Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003)

KILL BILL is both an homage and a reimagining of the genre films that Quentin Tarantino has seen and loved: spaghetti westerns, Chinese martial arts films, Japanese samurai movies as well as anime. Put simply, Tarantino describes the movie as a "duck press" of all the grindhouse cinema he's absorbed over the past 35 years. The film is conceived in chapters, each with the characteristic look and pulse of a specific genre and then interwoven with references from pop culture and other genres.

When a rubout sequence from a yakuza film is presented in Japanese anime imagery with a score lifted from an Italian Western what comes through is a sense of the thematic and
emotional binding energy that gives all of these forms their enduring power. Tarantino evokes not just the gaudy, engaging surface of genre cinema but also its rebel spirit.

As a result the archetypal characters of Vol 1. have a surprising undercurrent of emotional conviction that pulls us toward the ultimate confrontations of Vol. 2.

Kill Bill-Vol. 1 opens nationwide on October 10, 2003, with Kill Bill Vol. 2 following on February 20, 2004.

Strange as it may sound, some of the origin of Kill Bill is geographical. Tarantino spent his youth in the South Bay, the region south of Los Angeles in Orange County that includes Manhattan Beach. His previous movie, Jackie Brown (1997) is set in that vicinity and is a showcase for the area's many charms.

The South Bay was an area that still had second-run "grind houses," showing blaxploitation and kung fu films, long after the market had dried up in more northerly sections of the city.

"I was a little kid when the kung fu explosion hit in the early '70's," Tarantino recalls, of his schooling in Old School Martial Arts Cinema. "For about two years they were showing all these kung fu films all the time. And even after the kung fu craze died out everywhere else, it was kept alive in the late 70's and early 80's in areas like the South Bay, in grind houses and ghetto theaters. I think it's one of the greatest genres of cinema that ever existed."

On television, Tarantino watched The Green Hornet, which featured a young Bruce Lee as the title hero’s masked sidekick, and later followed the exploits of David Carradine's Eurasian kung fu master, Caine, on the ABC-TV series Kung Fu. A few years later he extended his interest in Asian action genres, tuning in a local Japanese-language UHF station to follow the subtitled exploits of Sonny Chiba's ninja-detective, Hattori Hanzo, on the imported series Shadow Warriors. When the new wave of Hong Kong action cinema hit in the mid-1980s, Tarantino, by then a video store clerk in Manhattan Beach, was one of its earliest and most vociferous boosters.

Knowledgeable Tarantino-philes have been spotting the influence of these punchy films on the writer/director's work right from the beginning: Sonny Chiba’s ultra-violent Streetfighter films influenced the screenplay for True Romance and the Hong Kong action movie City of Fire was given a nod in his thunderous directorial debut, Reservoir Dogs (1992). “Sonny Chiba was to me right up there in the 1970s with Charles Bronson and Clint Eastwood as one of the greatest action stars,” Tarantino says.

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