was written by Sam Raimi and directed by Scott Spiegel. It's Spiegel who introduced him to Tarantino at a party. In 1991, Bender and Tarantino found their production company a band apart, which I didn't even realize. The Tarantino's production company name is a movie reference. It is a reference to the French name for The Outsiders.

• 19:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Of course, that would produce everything from Reservoir Dogs to Kill Bill and beyond, until the company disbanded in 2006. Very quickly, one film that Bender did not produce was Natural Born Killers. However, he features prominently in producer James Hampshire's very juicy tell-all killer instinct about making the movie. We will certainly cover that film because wowzers, this is quite a book.

• 19:46Chris Winterbauer?

  It's a lot of personalities involved in that movie.

• 19:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, it sure is. So I'm not going to dive into it too much, but a couple of allegations she made about Lawrence Bender are interesting. She and her producing partner, Don Murphy, qualified Bender as someone who was truly just riding Tarantino's coattails. Now, I don't think this is fair. He also produced Good Will Hunting, An Inconvenient Truth, many, many other films. That is just what they said. Don apparently said Bender wanted to be, quote, "the only barnacle attached to Quentin's ass." But most of all, Hampshire accused Bender of being "a bit of a worm tongue," pouring poison into Tarantino's ear and turning him against them. This is a quote from her memoir. "It had something to do with the color of his skin and the way his gaze sort of receded

• 20:32Lizzie Bassett?

  into some emotional abyss when he smiled, or maybe it was the way his lips curled over his teeth when he spoke, a jackal." To quote our researcher, I cannot believe she wrote that.

• 20:43Chris Winterbauer?

  I was gonna say, that seems like you're-

• 20:45Lizzie Bassett?

  That's rough.

• 20:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Also, like, you might be asking for, like, a libel or slander suit with that sort of description, I feel like, in there. That's getting colorful.

• 20:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Also, it's very colorful. Just want to point out, he's a very handsome man, does not look like a jackal.

• 20:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I actually looked up a photo of him earlier. I was like, please don't describe me in your memoir.

• 21:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Please, lady, leave me alone. Anyway, we'll get more into that when we cover Natural Born Killers. Also, I want to give a shout out to our researcher, Laura, for this episode. She did an enormous amount of work on this, and it was really amazing. So, thank you, Laura. Now, the reason I'm talking about all of this with Lawrence Bender is because Kill Bill Volume 2 is the last film that he and Tarantino will produce together before a pretty major falling out, and he is going to pop up again today. For now, let's roll back in time to the film that cemented Tarantino as a Hollywood icon, which is, of course, what, Chris?

• 21:37Chris Winterbauer?

  Pulp Fiction.

• 21:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Pulp Fiction, because it's there that Kill Bill is born. So one criticism early on of Reservoir Dogs was that there are no women in it. And a question that was posed is, can he even direct women? So Pulp Fiction seems to be an answer to that with maybe his most iconic female character, which is, of course, Mia Wallace, played by Uma Thurman. This is the first time he'd worked with Uma Thurman. A little bit about her prior to Pulp Fiction, she had begun her career as a model. She transitioned into acting, broke out big in 1988 with Dangerous Liaisons. And then between that and Pulp Fiction, it's a real mixed bag with some serious stinkers in between.

• 22:16Chris Winterbauer?

  So a bag of shit.

• 22:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Hey, if it's a bag of shit with some diamonds in it, is it still a bag of shit?

• 22:24Chris Winterbauer?

  No, it's not. It's a glittery one.

• 22:27Lizzie Bassett?

  No, it's a bag of shit with diamonds in it. Of her early career, she told Time Magazine, "I had never built a niche for myself. Some of that was because I didn't want the niches I could have had. The romantic heroine, the victim, the girl who needs to be rescued. And some of it is because I didn't go to college and I saw the early part of my career as a chance to explore and develop. I didn't want to find something that works and just stick to it." And I think this is borne out very much by her filmography. I also think she's amazing. Chris, do you know anything about Uma Thurman's father?

• 22:55Chris Winterbauer?

  No.

• 22:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay. So he's a very prominent Buddhist author, and he was a professor of Indo Tibetan Studies at Columbia University until his retirement. He reportedly believes that Uma is a reincarnated goddess. I also think this is really interesting because Tarantino frequently refers to her as his muse, and the muses are, of course, goddesses. I think it's interesting, this sort of pedestal that she gets put on by some very important men in her life.

• 23:22Chris Winterbauer?

  Also 14-year-old Chris.

• 23:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Also 14-year-old Lizzie, because she's amazing.

• 23:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 23:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Now, Chris, what connections did you see to Pulp Fiction in Kill Bill? If any?

• 23:33Chris Winterbauer?

  I mean, there's the obvious use of the katana, the samurai sword, as like a main method of destruction.

• 23:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure.

• 23:39Chris Winterbauer?

  I don't know. I'm trying to think of anything hyper-specific between the two.

• 23:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay, well, there's one thing you may have noticed early on in volume one when she's talking to Vernita Green in the Pasadena Kitchen.

• 23:51Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm-hmm.

• 23:52Lizzie Bassett?

  She says, referring to how they could break even, that would involve killing Vernita, her child, and

• 23:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Right.

• 23:59Lizzie Bassett?

  her husband and entire family. She says, "That'd be about square."

• 24:01Chris Winterbauer?

  Right.

• 24:02Lizzie Bassett?

  And she draws a square with her finger, which of course she also does in Pulp Fiction, without saying the word, and they do the outline on the screen. But the big one is that Kill Bill is essentially a realization of Mia Wallace's failed pilot, Fox Force 5.

• 24:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, that's so cool.

• 24:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 24:19Chris Winterbauer?

  I did not pick that up. The Deadly Viper Assassins as

• 24:21Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right.

• 24:22Chris Winterbauer?

  Fox Force 5, okay.

• 24:23Lizzie Bassett?

  So, listeners, if you don't remember this from Pulp Fiction, Mia Wallace, when they're at Jack Rabbit's Slims, explains the TV pilot that she shot that never took off. It's called Fox Force 5, and she says that's because fox, as in we're a bunch of foxy chicks, force, as in we're a force to be reckoned with, and five, as in there's one, two, three, four, five of us.

• 24:42Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm-hmm.

• 24:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Her character, Raven McCoy, was known as the deadliest woman in the world with a knife.

• 24:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Yep.

• 24:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Also very close to this. And there's an interesting moment in the kitchen in volume one, in the same scene I just mentioned, between the bride and Vernita Green, where the bride says, "Bill always said you were one of the best ladies he ever saw with an edged weapon," to which Vernita says, "Fuck you, bitch. I know he didn't qualify that."

• 25:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 25:04Lizzie Bassett?

  And I love that so much.

• 25:06Chris Winterbauer?

  That scene in volume one is one of my favorite scenes in both films.

• 25:10Lizzie Bassett?

  It's one of the best. I agree.

• 25:11Chris Winterbauer?

  When Vernita's daughter arrives and they throw the knives behind their backs and they let motherhood take the forefront for a moment. It's great.

• 25:18Lizzie Bassett?

  It's amazing. In September of 1993, as the cast and crew of Pulp Fiction sat around drinking at the Daily Pint in Santa Monica, Tarantino pitched Thurman the idea of Kill Bill. He said, "I started describing it to her about you'd be the female assassin, you'd be the deadliest woman in the world, and these people have screwed you over and you're going to track them all down and kill them and everything." Uma loved it, and in this same conversation, according to Tarantino, pitched him the following: "I have an idea. What about you see me, my face is all bloody, and then the camera pans back and you realize I'm in a bridal gown? That's when the bride was born." And then she eventually came up with even the first name, the real name of the character. And then I proceeded to write like 30 pages, and then I kind of put it away. Now, you may have noticed at the beginning of Kill Bill, it says, "based on the character

• 26:03Lizzie Bassett?

  of the bride by Q and U." Q is obviously Quentin, and who is U?

• 26:07Chris Winterbauer?

  Uma.

• 26:08Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right. Uma gets a story by credit. Thurman and Tarantino were both genuinely excited about Kill Bill, but once Pulp Fiction premiered and became the juggernaut that it did, Kill Bill kind of falls by the wayside. Also, Chris, something else happened after Pulp Fiction was released. I don't know why I thought we were going to get through this episode without dealing with Harvey Weinstein. I was wrong. Harvey Weinstein assaulted Uma Thurman in the Savoy Hotel in London. You're going to hear a bunch of quotes in this episode, by the way, from Uma Thurman by way of a New York Times article called "This is Why Uma Thurman is Angry," written by Maureen Dowd. That specific article is going to become important later on. This is a quote from that. "It was such a bat to the head. He pushed me down.

• 26:53Lizzie Bassett?

  He tried to shove himself on me. He tried to expose himself. He did all kinds of unpleasant things, but he didn't actually put his back into it and force me. You're like an animal wriggling away, like a lizard. I was doing anything I could to get the train back on the track. My track, not his track. The next day, she got a large bouquet of yellow roses with a note that said, 'You have great instincts.'" He's such a creep. She was stuck with Harvey as a producer on several projects at this point, but privately she avoided him like the plague, even though he was the keeper of the keys of so many projects that were pretty much perfect for her. Something else very important happened, Chris, and this is the reason we're talking about this. She told Quentin Tarantino about the assault. Thurman would later say that Tarantino, quote, "probably dismissed it."

