Trivia / Kill Bill

• Ability over Appearance: Quentin Tarantino originally intended to cast a Japanese actress to play O-Ren Ishii, but before casting began, he saw Lucy Liu's work in Shanghai Noon, and immediately changed O-Ren into a Chinese-Japanese-American so that Liu could play the part.
• Acting for Two:
  • Gordon Liu plays both Johnny Mo, the head general of the Crazy 88 in Volume 1, and Pai Mei, Beatrix's old Chinese mentor, in Volume 2.
  • Michael Parks plays both Texas town sheriff Earl McGraw in Part 1, and the retired Mexican pimp Esteban Vihaio in Part 2.
• Actor-Inspired Element:
  • Julie Dreyfus suggested two popular pieces of music for the movie, the first one being "The Chase", where Elle drives to Budd's trailer, and the second one being "The Sunny Road To Salina", where The Bride walks through the desert to Budd's trailer. Julie's father is a record producer, who owns the rights to the soundtrack of La route de Salina, from where these pieces of music come.
  • Daryl Hannah owns the car (a 1980 Pontiac Trans-Am) her character drives in the film. However, she only owns the one that was used for promotional shots, because Michael Madsen got the working Trans-Am before she got to it.
• Approval of God: Some Norwegian amateur actors decided to make a parody of the film titled "Kill Buljo". It became a success in Norway, and Tarantino himself enjoyed it greatly.
• California Doubling: The House of Blue Leaves is allegedly located in Tokyo. It was actually filmed at the old Shaw Brothers studio backlot in Hong Kong.
• Cameo Prop: The sunglasses the Bride takes from Buck are Clarence's from True Romance.
• Career Resurrection: This film gave Uma Thurman a much-needed career boost after a dry run in the late '90s with the failures of Batman & Robin and The Avengers (1998). She had a few years of renewed exposure before her on-set injury (see below) limited the number of films she could safely work on.
• Cast the Expert: The brothel segment, where the Bride meets with Esteban Vihaio, was the last scene of the movie to be shot. It was filmed at a real Mexican brothel, and all of the female extras were the actual sex workers employed there.
• Cast the Runner-Up: Originally, Quentin Tarantino wanted Michael Madsen to play Johnny Mo. However, he decided that Madsen would be better as Bill's brother, so he had him play Budd instead. In the original script, the character was named Mr. Barrel, and with the black suit, white shirt combo, was seemingly a reference to Madsen's famous portrayal of Mr. Blonde. While everyone else wore masks, he didn't, citing that they "Fucked up his hair." Also, unlike his film counterpart, Mr. Barrel simply walks away, leaving O-Ren to deal with The Bride.
• Colbert Bump: Really, how many people would have known the song "Battle Without Honor or Humanity" (which originated from the old kung-fu film Five Fingers of Death a.k.a King Boxer) had it not been featured in this movie?
• Creator Backlash:
  • Uma Thurman has nothing good to say about the film(s), especially considering the events of 2018 with Harvey Weinstein. Ironically, despite filming it being such a terrible experience for her, Kill Bill gave her career the boost it needed to propel her to renewed stardom.
  • Quentin Tarantino considers the now-infamous car stunt to be the biggest mistake of his life, especially after Uma herself spoke about how terrible the stunt was and how it led to damage to her body, along with her beliefs that Weinstein caused the problems with that stunt.
  • That said, following the two talking through what happened and rekindling their friendship, apparently they have talked together about a potential third installment.
• The Danza:
  • Larry Bishop plays Larry Gomez.
  • In terms of surnames, you have Helen Kim as Karen Kim.
• Defictionalization: On a meta level, the entire film has been described as the real-life version of Fox Force Five, the failed TV pilot that Mia Wallace in Pulp Fiction starred in, thanks to the number of similarities in their plots, characters, and general tone.
• Deleted Role: Michael Jai White as a martial artist with a score to settle with Bill.
• Deleted Scene: Bill originally had a fight scene with Michael Jai White and his henchmen. See it here.
• Enforced Method Acting: As mentioned below on Hostility on the Set, Uma Thurman and Daryl Hannah didn't exactly have the most friendly of relationships, which makes the Bride and Elle Driver's mutual antagonistic behavior towards each other all the more authentic.
• Executive Meddling: The only time in Tarantino's career that this happened, and for two different things. Firstly, The Weinsteins asked to cut the film into two parts since the first cut was running around 4 hours long. Second was for the Crazy 88s fight to be in black and white since the color version nearly got the film an NC-17 rating, which is considered a kiss of death for a wide-release movie. The only versions that have this scene are the "Whole Bloody Affair" cut which screens sporadically at Tarantino's own New Beverley Cinema and the Japanese DVD release.
