In the Pei Mei flashback sequences, Tarantino honors a central convention of kung fu cinema: the “training for revenge” motif, in which we see a student acquiring skills that will pay off decisively in a later battle. Here the master passes on two top secret lethal techniques that The Bride has occasion to use only years later, when her quest for revenge takes her back to the US for a reunion with her daughter, to climactic encounters with her bitter rival, Elle Driver, and to a final showdown with Bill himself.
The preliminary bout to these title card events is the surprisingly heartfelt and vicious encounter between Elle Driver and Sidewinder Budd, Bill’s kid brother. Asked to account for the intensity of their battle, Hannah says: “Michael Madsen plays Budd, and Michael is a lovely guy, but Budd is sort of a despicable alcoholic. At least that’s my character’s opinion of him. He used to be a professional but now he just sits around in filth and drinks all day and does nothing. So we have to own up to our distaste for each other”
The scene includes a dramatic appearance by The Bride’s namesake, an actual Black Mamba, the deadliest poisonous snake on earth. “I bring a little friend to visit Budd,” Hannah agrees. “We had an actual Black Mamba on the set, which I guess they took the venom sacks out of.” “It’s a creepy snake,” admits Madsen, whose character was on the receiving end. “If you get that venom in your system, it’s over. It’s a slow suffocation. Reading that scene was one thing, but the actual scenes with the snake were a little harder to get through than I thought they would be. Although I also think that helped the energy of the scene.”
Tarantino had something special planned for the showdown between archrivals Elle Driver and The Bride: “I wanted it to be the ultimate cinematic cat fight of all time. It’s not a martial arts fight, alright, it’s a catfight. I mean, it sounds exciting: Uma Thurman and Daryl Hannah having a fight to the death. I’d pay to see that. Daryl, you know, actually starred in a TV version of Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, and there was even something about the very idea of this fight that made it sound like a Japanese superhero movie. I almost wished there was a way I could feed them a pill that would make them both 60 feet tall so that they could have their fight in a city and destroy half of it. In terms of re-creating my favorite Asian film genres, that’s really the only stone left unturned.”
Tarantino was able to give a nod to Japanese giant monster films: he used the actual scale model of Tokyo that was constructed at Toho studios for their Godzilla films as the backdrop for a shot in Kill Bill Vol. 1 of The Bride’s plane swooping down over the city.
Finally, it all comes down to Bill: David Carradine. As an undisputed global icon of the Kung Fu Craze of the 1970s, and a boyhood idol of Quentin Tarantino, Carradine clearly deserves a prime niche in a film designed, in large part, as the writer-director’s loving tribute to one of his favorite genres. Shaw Brothers great Gordon Liu has acknowledged the importance of Carradine’s performance as Caine on the ABC-TV series Kung Fu in popularizing the Chinese fistic arts around the world.
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