• 27:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Like, "Oh, poor Harvey, trying to get the girls he can't have." Now, before I get a bunch of lovely comments on Spotify about how this is an episode bashing Quentin Tarantino, I would implore you listeners to please wait and stick with us and keep listening to the end, because I promise you, it is not that. All of the things that I am referencing, the quotes that I'm reading, they are coming from Uma or Tarantino himself. So just stick with us. For the next five or so years, Tarantino and Thurman basically lost touch with each other. And it doesn't sound like there was any ill will at all. He was just distracted. He directed Jackie Brown in 1997, which Harvey Weinstein produced. And he was actually hard at work for what would become his war epic.

• 28:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Chris, what was it?

• 28:24Chris Winterbauer?

  "Inglourious Basterds."

• 28:26Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right. But he was having quite a lot of trouble with that script. It just wasn't really working. So when he ran into Uma Thurman at a party and she brought up Kill Bill, he was quick to dig the pages he'd written out of the drawer that he'd stored them in. And he couldn't help but thinking that working with Uma again would be fun and he would like to have some fun. He also came up with the idea of using Kill Bill as a way to test out his ability to shoot massive action sequences and also to write them ahead of really diving back into "Inglourious Basterds." He initially thought Kill Bill would be really quick, a 90-minute, quote, "dirty exploitation movie." Whoops. So obviously, this movie is an homage to so many things.

• 29:09Lizzie Bassett?

  He really viewed it as his chance to, like, show everybody what he loves about cinema. That drives some people nuts. I think it works really well in this. I love it. Just to name a few of the references you can see across this movie, there's, of course, Sergio Leone and spaghetti westerns. There's Japanese Revenge thrillers like Lady Snowblood, which in addition to serving as story inspiration, also is very much the visual inspiration for both the final fight in volume one between Orin Ishii and the bride, and also that shot at the beginning where the bride is staring up at her killers. Obviously, you've got Bruce Lee in The Game of Death with the bride's yellow tracksuit, Michelle Yeoh's character in Police Story 3: Super Cop, many films out of the Shaw Brothers Kung Fu Studio, and so, so, so many more because this thing is pastiche

• 29:54Lizzie Bassett?

  soup. I'm fine with it.

• 29:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Someone once described Quentin Tarantino as a guy who makes movies inside of other movies.

• 29:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 30:00Chris Winterbauer?

  And I think that's like a great way to think about him. He's one of the only meta filmmakers I really love. As you guys know, I'm not a big Deadpool fan, for example, but Tarantino, winking, I just, it feels like it's born of such a love of the movies that sit at the back of the video store.

• 30:15Lizzie Bassett?

  I agree.

• 30:15Chris Winterbauer?

  And I really appreciate that and enjoy it.

• 30:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, I also think part of that is the actors that he brings out.

• 30:23Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, they elevate everything. They're so incredible.

• 30:26Lizzie Bassett?

  They're so good, but he also has a habit of either pulling people out of relative obscurity.

• 30:31Chris Winterbauer?

  He can see who's been underused, who has not been used properly. What can I do with this person that's interesting?

• 30:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, famous example, of course, is John Travolta in Pulp Fiction. That reignited his career big time. Obviously, he's trying to pack a ton into this movie. So, he approached Harvey Weinstein with one condition. He wanted to film Kill Bill, the entire 200-page script as written, which was unusual, if you saw the screenplay, because it was more like a novel than anything else. It was basically prose. In a very un-Harvey Weinstein move, he agreed and kinda gave Tarantino carte blanche on this one. So, as we were just talking about, Tarantino is excellent at casting. Let's talk about the rest of the cast outside of Uma Thurman. He brought in Daryl Hannah for El Driver. Like we just mentioned, lifting actors and giving them the opportunities he felt like they didn't have. He felt like

• 31:22Lizzie Bassett?

  she was not afforded good opportunities earlier on, that she'd been relegated to, you know, the girlfriend role, or the girlfriend mermaid role, if you will.

• 31:31Chris Winterbauer?

  When she played such an effective villain as Priss in Blade Runner, for example, and she's so athletic and she can be so domineering and just that jeering smile and the disdain she looks at Michael Madsen with, she's great.

• 31:46Lizzie Bassett?

  I really love her in this. Also, David Carradine, of course, ended up playing Bill, but he was not the first choice. Do you know this?

• 31:54Chris Winterbauer?

  No.

• 31:55Lizzie Bassett?

  The role was written for someone else, and it is a massive What Went Wrong alum. I can't think of many episodes he didn't show up in. Any guesses as to who this is? We just talked about him on All That Jazz.

• 32:08Chris Winterbauer?

  We just talked about him on All That Jazz. Robert De Niro?

• 32:10Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 32:11Chris Winterbauer?

  He did come up. No, okay, who? I'm not gonna guess.

• 32:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Warren Beatty.

• 32:15Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, Warren Beatty. You know, I loved Carradine in this. Obviously, he nailed it, but Beatty would have been interesting.

• 32:21Lizzie Bassett?

  I agree.

• 32:22Chris Winterbauer?

  There's a meta-commentary to that, too. You know, kind of the aging Lothario. It's interesting.

• 32:27Lizzie Bassett?

  No knock against David Carradine. He's more attractive than David Carradine, which I actually think, I don't know if that would have made the part more effective to me. There's something I really like about the fact that Bill isn't that attractive.

• 32:41Chris Winterbauer?

  Has like a lisp and seems, you know, too laid back. And yeah, there's a Manson equality to Carradine's performance that I really like.

• 32:48Lizzie Bassett?

  I agree. Also, of course, David Carradine famously, probably most famously at this point, was known for playing Kung Fu. So there is that as well. We won't get into the fact that he is not remotely Chinese.

• 33:00Chris Winterbauer?

  No, he was not remotely.

• 33:03Lizzie Bassett?

  He's Irish.

• 33:04Chris Winterbauer?

  The character of Fred Kwan in Galaxy Quest is based on his character from Kung Fu.

• 33:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. Tarantino did work in very Carradine-esque moments into the rewrite of the character that he did specifically for him, including things like the flute playing that David Carradine just did. He just carried a flute around. Tarantino was like, great.

• 33:23Chris Winterbauer?

  That's cool.

• 33:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Now Bill carries a flute around. Now, Chris, did you notice an actor playing two different roles across volume one and two?

• 33:31Chris Winterbauer?

  Did I?

• 33:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Honestly, because his performances are so good, both of them, they're too hard, I think, to be able to guess this.

• 33:37Chris Winterbauer?

  Tell me, tell me, tell me, tell me.

• 33:39Lizzie Bassett?

  So the first one is Gordon Liu Chi Hui as Johnny Mo in volume one and Pai May in volume two.

• 33:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Okay, now I see it. Very good.

• 33:50Lizzie Bassett?

  He, of course, was one of the biggest male stars of the Shaw Brothers Martial Arts Cinema during the 70s and 80s.

• 33:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 33:56Lizzie Bassett?

  I love him as Pai May in particular. He's just, he's so fun.

• 34:01Chris Winterbauer?

  When he's Johnny Mo, he's masked and he's bald. And then as Pai May, obviously, I mean, the Pai May performance is...

• 34:07Lizzie Bassett?

  It's fantastic.

• 34:08Chris Winterbauer?

  It's the most scenery chewing...

• 34:09Lizzie Bassett?

  His little beard flick.

• 34:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Ah.

• 34:12Lizzie Bassett?

  I love it.

• 34:12Chris Winterbauer?

  And it's a wuxia sort of homage with the wire work and the jumping and the dancing. It's great.

• 34:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Totally. So as I said, there's another actor who plays two roles across both films. I'm guessing you did not catch this one. I certainly would not have if I didn't know this.

• 34:26Chris Winterbauer?

  No.

• 34:26Lizzie Bassett?

  That is Michael Parks as both Texas Ranger Earl McGraw at the beginning and Esteban Viejo in volume two.

• 34:35Chris Winterbauer?

  I would not.

• 34:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 34:36Chris Winterbauer?

  I knew it was Michael Parks. I believe his son plays his son, the deputy.

• 34:40Lizzie Bassett?

  That's correct. That is his actual son. Yeah.

• 34:43Chris Winterbauer?

  And I did not pick up that that was him in volume two. Wow.

• 34:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Yep, it is. So that was actually an accident. That role was supposed to be played by Ricardo Montalban. However, Montalban couldn't make the all-cast reading, and here's how Tarantino explains it on the Two Bears One Cave podcast. He said, "That's a very, very important day for me because that's like the closest to me actually seeing the movie finished before I start shooting the movie. I had actually cast Ricardo Montalban to play Esteban. He couldn't make it. Michael was there because he was playing the Texas Ranger. I go, 'Hey, Mike, would you play Esteban?'" He said, "Yeah, sure." And he did such a fantastic Esteban. So he just was like, "Done. It's you."

• 35:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Wow.

• 35:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Now, a frequent Tarantino collaborator, Michael Madsen, also joined as Bud. I love Michael Madsen, R.I.P. We just lost him.

• 35:25Chris Winterbauer?

  He's great.

• 35:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Lucy Liu was cast because a friend of Tarantino's begged him to watch Shanghai Noon, and Tarantino loved it.

• 35:33Chris Winterbauer?

  Shanghai Noon is great.

• 35:35Lizzie Bassett?

  It's so fun.

• 35:36Chris Winterbauer?

  It's a lot of fun. And Jackie Chan, God bless that man, how can he move his body? And does he risk his body? It's crazy.