• Extremely Lengthy Creation: It took six years to write the entire script before it was split into two parts. The original draft was about two hundred twenty pages long.
• Fake Mixed Race: The half-Japanese, half-French Sophie Fatale is played by the fully French Julie Dreyfus. Likewise, the half-Japanese, half-Chinese American O-Ren Ishii is played by the fully Chinese-American Lucy Liu.
• Fake Nationality:
  • Played straight in Vol. 1 with Chinese martial artist Gordon Liu playing Japanese general of the Crazy 88s Johnny Mo, but averted in Vol. 2 when he plays Chinese Pai Mei.
  • American Michael Parks as the Mexican pimp Esteban Vihaio in Vol. 2. For that matter, the reveal that Bill and Budd are also Mexican would make them examples, as neither David Carradine nor Michael Madsen has any Mexican ancestry.
• Follow the Leader: In the original script, the fight between the Bride and Elle Driver was supposed to resemble her fight with O-Ren Ishii. Quentin Tarantino revealed in an interview with Entertainment Weekly that he changed it the day after catching a showing of Jackass The Movie at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, Texas.
• Hostility on the Set: Uma Thurman and Daryl Hannah didn't get on well. This even stretched to after filming was done.
• Missing Trailer Scene: While Michael Jai White is featured in the Vol. 1 teaser, his scene did not make it into either film.
• On-Set Injury: Near the end of filming, Uma Thurman was injured in a crash while filming the scene in which the Bride drives to Bill. She was uncomfortable driving the car and asked a stunt driver to do it, but Quentin Tarantino assured her that the car and road were safe. She lost control of the car and hit a tree, suffering a concussion and damage to her knees. Thurman requested the crash footage, but Miramax would only release it, in Thurman's words, if she signed a document "releasing them of any consequences of [Thurman's] future pain and suffering". Tarantino was apologetic, but he and Thurman had an acrimonious relationship for years afterwards; she said after the accident she "went from being a creative contributor and performer to being like a broken tool". Miramax released the footage in 2018 after Thurman went to the police following the revelations of rampant sexual abuse by Harvey Weinstein.
• Playing Against Type: Most of Michael Madsen's other work is a variation on his most famous role, which was in another Tarantino movie, as a brutal psychopath and murderer. Here, he's part of a whole gang of psychotic murderers... but he's probably the sanest and least evil out of any of them.
• Promoted Fanboy: The House of Blue Leaves fight was filmed in the old Shaw Brothers studios backlot, fittingly enough, as Quentin Tarantino himself is a huge fanboy of the Shaws' martial arts movies.
• Prop Recycling: The Tokyo miniature sets were leftovers from Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack!.
• Real-Life Relative: Texas Ranger Earl McGraw's "Son Number One", Edgar, is played by Michael Parks' real-life son, James.
• Referenced by...:
  • In Ghosts of the Federation, Kat is interested in a katana that the storekeeper describes as "A precisssse replica of the very blade with which the Bride ssstruck down her nemessssissss, the cruel and dassstardly 'Bill.'"
    • ...which is Hilarious in Hindsight when you realise that the Bride used the Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique to kill Bill, and her sword didn't have anything to do with it.
  • The 130th chapter of Chainsaw Man is titled "Kill Building".
• Science Marches On: The MythBusters tested whether it's really possible for a person to punch their way out of a coffin buried deep underground, with the conclusion that it isn't: even the world's most skilled boxer wouldn't be able to punch a hole with that little space for drawing the fist back to create enough force, and before they'd manage to create a crack the air would have run out anyway. And even if a person did manage to punch through, they would immediately be buried and suffocated in dirt.
• Spared by the Cut: The Bride was originally supposed to kill Elle by slicing her throat.
• Stunt Double: Zoë Bell was Uma Thurman's stunt double. She really sliced a baseball in half with a samurai sword.
• Throw It In!: Daryl Hannah improvised the scene where Elle Driver's eye gets removed by the Bride and she goes "nuts". She did this because she thought it would make Quentin Tarantino laugh. He did, and that scene appears in the final film. She sustained injuries from breaking so many things in the bathroom.
• Troubled Production: The filming of this movie led to the disintegration of the working relationship between Uma Thurman and Quentin Tarantino, on account of this trope. According to Thurman's telling of the story, Tarantino pushed her to do a dangerous vehicle stunt herself rather than swapping in a stunt driver, despite her misgivings about the safety of it, describing the stunt car as a "deathbox" that wasn't properly maintained and the winding, sandy road she was asked to drive on at 40 mph as unsafe; sure enough, she got into a bad accident while shooting the scene. Tarantino and Thurman bitterly fought each other over the incident during the promotional tour, and Thurman spent fifteen years trying to get a hold of the set footage showing the crash, finally doing so in 2018 and releasing it in an op-ed in The New York Times.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Tarantino originally intended it to be one long movie with an intermission.
