For Kill Bill producer Lawrence Bender, "Going to China was the best thing that we did. Quentin felt very strongly that when he was in China, he wanted that input, to have a Chinese creative team. He didn't want an all-American crew to go over to China and say, 'This is how we're going to do it.' And as a result our Japanese and Chinese art teams did stuff together that no one could have ever dreamed of.”
Bender, Tarantino, and the principle cast traveled to China in May, 2002, to continue training and action choreography, and to begin rehearsals. By mid-June line producer E. Bennett Walsh, associate producer Dede Nickerson, production supervisor Koko Maeda, and Academy Award-winning director of photography Robert Richardson had put together a multinational crew, with several teams of translators, and had settled into work at the Beijing Film Studios, located in the northern section of the Chinese capitol.
Kill Bill employed a Chinese, a Japanese and an American production designer, a Chinese and an American costume designer, and a Chinese and an American prop master. A team of Chinese and American assistant directors supervised the day-to-day operation of the production. American first assistant director Bill Clark, a veteran of Tarantino's films since Pulp Fiction, worked closely with Chinese first assistant director, Zhang Jin Zhan to coordinate the massive cast and crew.
"It's two very different ways of working,” Bender explains. “The American way is very precise. You’ve generally got one or two guys on each piece of equipment, and they are quiet and orderly. But the Chinese way is to have twenty people making a ton of noise and all working to get it done. They use a lot more crew and they get things done very quickly."
On their first day in China, the Kill Bill crew completed twenty-two set ups, almost unheard of for a typical Hollywood production. After completing their work at the Beijing Studios, where the huge set for Vol. 1’s House of Blue Leaves was constructed, the cast and crew set out for a week of location shooting at an ancient temple in the town of Zhongwei.
First built in the 17th century the Gao Temple “is a magnificent jumble of buildings and styles covering an area of about four thousand square meters,” according to a Chinese tourist web sit. The arduous daily climb to the set, up a massive flight of stairs on the east side of Miao Gao Mountain, 240 meters high, was only a taste of the rigors involved in filming the Shaolin kung fu training sequences featuring Uma Thurman, Daryl Hannah, and Gordon Liu, "The Cruel Tutelage of Pei Mei."
The action sequences in the Kill Bill script were already unusually detailed. Tarantino had been re-writing and refining them in the planning, training, and rehearsals phases for the better part of a year. In Beijing he continued the process, describing the scenes in even more detail and when necessary acting them out. Surrounded by a team of Japanese, Mandarin and Cantonese translators, he worked through each shot as the crew, the actors, Master Yuen, and the wirework team watched and walked through it alongside him. By the time they hit the ground on Miao Gao Mountain, they were ready to rumble.
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