• 35:43Lizzie Bassett?

  It's great. And Lucy Liu is great in it.

• 35:45Chris Winterbauer?

  And also, Charlie's Angels was such an injustice, cinematically, but also for Lucy Liu, I feel like, in this movie, gave her some redemption, because Fox Force 5 and The Deadly Viper Assassin Squad, the whole thing's also a riff on Charlie's Angels, too.

• 35:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Totally.

• 35:59Chris Winterbauer?

  You know what I mean? And so it's so fun that she gets to do the better version in Kill Bill.

• 36:03Lizzie Bassett?

  I think she's fantastic in this. There was some backlash against her role afterwards in terms of, you know, people saying like, she's being relegated to sort of a dragon lady trope in this. She pushed back on that, and she was basically just like, "You wouldn't say that if it was a white actor in the same situation. You're saying that because I'm Asian, and that's not fair, because I want to be able to play a role that's this exciting."

• 36:28Chris Winterbauer?

  I also think it's a failure to fully appreciate, that's exactly what Tarantino's doing. He is playing in the back of the video store, broad strokes, exploitation genre, you know, where the white guy's a cult leader, and, you know, everybody kind of plays to the stereotype, and then he subverts them in really fun and interesting ways.

• 36:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, he also took the time to rewrite the character for her. Orin was initially supposed to just be Japanese, but he knows Lucy Liu is not Japanese. She is of Chinese descent, so he goes in and rewrites Orin to be half Chinese, half Japanese, and also American, and he makes that into arguably one of her best scenes in the entire movie, where she beheads the-

• 37:09Chris Winterbauer?

  Right, when she does the corporate speak of like, "Please bring all further problems to me, but I consider this matter done." It's so fun. And also, I love the animated sequence in volume one.

• 37:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, it's so good.

• 37:19Chris Winterbauer?

  It's so over the top, and it's also beautiful, and it's incredibly well-animated.

• 37:23Lizzie Bassett?

  This is a good time to say this. There's so many elements of these movies that I wish we had time to talk about that we just- Won't. Chris, you said something recently about trying not to be a completionist with our work on this podcast and to really kind of focus on the story. So for those of you listening and wondering why I'm not hitting every single note on the IMDB trivia section, it's because there's an IMDB trivia section and you can go look at it and I'm going to try and stick to the story.

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• 38:30Lizzie Bassett?

  So finally, he rounded out the cast with Vivica A. Fox as Vernita Green. I think she's fabulous in this. We're going to hear quite a bit more from Vivica over the course of this episode. He also brought in a ton of experts who pulled double duty both in front of and behind the camera, including Sonny Chiba as Hattori Hanzo. Tarantino had been a huge fan of him since he was a kid. Chiba had starred in ultra-violent martial arts films like The Street Fighter. He also had played multiple Hattori Hanzos across the TV series Shadow Warriors, as well as a TV movie. This is confusing. I can barely understand it, but when I say multiple Hattori Hanzos, he played different ninjas and samurais, all named Hattori Hanzo. They were all descendants of Hattori Hanzo. I believe they were also

• 39:11Lizzie Bassett?

  all real. It's too complicated. Anyway, Tarantino could explain it. I cannot. But part of his idea about Kill Bill was that this Hattori Hanzo was like the 100th Hattori Hanzo or something. Chiba actually helped train Thurman in fight choreography prior to filming. I believe he did a lot of the sword work with her. Tetsuro Shimaguchi, who played Oranishi's right-hand man, Miki. He's the first one that she sends after Thurman in the battle in volume one, who dies like immediately. Also doubled as a major fight choreographer on the film. He choreographed, he said, much of the final sword fight between the bride and Oranishi, and also parts of the fight inside the House of Leaves. However, the wire work that you see in the film, and particularly the fight in volume

• 39:54Lizzie Bassett?

  one, inside the House of Leaves, you may think that that looks more akin to the style of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. And Chris, that's because it was choreographed by Yin Wu Ping, who did the wire work on Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, as well as The Matrix and many, many more. I think we will talk about him again when we cover The Matrix. I know that that was sort of a groundbreaking experience, the way that he worked with them on that. I think part of the reason he enjoyed working with both the Wachowskis and actually Quentin Tarantino is that he wanted things to be shot the way that they did it in Hong Kong, which is also how Quentin Tarantino wanted to do it. He wanted one camera, and for this movie in particular, he wanted as many things impossible in camera. He wanted little to no VFX. So they really went out of their way to do that.

• 40:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Nobody's faking anything in this, and it's really pretty impressive. Also, of course, the reason for multiple fight choreographers is that the styles present in the movie are very, very different. The wire work is used in Kung Fu, particularly, Chris, as you've mentioned in the past, in Wooja films versus the Samurai sword work. Entirely different art and also, of course, different culture. The chapters in Kill Bill are also extremely varied, so much so that Tarantino initially thought he was going to hire three different cinematographers for this. He ended up realizing that would be a terrible idea, and so he settled on one, and that one is three-time Academy Award-winning cinematographer, Robert Richardson, who at this point had already won for JFK. He would go on to win very shortly after this for The Aviator and for Hugo.

• 41:22Lizzie Bassett?

  And they end up teaming up together and doing Inglourious Basterds, Hateful Eight, Django Unchained, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. I do think his movies from Kill Bill forward, they look so, so polished and elevated in a way that the earlier ones don't, for better or for worse. I love the earlier ones as well. So now it's around May of 2001, Chris. The team is assembled. Kill Bill is ready to go. Tarantino Thurman and Harvey Weinstein are all at the Cannes Film Festival. Tarantino noticed that Uma Thurman seemed a little skittish and weird around Harvey Weinstein. He asked her why, and she reminded him she had told him why several years earlier. So this is an issue because they're about to make a movie together.

• 42:05Lizzie Bassett?

  And for whatever reason, this time it really stuck in his head. Probably because they're about to make a movie together. So Tarantino confronted Weinstein about it, told him he had to apologize to Uma Thurman. He said Weinstein tried to weasel out of it, to downplay it, but Tarantino held firm. He said, I believe Uma. It's necessary for her to accept Weinstein's apology if they're all going to move forward with Kill Bill. Quentin, stop. You're not supposed to move forward with him at that point. That's the point at which you say no. But he doesn't. Remarkably, in one of the few times this ever happened, though, Weinstein did apologize to her. And to me, this just shows how much power Tarantino had over Miramax because he made them so much money.

• 42:49Chris Winterbauer?

  I think the truth is, it's true of Tarantino, and I think it's true of a lot of, maybe not a lot, a number of filmmakers at the time, male filmmakers and actors.

• 42:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, it's true of a ton, yes.

• 43:01Chris Winterbauer?

  And my perception is that a lot of people thought Weinstein was almost like a necessary evil, and it was a cop out. And he was an unnecessary evil. And if everybody, if one domino had, you know what I mean?

• 43:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 43:15Chris Winterbauer?

  Let's be honest, if one of the men dominos had fallen, this whole thing would have come down, I think, a lot earlier.

• 43:20Lizzie Bassett?

  For sure, but none of them did.

• 43:22Chris Winterbauer?

  No, and well, we'll get to Tarantino's later comments and stuff, I'm sure, but I'll just leave it at that, you know, for now.

• 43:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I admire the way that Tarantino has spoken about this in recent years, although obviously I do not admire the sort of willful ignorance involved in just, I think it was a thing where he and so many others, like you said, brushed off these kinds of interactions as like, it's just a Don Draper type, you know? It's just the boss chasing the secretary. And obviously it was not that, but I think it was very easy to paint it as that.

• 43:55Chris Winterbauer?

  By the way. This was a global failure, and I'm not saying I would have done better or would have spoken out. There's no evidence that had I been active in the film industry at this point in time, I would have had any more moral fortitude than anybody else. And so that's not what I'm trying to say at all. I'm sure I would have failed, but that's the point, is, you know, we, the men, collectively failed. And if one person, one of the, you know, Quentin Tarantino, Brad Pitt, other folks had said something publicly, this whole thing could have come down a lot sooner.

• 44:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, because you're right. If one person, particularly if someone as powerful as Quentin Tarantino, had outed him or had refused to work with him.

• 44:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Or like a Brad Pitt, you know? A similar thing happened with him and Paltrow, I believe, and he confronted Harvey Weinstein privately.

• 44:46Lizzie Bassett?

  That's the thing.

• 44:47Chris Winterbauer?

  But it's the thing. That's the same thing.

• 44:49Lizzie Bassett?

  So I don't want to derail us too much on this, but you know, Brad Pitt got a lot of, I think, good press when Gwyneth Paltrow very bravely did come forward, and she mentioned that this had happened and that Weinstein left her alone after Brad Pitt like really threatened him. But again, he did it privately. I'm not saying it wasn't good of him to do that, but the problem is that nobody did it publicly. And again, here is Quentin Tarantino handling this behind closed doors. So Weinstein did it. He apologized. Uma Thurman is like, whatever, I just want to move forward. In theory, Kill Bill is finally ready to head into pre-production with a finished script, but there was one more problem, Chris. Uma Thurman got pregnant.

• 45:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Maya Hawke?

• 45:31Lizzie Bassett?