  • In the original script, Gogo was a pair of Creepy Twins: the silent one at O-Ren's side and the Ax-Crazy one at the bar. After the quiet one (Gogo) is killed, the crazy one (Yuki) stalks the Bride all the way to Pasadena (that's her in the ice cream truck in Vol. 1). Yuki takes some ultra-steroids that Bill's cooked up and goes after the Bride with guns and bombs, blowing up the Pussy Wagon in the process, but dies of an overdose before killing her. The Bride is so shaken that she calls Hanzo for reassurance and then calls a certain Nurse Bonnie to fix her up. Bonnie is hysterical and claims she "got out of that a long time ago," but like Hanzo is ultimately not immune to the Bride's charms. This is still referenced in the final cut: when the Bride meets Esteban in a convertible, he says that Bill said she would be driving a truck. She simply replies that her "Pussy Wagon died on her".
  • The climax of the film was originally written as a sword-fight on the beach, under the moonlight, between the Bride (clad in her wedding dress) and Bill. When the production ran long, Harvey Weinstein insisted Tarantino cut the scene back. All that remains is Bill's brief reference to such a fight while Beatrix sits on his sofa, and the poster for the film, with Beatrix in the dress, holding her sword.
  • There are rumours that the original script called for Beatrix to kill O-Ren via decapitation (which would have been a Karmic Death for O-Ren, given how often she killed people that way). It was scrapped because that would have made O-Ren's dying words — recanting her previous refusal to believe that the sword was an authentic Hanzō sword — impossible.
  • Warren Beatty was who Tarantino had initially envisioned as Bill. The character was originally envisioned as a suave, James Bond type. Kevin Costner was offered the role, but he was busy with Open Range. Jack Nicholson, Burt Reynolds, Mickey Rourke, and Kurt Russell also passed on it.
  • Ricardo Montalbán was cast to play Esteban. Unable to make an early read-through of the script, his lines were read by Michael Parks, who impressed Tarantino so much that he re-cast Parks instead.
  • In one version of the script for Volume II, Pai Mei's lips would be speaking Cantonese while his voice (dubbed by Tarantino) would be in English, imitating a bad dub job.
  • The biggest one is yet to come — the planned third volume (with the story potentially either focusing on "the revenge of two killers whose arms and eye were hacked by Uma Thurman in the first stories", or a daughter's revenge story), which Quentin has gone back and forth on whether he's filming it. As of 2018, things don't look good: in a 2014 interview, Tarantino mentioned plans to retire after directing his tenth film; Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019) is his ninth film, leaving just one more chance for Volume 3 to see the light of day. Tarantino's tenth and final film has been announced as The Movie Critic, putting any possibility of a third volume to rest. The possibility of a third volume had already been called into question by this point, given Uma Thurman's estrangement from Tarantino. Fortunately, the two have mended fences in the last few years, and the possibility of Thurman's Real Life daughter Maya Hawke playing a grown-up B.B. has been raised.
  • In the original draft of the scene where the Bride fights Gogo and the Crazy 88s, she wields both a katana and a boomerang.
  • Another draft featured a scene in which the Bride's "Pussy Wagon" is blown up by Elle Driver.
  • In the original script, Johnny Mo was called Mr. Barrel. He had a Kato mask on a stick, like someone from a seventeenth century costume ball. Mr. Barrel didn't like the rubber bands on the typical Kato masks because they "fucked up his hair". The Bride convinces him not to fight her, and he walks away, leaving O-Ren with no bodyguards.
  • Vernita Green's original codename was "Cobra", before it was changed to "Copperhead".
  • According to The Kill Bill Diary (written by David Carradine), the movie that the Bride and her daughter would watch was originally going to be The Aristocats. When Disney wouldn't allow it, Quentin decided to have them watch an episode of Samurai Jack. But, the film featured in the final cut (or overheard, as we only see their faces as they watch), is Shogun Assassin.
  • In the original script, Bill told the Bride the story of Pai Mei in the jeep on the way to the temple.
  • Tarantino stated he would have loved to write a scene with Elle Driver and Beatrix growing fifty feet tall and fighting, a reference to the remade Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, featuring the same Daryl Hannah in the main role.
• Word of Saint Paul: According to David Carradine, the man in the animé flashback who kills O-Ren's father is a younger Bill.
• Writing by the Seat of Your Pants: During production, Quentin Tarantino wrote new scenes as he shot, thus compiling massive amounts of footage.
• You Look Familiar: Michael Parks plays Earl McGraw in Volume 1 and Esteban Vihaio in Volume 2. Gordon Liu plays Johnny Mo in Volume 1 and Pai Mei in Volume 2.

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