  No, she had Maya already. This was her second child with then-husband Ethan Hawke. There was pressure on Tarantino to replace her, which is nuts, given the whole inception of this movie, although I'm sure Harvey Weinstein wouldn't have been sad to see her go. But Tarantino categorically refused, telling Time Magazine, "Would Sergio Leone have replaced Eastwood in a fistful of dollars? Would Von Sternberg have replaced Dietrich in Morocco? I know how good she was gonna be in this movie." So we waited. And naturally, Chris, all the producers were super patient, right? Wanted to make sure she had enough time to recover after giving birth. Really demanding, physical juggernaut.

• 46:07Chris Winterbauer?

  I have a feeling Lawrence Bender was in the room during the delivery. And he was saying, can we get this baby out faster?

• 46:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, Chris, I have a quote from Lawrence Bender to The Hollywood Reporter for you. Quote, "I remember calling Uma and said, right, you're giving birth in January. We'll give you two months to recuperate and to come back. And then we'll start the training for three months." She goes, "Lawrence, it's not like baking a loaf of bread. There's no guarantee that my baby's going to come on X date." But Levon Ron Thurman-Hawke was born in January of 2002. And despite the fact that she almost certainly needed more time, she was back to work on Kill Bill in March of 2002.

• 46:46Chris Winterbauer?

  That's insane.

• 46:48Lizzie Bassett?

  I just had a baby.

• 46:50Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 46:51Lizzie Bassett?

  And this makes me want to vomit.

• 46:54Chris Winterbauer?

  It does two things. Number one, Uma Thurman is a goddess.

• 46:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, holy shit.

• 46:57Chris Winterbauer?

  Clearly for pulling this off. Yeah, like you said, I've obviously never had a baby. I watched my wife have two babies, C-section, natural birth. I don't know how somebody returns to living after these experiences. Like, it's such a brutal, amazing process to the human. I sat there and I was like, oh, my God. Oh, my sphincter is so tight. It's so tight the whole time. But then I was like, it's beautiful, babe. It's beautiful. I don't know how anybody does this. That's insane.

• 47:26Lizzie Bassett?

  David had a different experience. He didn't say it was beautiful. I mean, he did, but he watched. Obviously, he was right there with me. He was really amazing throughout the whole birth and process. But afterwards, I was probably still on a lot of drugs at that point. And I was like, that wasn't that bad. And he looked at me with such a hollowness in his eyes and said, "You didn't see what I just saw." And he's right, and I don't want to know.

• 47:48Chris Winterbauer?

  I came back from Vietnam and you didn't see what I saw.

• 47:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. So as I said, she was back in March of 2002 for training and then filming began in early to mid-June. So it seems to me like they stuck to Lawrence Bender's schedule. She was immediately thrown into intense training. She told Time Magazine, "Three styles of Kung Fu, two styles of sword fighting, knife throwing, knife fighting, hand-to-hand combat, Japanese speaking." It was literally absurd. Not to mention the fact that she's five foot 11, which made a lot of this really difficult. She said, quote, "My body type is the opposite of all the people who created these arts. They have a low center of gravity. They're compact. Then there's me. I'm five foot 11, all arms and legs with a two-foot

• 48:30Lizzie Bassett?

  neck." So she was really struggling. She also, I think at one point, told Vivica A. Fox she was like really upset that the weight wasn't dropping off quickly. And Vivica was like, "You just had a baby. Like, you need to calm down."

• 48:45Chris Winterbauer?

  Also, she's so thin in this movie. But this was early 2000s where the definition of what was thin was the most insane it's maybe ever been. So it was a different standard, you know, than it is today.

• 48:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, let's hear what Tarantino said in the same Time Magazine interview, quote, "Before this movie, Uma's way of training was to smoke half a pack of cigarettes as opposed to a pack. All right. She started training 30 pounds overweight from the baby, and she was really intimidated. But no way we were going to use quick cuts or CGI. Not in this movie." 30 pounds overweight from the baby? That's pretty good. Like, come on.

• 49:22Chris Winterbauer?

  The one thing I would like to, having listened to a number of Tarantino interviews, especially from the earlier years, Qualify, is he is trying so hard to sound like bad boy. I feel like, you know what I mean, in some of these early interviews. Like, I think he likes the story of Tarantino a lot, especially the young Tarantino. So I'm just kind of like, that's a cool thing you say, man, but I'm not sure I buy that that's, you know what I mean, that was actually the conversation on set.

• 49:46Lizzie Bassett?

  He hath drunk in his own flavor aid, for sure, in both good ways and bad.

• 49:50Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 49:50Lizzie Bassett?

  She was really struggling, particularly with the giant, heavy samurai swords. At one point, she actually whacked herself in the head with a 10-pound sword, and she thought, okay, obviously, he's going to see this is too hard for me. You know, he's gonna help me out. And she was wrong, because as we mentioned, he really wanted to do this, quote, "the Chinese way," meaning no digital effects. He wants to have everything in camera as much as possible. Amidst all this, she's also working day and night on the character. He tried to feed her a ton of movies and references for her to watch, but she pushed back because she wanted to create something entirely new. According to Vivica A. Fox's book, "Every Day I'm Hustling," quote, "I watched her argue with Quentin intelligently and successfully for wardrobe changes, dialogue rewrites.

• 50:34Lizzie Bassett?

  She made it a true collaboration, pushing him away from simply making an ode to the Samurai films he made us all watch with him towards something new. Kill Bill is an astonishing work because of their shared efforts, and it's because they each approached it not as a job, but as a cornerstone of their careers. Now, as you may be able to tell Chris from that quote, she was not a fan of Quentin Tarantino's directing style. She and the rest of the cast were put through grueling martial arts training as well alongside Uma. Vivica, Lucy Liu, Daryl Hannah, and David Carradine all spent eight hours a day for three months studying martial arts at a gym they put together in Culver City. According to Vivica, "If you didn't walk in the door between 8:55 and 8:59, you were in trouble at 9:01. I thought I was in the damn Olympics or something.

• 51:18Lizzie Bassett?

  And every Friday, at the end of the day, Quentin would gather us around and give us a review. He called it his State of the Union. We all had to sit and listen." One day, she was extremely proud of the work everyone had put in and was expecting Tarantino to high-five them all, but instead, he just started ripping them a new asshole. Vivica lost it. She said, quote, "Hold up, is this a beat us up contest? Are we fucking doing anything right?" And Lucy Liu is next to her, holding her hand, going, "Calm down, calm down, calm down." Afterwards, Uma pulled her aside, and according to Vivica, they had the following exchange. This is Uma Thurman. "What you need to do is learn how to manipulate the situation better. Then you can get what you want." Vivica, "I don't have to manipulate nobody. That's not me. I don't have to kiss his ass." Uma, "No, I don't mean it like that.

• 52:03Lizzie Bassett?

  You have to learn to be quiet, speak less. He's tough, but he's not stupid. He'll concede you something if it's to make the film better. Learn to attack intelligently, Vivica, because he's got the power to fire you."

• 52:15Chris Winterbauer?

  It's good advice.

• 52:16Lizzie Bassett?

  It is good advice. I think it's interesting that that's the way that even she viewed her dynamic with Quentin when they seemed so sort of like inextricably connected.

• 52:26Chris Winterbauer?

  That's how Tarantino works with everybody. It wouldn't be my style and it wouldn't be the style that I would want to work with as somebody underneath a director. But I was watching an interview with him talking about composers and basically like, I have no use for them because I'm not interested in hiring someone to come in and write me some pretty songs. Like, I know the songs. I need a music editor to do exactly what I tell them. That's the person I'm interested. And you can tell he's just, like, when it comes to filmmaking, Quentin Tarantino is a fascist.

• 52:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, totally.

• 52:52Chris Winterbauer?

  And he wants people just to do exactly what he says. And I'm not saying it's a good or a bad way. I'm just saying Thurman, I think, very much understands that.

• 52:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Hundred percent.

• 52:59Chris Winterbauer?

  And is like, I know exactly how to deal with this guy, you know, as she goes through the movie.

• 53:04Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 53:04Chris Winterbauer?

  And she made it a better movie, which is great.

• 53:06Lizzie Bassett?

  I think it cannot be overstated how incredible her performance is across these two movies and how these movies do not work without Uma Thurman. And it is such a hard thing to hold down this kind of like, over the top, zany, 10 different things happening at once, million different plotlines, and she really does it. Now, while Uma may have been consoling Vivica, it sounds like the same courtesy was not extended to Daryl Hannah. According to Vivica, Uma and Daryl Hannah did not get along.

• 53:36Chris Winterbauer?

  You can see it on screen, and it's great.

• 53:39Lizzie Bassett?

  She said, quote, "She was so busy," and then her and Daryl had that blonde competition thing going on. And I was like, "I'm gonna be cool with you, and I'm gonna be cool with everybody. I'm not in the pissing contest." I love Vivica's memoir. I will put a pin in that, though, because there might be a reason things with Hannah were tense on set, not just with Uma, but more on that later.

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• 55:11Lizzie Bassett?

  So let's talk about just the scale of this movie in terms of where they shot it, because this thing is truly a global production. And the majority of it is filmed in, do you know this?

• 55:22Chris Winterbauer?

  No.

• 55:23Lizzie Bassett?

  China.

• 55:24Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh.

• 55:25Lizzie Bassett?

  Despite only the bride's training with Pai Mai taking place in China, the majority of this film is filmed there. He was actually one of the first major directors to use China as a cheap production base. They shot at the Beijing Film Studios, which were built by Mao Zedong to produce propaganda films. The House of Blue Leaves was inspired by the Japanese restaurant Gonpachi Nishi Azabu, but even this was recreated and built specially on a soundstage in Beijing. Couple of quick things about the House of Blue Leaves sequence, because it is so fun. It's one of my favorites across any of his movies, to be honest. They used bamboo swords wrapped in soft materials. No one would actually get hurt. The only time there is a real sword is when there's a close up. At one point, they replaced the team of swordsmen who had performed the fight with just random Chinese extras

• 56:11Lizzie Bassett?

  once they were dead, because they were like, they're dead. We don't need to pay them so much. I like that. To get the long tracking shot where the bride walks down the stairs through the club into the bathroom, they actually had to remove a wall and roll a crane in that seti cam operator Larry McConkey had to climb onto and ride over the bathroom wall. Then they would roll the crane back out, pull the wall back in before the camera turned around. I love that shot. And then the last thing that's fun about this is Xiaohui Hu, the kid who gets spanked by the bride. He was only 17 years old, and he was actually supposed to die in that scene. But when Tarantino saw his face as they were rehearsing it, he was like, she wouldn't kill this kid. And so he changed it.

• 56:53Chris Winterbauer?

  It's very smart and it's a really good.

• 56:56Lizzie Bassett?

  It's a great line.

• 56:57Chris Winterbauer?

  It's kind of funny. Dami mommy is sort of funny because she's so tall. It's like she towers over him. It's great.

• 57:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Go back home to your mother.

• 57:04Chris Winterbauer?

  This is what you get for playing with a Yakuza. It's so good. This year had two of my favorite crane shots through like overhead in a building and also Minority Report has when the little spiders are going through the building to get Tom Cruise. It's a similar shot and they're both so virtuoso. And Lizzie, can you confirm this? The rumor that I heard when I was younger was always they go to black and white because if they showed that much blood, they would get an X rating with the MPAA.

• 57:28Lizzie Bassett?

  I believe that is true. It's the eye. It's specifically the eyeball that if that had been shown in color, it would have been considered too gory. So yes, it was both a stylistic choice and it was also to avoid an NC 17 rating. So when they wrapped shooting in China, Tarantino was already way over their $30 million budget. According to him though, Weinstein saw the dailies and told him to just keep making his movie. Now, there are a few brief establishing shots of Tokyo, but that's kind of a lot of the only filming they did in Japan. In LA, they shot at the Two Pines Chapel in the Mojave Desert outside of Lancaster. Of course, they shot in Pasadena, although I looked it up, technically South Pasadena, at Vernita Green's house.

• 58:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Vernita, expensive. And also at the abandoned St. Luke Medical Center in Northeast Pasadena. Now, by October of 2002, Tarantino was not only over budget, but majorly over schedule. He was given a drop dead date of December 25th. But he doesn't care and doesn't listen to a drop dead date because from January to February of 2003, they were still capturing the last few scenes they needed in Mexico. One of the last scenes they shot was the bride tracking down Esteban Viejo, Bill's old mentor, as we mentioned, played by Michael Parks. And Tarantino decided he wanted an actual brothel for the scene, Chris. So his poor production scouts went and found a Four Realze's side of the road brothel about 90 miles south of Puerto Vallarta.

• 58:53Lizzie Bassett?

  There was no bathroom and the floor was covered in poop, both pig and human. Pig because there was a slaughterhouse across the street and human because.

• 59:01Chris Winterbauer?

  There was no bathroom.

• 59:03Lizzie Bassett?

  I guess, yeah. The set designers leaned all the way in and actually brought in more pigs and chickens. I believe they did clean the floor, though. But when it came time to shoot, they discovered there'd been a murder at the brothel, and the police had shut it down, which was a problem, because he wanted to use the employees in this scene. But don't worry, they discovered that it had just moved a little bit up the street, and so they went and shot there. And yes, all of the women in that scene, with the exception of the one whose face is slashed, who's played by Claire Smithies, those are the actual employees of the brothel. All right, Chris, we are now to the thing that I'm sure you knew we were going to spend a lot of this episode on. One of their only remaining scenes to

• 59:45Lizzie Bassett?

  be shot at this point was the bride driving to go kill Bill. Now, Chris, what do you remember about this scene from the movie?

• 59:52Chris Winterbauer?

  She is driving a very small sports car, convertible, top-down. It is a sandy, seems like, almost like a game trail in terms of how well-maintained it is, road, palm trees, I believe, cane trees, you know, on either side. And she's driving very fast, especially with whatever the suspension on that car is, the camera behind her in the car, you can see it's Uma Thurman driving the car, and it looks risky, the way she is driving that car. And I know my perception is colored by the fact that I know what you're about to tell me, but I remember that scene even when I first saw this movie, and I thought, wow, she's going fast, way back in 2003, for when I first saw it, because it's an

• 1:00:36Chris Winterbauer?

  effective stunt. That's what this is. It's a stunt.

• 1:00:38Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right. This is a stunt. And I would also like to point out, you said something very important. It is mostly the back of Uma Thurman's head.

• 1:00:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes.

• 1:00:46Lizzie Bassett?

  You don't really need Uma Thurman to be driving that car in order to get this shot, but we will get there. So according to Uma, the car had been converted from stick shift to automatic for the shoot, and she had been warned that day by a teamster that it wasn't working properly. Tarantino says he never heard this and would not have put her in the car if he thought there was something physically wrong with it. Now, this I believe. Regardless, she told the production team, as well as producer E. Bennett Walsh, that she was not comfortable driving it and asked for a stunt driver to step in. Producers would later claim that she never expressed any concern. So back to Uma's account. Quote, "Quinton came in my trailer and didn't like to hear no, like any director. He was furious because I'd cost them a lot of time, but I was scared.

• 1:01:30Lizzie Bassett?

  He said, "I promise you the car is fine. It's a straight piece of road." Now Tarantino backs up that she did express concern before getting behind the wheel. And Tarantino, he says that he was not angry. He was not yelling. He was just frustrated. That's besides the point. The point is this conversation in her trailer happened. So what he says he did at that point was he was like, all right, you know what? She's nervous about this. Fine, I'm gonna go drive the road myself. And again, I believe that he did this 100%. He went out, he drove the stretch of road to make sure it was okay. He was like, this feels fine. He came back and he said, "Uma, it's a straight stretch. You're gonna be okay." But right before they were about to shoot, someone pointed out that the light would actually be better if she drove in the opposite direction.

• 1:02:15Lizzie Bassett?

  So they flipped the shot, but Tarantino never tested that direction. He had said not redoing the test drive is one of the biggest regrets of his life. He said, quote, "I didn't force her into the car. She got into it because she trusted me and she believed me." According to Uma, one of the last things he said to her was, "Hit 40 miles per hour or your hair won't blow the right way and I'll make you do it again." So Uma did it. And to your point, Chris, 40 miles per hour on that stretch of road, that might not sound that fast, it's really fast.

• 1:02:48Chris Winterbauer?

  And again, in that car.

• 1:02:49Lizzie Bassett?

  In that car.

• 1:02:50Chris Winterbauer?

  It's not a modern car. It is a very old car. So I just, you know, it's important.

• 1:02:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. So Chris, I'm gonna show you the footage from the camera mounted on the back of the car. Have you seen this before?

• 1:03:02Chris Winterbauer?

  I have seen this before.

• 1:03:05Chris Winterbauer?

  So you guys can see this footage online. Thurman is driving down this road. It is relatively straight, but there's a slight bend. She loses control of the car. It starts fishtailing from side to side. She hits a tree trunk or the car bottoms out and comes to an abrupt stop. She's jolted. It's a little hard to see, but she immediately grabs the back of her head and basically collapses back into the car. She looks concussed at the very least. And immediately, some coordinator or PA runs up to check on her. She is lying down in the car. Her hands are up. She's not really moving. She's clearly in a lot of pain. And now, more and more crew members are rushing over, literally pulling her out of the car.

• 1:03:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:48Chris Winterbauer?

  Lifting her out of the car.

• 1:03:50Lizzie Bassett?

  We don't need to keep watching it, but yeah, they physically remove her from the car. Tarantino is right there next to her. He's talking to her. There's a moment actually where they're pulling her out of the car and she lets out this really big grin across her face. And it's heartbreaking when I found out that that's because in that moment, she was just so happy to realize that she actually could still walk, because that's how badly she had been injured in this accident. So, she would later say, "The steering wheel was at my belly and my legs were jammed under me. I felt the searing pain and thought, oh my God, I'm never gonna walk again. When I came back from the hospital in a neck brace with my knees damaged and a large, massive egg on my head and a concussion, I wanted to see the car and I was very upset."

• 1:04:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Tarantino later pointed out that the camera mounted on the back of the car had likely made it way too heavy, so when it started to spin out of control, it was impossible for her to get it back on track. She and Tarantino got into an enormous fight in which she accused him of trying to kill her. This in turn made him really upset because he felt like, of course, he had not tried to kill her. And despite their marriage being in shambles, Ethan Hawke flew immediately from Kentucky to be with her. Ethan Hawke confronted Tarantino, pointing out the obvious, that Thurman is an actress, not a stunt driver, and he had no business putting her in that car. At which point Tarantino apparently apologized to him.

• 1:05:10Chris Winterbauer?

  Which is just another echo of the pattern of, for example, Tarantino confronting Weinstein behind closed doors, or Pitt confronting Weinstein behind men dealing with this amongst ourselves, right? Not the bigger problem, and keeping things between the men in this way.

• 1:05:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Right. Men handling women's pain, which I think, at the end of the day, ends up also being a bit of the feeling I left Kill Bill with after I had gone through this research. So about two weeks after the crash, Thurman asked to see the footage from the back of the car that you and I just watched. Much to her surprise, the producers refused. She had her lawyer send a letter to Miramax detailing the crash and reserving the right to take legal action. Miramax was like, sure, we'll let you see the footage, but only if you sign a document that releases us from any liability, including future pain and suffering. She said, and I'm paraphrasing, fuck off. And she did not sign anything. So Kill Bill kept right on going, heading straight into post-production with a budget

• 1:06:13Lizzie Bassett?

  that had ballooned upwards of $55 million. Unbelievably, they still thought this could be one movie potentially up until the edit. I think there were some inklings during the filming that potentially they were like, all right, this is probably going to be two movies, but they didn't change anything about the way that they were shooting it. Lawrence Bender said, in the beginning, I was saying to Quentin, we're never going to get this in under two and a half hours. And he argued with me. He was like, it's gonna be fine. We had these arguments and finally he says to me, you just have to trust me. And I said, okay, I trust you. And then, of course, it did indeed end up being two films, which Tarantino didn't agree to until post-production. The saga would be known as The Whole Bloody Affair, and in a rare move for Harvey Scissorhands,

• 1:06:55Lizzie Bassett?

  he let Tarantino create these two really sprawling epic volumes versus cutting the whole thing down into one film. Now, for anyone who doesn't know, Harvey Scissorhands was a name that Harvey Weinstein earned because he had a habit of going into the edit and post-production and just chop, chop, chop, just absolutely snipping up your movie. But again, this just highlights the power that Tarantino did have in that dynamic, but it also, I think, highlights how much he needed Harvey Weinstein and why he put up with him, was I don't know that other producers and studios would have let him do this.

• 1:07:28Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. It's the all-scratch-your-back-you-scratch-mine. There's an implicit quality there to that relationship. And Weinstein was obviously aware of it, and I think deep down, everybody that's working with him has to be aware of it, too.

• 1:07:44Lizzie Bassett?

  100%. And I think Quentin Tarantino agrees with you. So, turning one movie into two during post-productions did cause some additional financial problems because both Lucy Liu and Uma Thurman's contracts were for one film. And they weren't finalized.

• 1:08:01Chris Winterbauer?

  And per the Saul Kind clause, Lizzie in Superman.

• 1:08:04Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right.

• 1:08:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Can't just do this.

• 1:08:06Lizzie Bassett?

  You can't just edit it into two movies. No, you cannot.

• 1:08:09Chris Winterbauer?

  And just not pay the actors. Yeah.

• 1:08:12Lizzie Bassett?

  So they went back to the drawing board and I think they absolutely squeezed Miramax dry and I am thrilled. They both got points on the back end. Good for them.

• 1:08:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Lucy Liu, get the bag. Get that branch truck.

• 1:08:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Absolutely.

• 1:08:22Chris Winterbauer?

  Back it up.

• 1:08:23Lizzie Bassett?

  It is really a testament to Tarantino's longtime editor Sally Manke, who of course we tragically lost way too soon, that these two movies work both together as a saga and also independently. The editing is fabulous.

• 1:08:36Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Also, we don't even have time to talk about the music, obviously produced by The RZA and Robert Rodriguez as well. I love it. I think it's absolutely fantastic.

• 1:08:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Quincy Jones, just like so many good needle drops in it. It's so good.

• 1:08:50Lizzie Bassett?

  It's so good. There's so much fun stuff about this. Quentin Tarantino finding the five, six, seven, eights at like a clothing store in Japan and putting them in the movie. Like, there's a lot in here that's really fun. You can read about all of it. But we have to go back to the car crash because the nightmare didn't end for Uma and so it's not going to end for us. Despite pleading for access to the footage, the producers continued to withhold it. So she went to Tarantino about it, who told her he couldn't let her see the footage because it had been a group decision amongst the producers. That is Uma Thurman's account, that he said that. I want to point that out. After this huge blowout fight, which Tarantino does acknowledge that they had the fight, he thought that they had cleared the air and were all good. She did not feel the same.

• 1:09:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Not in his defense because I think putting her in that car was indefensible. And again, I think he agrees with that. But according to him, there was no reason for him to keep thinking about the crash because at that point, it was an insurance issue. That's true. Something that the producers and executives would all handle with the insurance company, not something he thought that he needed to be involved with at all at that point.

• 1:09:53Chris Winterbauer?

  It's an employment issue at this point, really. And this is important, guys, to understand. Uma Thurman's an employee, right? And Quentin Tarantino was her manager, in a sense. And it's easy to think of these movies in terms of artistic terms, et cetera. This is an employee who was injured at work, performing a task that they definitely should not have been performing.

• 1:10:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:13Chris Winterbauer?

  And that's really what this boils down to. And in the same way that somebody that gets hurt by a forklift that they shouldn't have been driving, you know, at a warehouse, deserves recompense for that. This is the same sort of thing. And if, you know, Walmart was withholding a videotape of somebody getting crushed, we would be horrified. And we should be horrified in the same way, that this employee was denied the video footage of their own injury.

• 1:10:37Lizzie Bassett?

  It's nuts. It is horrible that they would not give her this. You know the footage exists.

• 1:10:44Chris Winterbauer?

  It's on Tarantino, but it's especially on the producers, like here, too, you know? Like, that's just indefensible.

• 1:10:51Lizzie Bassett?

  So he swears that he did not realize she had assumed that he was part of what ended up being a much bigger cover up. He swears, up, down, and sideways, he was not. Still, she had to go through the entire press tour for volumes one and two with him during all of this. There's something else I want to note about the press tour. After the Italian premiere of Kill Bill, Volume Two, Daryl Hannah was very nearly assaulted by Harvey Weinstein when he burst into her suite using his own key that he had without her knowledge.

• 1:11:21Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, my god.

• 1:11:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Her makeup artist was with her, which is the only reason nothing happened. And by the way, this is not the first time he had tried to enter her suite uninvited. She had actually barricaded another hotel room door with a dresser before they ever even started filming. She also escaped out the back of a ground floor hotel room from him. So back to the night on the press tour at the Italian premiere, he asked if he could at least feel her breasts. And she said, and this is a quote, "Fuck off Harvey." The next morning, the Miramax jet carrying the entire cast to Cannes for the next premiere, left without her. Her hotel rooms were canceled, as was her hair and makeup artist. She told Quentin Tarantino and many, many others on the production, all of this.

• 1:12:08Lizzie Bassett?

  And frankly, even if she hadn't, there is no way that he would have not known why she was essentially cut from the premieres at that point.

• 1:12:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I would assume you would think Occam's razor. What could be the reason for this? Let's put two and two together. And Quentin Tarantino is an extremely smart person who writes about people's motivations all the time.

• 1:12:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:29Chris Winterbauer?

  He writes villains like Harvey Weinstein in his movies.

• 1:12:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Also, she told him.

• 1:12:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, well, no, I'm saying even if she hadn't is my point. I agree with you.

• 1:12:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:12:37Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree.

• 1:12:38Lizzie Bassett?

  On October 10th of 2003, Miramax released Kill Bill, Volume One, and it absolutely crushed. It collected $22 million on opening weekend. Jackie Brown and Pulp Fiction had each grossed around $9 million. So this was a big deal for Tarantino. Volume One continued to perform very well, taking in $180 million worldwide and then bringing in buttloads more on the DVD release. It received pretty strong critical views, although many called out its overuse of pastiche as being a little too self-aware to be enjoyable. I don't agree. I think it works. Volume Two released in April of 2004 and brought in another $150 million, bringing the total worldwide box office for the whole bloody saga to over $330 million.

• 1:13:23Lizzie Bassett?

  But despite the massive success of the films, Uma Thurman was still in pain, both physically and emotionally. However, unlike Daryl Hannah, telling everybody who would listen about Harvey Weinstein, she never spoke about the crash throughout the press for the films. In fact, the rest of the cast, including Vivica A. Fox, did not know about it until 2018, when Uma Thurman decided to go public with both Harvey Weinstein's attack and the car crash in the aforementioned New York Times article by Maureen Dowd.

• 1:13:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Now, Tarantino responded to this article and agreed that Weinstein almost certainly withheld the footage to keep Uma from being able to sue. He also said in his response, which was in Deadline, that he was well aware of the article before it came out and had every intention of corroborating Uma. He also made himself available to writer Maureen Dowd, but she never got ahold of him. When the article came out, though, it seemed like Tarantino was the prime target.

• 1:14:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Now, Chris, do you remember this article at all or the backlash around it?

• 1:14:30Chris Winterbauer?

  This is when I saw the footage was when this article came out.

• 1:14:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Right. It's when they got ahold of the footage.

• 1:14:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. I'll be honest. When I went into it, watching it, I thought, oh, like, the car, that was going fast. I don't know. Who knows what happened? You know, blah, blah, blah. You watch the footage and you're like, whoa. Or at least my reaction was, holy shit. That's a terrible accident. How could they not let her have this?

• 1:14:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:57Chris Winterbauer?

  Your job is to come to a solution that helps everybody, that makes the workplace safer, right? To avoid further legal action. But obviously Weinstein's so exposed up his ass on everything, you know, the guy's such a snake.

• 1:15:08Lizzie Bassett?

  He doesn't care.

• 1:15:09Chris Winterbauer?

  He's just gonna block everything. Anyway, so my point was, when I watched it, I was stunned by how jarring it was and how destructive it looked.

• 1:15:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. And also, I will say, from reading that article, I do agree that you come away from that article feeling like Tarantino, obviously in addition to Weinstein, is really the prime target. Now, he theorizes that is because, quote, "all the other guys lawyered up." So let's talk about the other guys in question. He is referring to, of course, Harvey Weinstein, but also E. Bennett Walsh and notably Lawrence Bender. In fact, he flat out says that the New York Times, which, like I said, published this piece, redacted Lawrence Bender's name every time Uma Thurman had mentioned it in the conversation with Maureen Dowd. And he is correct. Lawrence Bender never appears once in that article.

• 1:16:00Lizzie Bassett?

  He even took it a step further and said that Uma felt it was, quote, "very possible the car was destroyed at Harvey Weinstein's insistence and at Bennett Walsh and Lawrence Bender's execution." Thurman confirmed this, posting the following to Instagram, quote, "The cover up after the fact is unforgivable. For this, I hold Lawrence Bender, E. Bennett Walsh, and the notorious Harvey Weinstein solely responsible. They lied, destroyed evidence, and continue to lie about the permanent harm they caused and then chose to suppress."

• 1:16:33Chris Winterbauer?

  It's the, obviously, it's the crime. But the saying, "It's not the crime, it's the cover up."

• 1:16:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:16:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Let's, we'll separate the Tarantino thing, you know, separately. And I appreciate Tarantino's candor in recent years. Like you said, Lizzie.

• 1:16:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Which we're going to talk about in a minute, yeah.

• 1:16:48Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, but let's separate that. This happens all the time. Crap like this, and also films are set up under these LLCs that make it very difficult to hold anybody accountable. I mean.

• 1:16:58Lizzie Bassett?

  To destroy the car, though, is wild.

• 1:17:01Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, I don't know if that happens all the time. They took it to another level. But my point is that stunt performers are hurt often. And unfortunately, there's not a lot of recourse for them from the articles I've read, and including, you know, on a movie like Deadpool 2, a Paul W. S. Anderson film, I can't remember what the name was, that shot down in South Africa, Fast and Furious 9, Expendables 2. There's all these wrongful death suits, you know, et cetera. But there's a Byzantine shell network of companies, right, that are set up to make these movies that make it extremely difficult for anybody to get justice or financial payout or, you know, compensation for their loss.

• 1:17:36Lizzie Bassett?

  She just wanted the footage. Yes, I totally agree with you. But the fact that they withheld the footage.

• 1:17:41Chris Winterbauer?

  That's nuts.

• 1:17:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Which you know exists because the whole point of this was to film it.

• 1:17:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Yep.

• 1:17:46Lizzie Bassett?

  And then just potentially allegedly destroyed the actual car in question. That also tells me there was almost certainly something wrong with the car. And I believe her that a Teamster had said something before she got in it. And I believe Tarantino that he didn't know that.

• 1:18:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:00Lizzie Bassett?

  I do not think he would have put her in that car if he had thought that this was possible. Now, Lawrence Bender did make a statement, quote, "I never hid anything from Uma or anyone else, nor did I participate in any cover-up of any kind, and I never would. I was informed of Uma's feelings in regard to this incident a few months ago, and I've done my best over this time to get as much verifiable information from all the relevant sources that I could and shared it with Quentin. I wanted to make sure she had all of the answers she had been seeking." Sorry, but no fucking way, allegedly, allegedly, allegedly, allegedly, I'm scared of Lawrence Bender, but no fucking way did you just hear about this in 2018. Sorry. No.

• 1:18:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, I think, you know, if you tease it out, there's two possible explanations. One is, somebody hid the footage from her. So, there's one version where it's just Harvey Weinstein, or a P A, or something random. Okay.

• 1:18:51Lizzie Bassett?

  That's the version I think they want you to believe, yeah.

• 1:18:54Chris Winterbauer?

  The other version is, okay, you were a producer in name only, and you had no connection to this movie.

• 1:19:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 1:19:00Chris Winterbauer?

  You know what I'm saying? Because like, either you weren't involved, and therefore did not come across any of this, or you were involved. Like, those are the only things that make sense to me. Allegedly.

• 1:19:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Allegedly, allegedly. There are no statements from E. Bennett Walsh. Now, something else came up in this article that got a lot of attention, and that was Tarantino's choice to choke Uma Thurman with the chain in volume one, when she's being choked by Gogo. He does that himself. And also to spit in her face in volume two, when Michael Madsen's character Bud is doing it. Of course, he famously also is the hands choking Diane Kruger in Inglourious Basterds. Now, his explanation is that the reason he does this is because he knows exactly what he wants this shot to look like, and he does not want Uma Thurman, Diane Kruger, whoever, to have to do it more than once. Because he's like, "I know what I want,

• 1:19:54Lizzie Bassett?

  I can do it, I can execute it perfectly, I'm gonna do it, so that you don't have to sit there and get spat in the face by Michael Madsen, who can't aim 15 times in a row for the take." So, I believe that he believes that, and I believe that it is at least partially true.

• 1:20:12Chris Winterbauer?

  I would say, as long as it's done in a way where, I understand there's power dynamics at play, but if the stunt coordinator says it's safe.

• 1:20:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 1:20:19Chris Winterbauer?

  And that Uma Thurman says it's okay, and she feels empowered to make that decision as an actor, as an employee. I think that's totally fine.

• 1:20:29Lizzie Bassett?

  So it is worth pointing out that this article in Tarantino says this article itself is a bit misleading because all of the times that it's talking about these instances of her being spat on and choked, it phrases it in such a way that it sounds like Uma Thurman is the one who is talking about how these were degrading experiences. She's not. None of them are direct quotes. And I have not found anything saying that she had a problem with those instances on the set of this.

• 1:20:57Chris Winterbauer?

  Right. So that's the writer trying to paint a larger picture for.

• 1:21:00Lizzie Bassett?

  It's Maureen Dowd. Yeah.

• 1:21:02Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly.

• 1:21:02Lizzie Bassett?

  And it's also, you know, she's highlighting something that Tarantino at that point had done multiple times that people were aware of and people got very up in arms about it. I guess my point is, I believe him. I think that he is, for the most part, doing that because he knows what he wants and he wants to get it quickly and precisely. And also, what he said about Uma Thurman getting in the car, she got in the car. He didn't force her. She got in the car because she trusted him and she believed him. And I think, you know, you've had these experiences with him where he is choking with you with a chain or he's spitting in your face. And it's like, for those experiences not to be traumatic, you have to have an immense level of trust with the director. And she did, which is what made this thing with the car so horrible. Of the whole experience, Uma said, quote, "Harvey assaulted me, but that didn't kill me.

• 1:21:48Lizzie Bassett?

  What really got me about the crash was that it was a cheap shot. I had been through so many rings of fire by that point. I had really always felt a connection to the greater good in my work with Quentin. And most of what I allowed to happen to me and what I participated in was kind of like a horrible mud wrestle with a very angry brother, but at least I had some say, you know? When they turned on me after the accident, I went from being a creative contributor and performer to being like a broken tool. When she did decide to go public with this, she came to Tarantino and asked him to help her find the footage, which he did, albeit 15 years too late. And she turned it over to the police at that point. Now, despite everything, she would still work with him again, and he would certainly work with her. And I don't think she intended that article to single him out

• 1:22:32Lizzie Bassett?

  as much as it did and was surprised that more of the vitriol was not aimed at Harvey Weinstein. I kind of get it. This came out in 2018. I believe the revelations about Harvey Weinstein were 2016 and 2017. So I think some people may have thought that part of this is old news. Unfortunately, of course, it's not old news. And that the more salacious piece of this was the element of her relationship with Quentin Tarantino. She later told Entertainment Weekly, "We've had our fights over the years. When you know someone for as long as I've known him, 25 years of creative collaboration. Yes, did we have some tragedies take place? Sure, but you can't reduce that type of history and legacy."

• 1:23:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Now, for his part, Tarantino was one of, gotta be honest, very few men who admitted that he could have and should have done something about Harvey Weinstein. He said, quote, "I knew enough to do more than I did. There was more to it than just the normal rumors, the normal gossip. It wasn't secondhand. I knew he did a couple of these things. If I had done the work I should have done then, I would have had to not work with him." And by the way, those quotes are from before that article ever came out about the car crash. He offered that of his own volition. But I do want to point out, again, when he chose to continue working with Harvey Weinstein, when Uma Thurman came to him at Cannes Film Festival, at that point, he knew about both Rose McGowan having reached a settlement with Weinstein and his former girlfriend, Mira

• 1:23:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Sorvino, also having a very, very similar experience. So, good on him for owning up to it, but it's tough. Thurman told Maureen Dowd, "I am one of the reasons that a young girl would walk into his room alone," his being Harvey Weinstein's. Quentin used Harvey as the executive producer of Kill Bill, a movie that symbolizes female empowerment. And all these lambs walked into slaughter because they were convinced, "Nobody rises to such a position who would do something illegal to you, but they do." And I'll end this with one more quote from Uma. "It has taken me 47 years to stop calling people who are mean to you in love with you."

• 1:24:33Chris Winterbauer?

  It's a great quote.

• 1:24:34Lizzie Bassett?

  It is a great quote. I love Uma.

• 1:24:36Chris Winterbauer?

  She's fantastic. She's great in this movie.

• 1:24:38Lizzie Bassett?

  She's so good. Charlize Theron famously said she thought she should have won an Oscar for this.

• 1:24:43Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree.

• 1:24:43Lizzie Bassett?

  And of course, being Charlize, she was like, "The men get a lot of credit for these, but this is Uma's movie." I agree too. I think she's amazing. There is potentially talk of a Kill Bill 3, by the way.

• 1:24:53Chris Winterbauer?

  That'd be great. Lizzie, what went right?

• 1:24:58Lizzie Bassett?

  I'm gonna let you go first, Chris. I want to see what you pick.

• 1:25:01Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, I know what I would pick, but I want to let you pick it. Look, I will go first. There are two things that went right with this movie, and they are Uma Thurman and Quentin Tarantino.

• 1:25:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Uh huh.

• 1:25:13Chris Winterbauer?

  And to your point, I don't know. Maybe Quentin Tarantino sees it as a, I don't even know if he sees this. Maybe he has described it as a woman empowerment movie. I just think he at least likes to present himself as this amoral director, which I think is funny because I actually think he has this very like biblical sense of morality in all of his movies. And the good guys often win and the bad guys get their comeuppance in like a really gnarly way. And it's almost Old Testament, the way that he views things.

• 1:25:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Totally.

• 1:25:37Chris Winterbauer?

  And I actually think this is somebody, despite wanting to present himself as like the nerd who doesn't care. I think he cares deeply.

• 1:25:44Lizzie Bassett?

  I actually don't agree that he presents himself as the nerd who doesn't care. I think he does care so, so much.

• 1:25:50Chris Winterbauer?

  He used to. He does. Yes, that's fair. Sorry. I'm taking kind of earlier interviews and extrapolating from them. I'll leave him to you. I'll just say, without her grounding the movie in a very, very real emotional reality, it's just an exploitation revenge flick. It's an amazingly stylish, visually dynamic, funny, well-written, poetic exploitation revenge flick. But you need her, like she's the person that actually makes it. And so what I would say is the reason this movie, I view it as somewhat empowering is because of Uma Thurman, not because of Tarantino. I think he wrote a cool character. It's a really great character that she largely came up with too. It's the marriage of the two is my point.

• 1:26:34Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:34Chris Winterbauer?

  And that's why this accident, again, workplace accident is so unfortunate for so many reasons. So I'll leave it there.

• 1:26:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, it was the breakdown of what really was a pretty incredible working relationship. I don't know that they will ever really recover what they had prior to this accident.

• 1:26:54Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, it's hard to know. Can I say one last thing, Lizzie, about the Tarantino went right, went wrong? There's a really important moment, and this is the moment, we talked about it on The Crow, and we could talk about it regarding Vic Morrow and those two children on the Twilight Zone movie. And again, it's about the principle. It's not about the person. It's about, we want to enjoy movies and know that people didn't have to be hurt in making them. I think as an audience, we should all want that. And as filmmakers, everybody should want that. There's a moment when you're making a movie. I've had this moment, even though I've only made a couple tiny ones. No one's seen, that's totally fine. But it's the moment you feel it and you say, we're out of time, we're out of money. It's probably going to be fine. And you shoot it.

• 1:27:38Chris Winterbauer?

  You say, it's probably going to be fine. Maybe that moment is just you didn't get the performance you wanted. You know, it could be any. They said on Rust, it's probably fine when they didn't check the gun. They said it's probably fine when they reverse direction.

• 1:27:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:52Chris Winterbauer?

  It's just that moment. It's probably fine because the pressures feel so intense. It's when you say Uma will probably be fine with Harvey Weinstein. But what you're really saying is I don't know if anybody else is going to fund my crazy Kung Fu movie right now. And this guy will.

• 1:28:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, what you're saying is I accept the risk.

• 1:28:10Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, exactly right. If you're accepting that risk on behalf of somebody else.

• 1:28:14Lizzie Bassett?

  That's the problem.

• 1:28:15Chris Winterbauer?

  That's when it becomes a problem.

• 1:28:17Lizzie Bassett?

  I agree. Well, I think that you beautifully highlighted why I think the biggest what went right of this entire movie is Uma Thurman. I just don't think that there's any arguing with that. Her performance is remarkable. She doesn't just ground the movie. She also makes it fun, but she clues you into the sort of depths of how disturbing it is. In a few very choice moments that I thought are just so good. There's one when at the very end of volume two, when she reaches the villa and she's ready to kill Bill. And he reveals her daughter to her. And she's holding Bebe and you just see her face over the little girl's shoulder.

• 1:29:01Lizzie Bassett?

  And the look on her face when she's looking at Bill in that moment. Give her an Oscar. Like it goes from cartoon to just gut punching really real so quickly. And then right back into cartoon. And I think that is what's so successful about these movies. They literally shift from real to animation and right back. And it works, obviously because of the incredibly talented cast, crew and Tarantino all around it. But it does not work without her. I do want to give a massive, massive shout out to the incredible fight performers and choreographers on this film. Yan Wu Ping, the Crazy Eighty Eights are entirely his fight team. They are amazing.

• 1:29:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Tetsuro Shimaguchi, Sonny Chiba, Gordon Liu, it really just the performers in this are so, so fun to watch. I love them. It makes me want to watch more Kung Fu movies, more Samurai movies. It's just so, so good. So that wraps up our coverage of Kill Bill, volumes one and two. Thanks for sticking with us.

• 1:30:04Chris Winterbauer?

  Thank you, Lizzie.

• 1:30:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure.

• 1:30:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Before we announce what's coming next week, I'd just like to make one last plea. If you ever have the privilege or opportunity to direct a movie, to produce a movie, or you're just working on a movie and you think it's probably gonna be fine at any moment, just speak up to whoever's in, you know, authority over the scene or what's happening. And I know that can be intimidating. And this is a message to myself as much as it is to anybody else. Never assume it's probably gonna be fine. I know Dave Kamites, Steadicam Extraordinaire, would agree with us and back us up on this. If you think there could be a safety issue on a set.

• 1:30:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Plag it.

• 1:30:45Chris Winterbauer?

  I assure you, the time lost is nothing compared to what could be lost if you didn't say anything. And again, that's as much a message to myself as it is to anybody else out there. All right, Lizzie, that was great. Thank you so much. It's a, I love this movie. It's a very complicated, it's a weird, but I feel many things when I think of this movie, you know? I'm glad we had this conversation and you never fail to give me more and more great insights into the victims of movies at the end of the day. And that's very important. As we enjoy these things, we need to understand how they're made. Okay, enough on that. My, what is coming next? What's coming next? Let's talk about it. We have a very, very

• 1:31:27Chris Winterbauer?

  fun, very outlandish, satirical, misunderstood upon release, still some of the best visual effects I've ever seen to this day, film. Lizzie, can you say the name?

• 1:31:38Lizzie Bassett?

  I believe it's Starship Troopers.

• 1:31:41Chris Winterbauer?

  We cannot wait to see you guys there. In the meantime, if you guys are enjoying this podcast, there are five easy ways to support us. Number one, tell a family member or friend. Number two, leave us a rating and review. On whatever podcatcher you are listening on. Number three, hit subscribe or follow on that podcatcher. So our episodes drop every Monday for you to listen to. Number four, we are doing a live show, our first live show ever at the Caveat Theater in Manhattan this October, October 8th and 9th of 2025. That is two shows, both start at 9:00 PM and we are covering not one, but two movies. It's going to be a versus night with Deep Impact and Armageddon. Which one will win? Will it be the scientists or the oil drillers?

• 1:32:26Chris Winterbauer?

  We will learn on October 8th and 9th of 2025 at 9:00 PM. We're covering both films each night, same show each night. So pick whichever night works best for you. If you're interested in tickets, head to cheerfulearful.podlifeevents.com. Hit the festival for the New York festival and then go down to our logo and click on what went wrong and get yourself a ticket. That's October 8th and 9th in Manhattan at the Caveat Theater, starting at 9:00 PM. Deep Impact, Armageddon, the end is nigh. And of course, the last way you can support this show is by joining our Patreon. Head to www.patreon.com/whatwentwrongpodcast.

• 1:33:07Chris Winterbauer?

  You can join for free, join for a dollar to vote on films that we cover in the future. For $5, you can get an ad-free RSS feed, or for $50, you can get a shout out from the bride, just like one of these.

• 1:34:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Jen Mastromarina, Christopher Elner, Blaze Ambrose, Jerome Wilkinson, Ruel Gehr, Lance Stater, Nate the Knife, Lena, Half Greyhound, Brittany Morris, Darren and Dale Conklin, Jake Killen, Matthew Jacobson, Grace Potter, Ellen Singleton, JJ Rapido, Jui Sri Samat, Scott Gerwin, Sadie, Just Sadie, Brian Donahue, Adrian Pengkaria,

• 1:34:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Chris Leo, Kathleen Olson, Rook, Leah Bowman, Steve Winterbauer, Don Schibl, Rosemary Southward, Tom Kristin, Jason Frankel, Somen Chinani, Michael McGrath, Lan Relag, and Lydia Howes. Thank you all.

• 1:35:26Chris Winterbauer?

  All right, guys. That does it. Until next time. Bye-bye. Bang-bang.

• 1:35:35Speaker 06

  Go to patreon.com/whatwentwrongpodcast to support What Went Wrong and check out our website at whatwentwrongpod.com. What Went Wrong is a Sad Boom Podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Editing and music by David Bowman. This episode was researched by Laura Woods with additional editing from Karen Krupso.