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“Kill Bill” DVD makes two films one

Wed 11 August, 2004 22:04



By Bob Tourtellotte



LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Director Quentin Tarantino has one lament about splitting his “Kill Bill” movies into Volumes I and II. It sacrificed actress Uma Thurman’s shot at winning awards this past season in Hollywood.



But this week the DVD for “Kill Bill Vol. II” hit retail shelves, and for the first time – excluding special screenings at the film’s release last April – the director’s fans can see both movies the way they were meant to be seen: as one.



“The only thing that was lost from splitting the movie in half is, I think, we could have done better during the awards time,” Tarantino told Reuters. “It would have been pretty hard for Uma not to have been nominated for best actress.”



“Vol. I” lacked the emotional and dramatic scenes that normally win award votes in Hollywood, and because it was released in the fall of 2003, it was the only one of the two that qualified for last year’s awards-season race.



The “Kill Bill” movies have been described in many ways – kung fu movies, action flicks, revenge tales, spaghetti westerns. There is no doubt that, as one, they are epic.



Thurman portrays “The Bride,” a one-time trained assassin who awakes from a coma after an attempt to murder her fails. Her former employer, Bill (David Carradine), put out the kill contract, and throughout “Vol. I,” she fights her way through her former colleagues to get back at Bill.



“Vol. II” goes deeper into the reasons behind The Bride’s motivation for vengeance.



As one movie, the two segments would have lasted longer than four hours, making it too long for commercial theatrical release. Tarantino understands the one film had to be cut in two, and he still thinks doing so was the best move to make.



“The average person, going to see a movie on Friday or Saturday, doesn’t want to sit down for more than two and one-half hours,” he said.



With the DVD, of course, fans can hit the pause button. With the two DVDs, they can take an intermission break and go outside to practice their own kung fu moves.



“Kill Bill Vol. 1” DVDs and videos sold 2 million units on their first day, according to the movie’s backers at Miramax Films, a unit of The Walt Disney Co.



Tarantino said fans were watching the DVD during the day and going to see Vol. II in theatres the same evening.



The “Vol. II” DVD has few of the extra features that are typically loaded onto DVDs, Tarantino said, because so much of what was shot made it into the movie.



The one deleted scene that made the DVD is a fight sequence between Carradine and martial arts expert Michael Jai White (“Spawn”). Also on the DVD is a “making of the movie” featurette.



Now that it’s over, the director said he doesn’t yet know what he will do next. He said he will likely do more big, epic, films like “Kill Bill” but he won’t try to replicate it.



“The only thing I know is: I just climbed Mount Everest. It was the hardest I ever worked on anything; I don’t know if I want to climb Mount Everest” again, he said.

Part of an interview with Quentin taken from a magazine:



Q. So can you explain to us what exactly is going on with the Kill Bill DVDs?

It’ll be like this: we’ll put the two films on a giant collector DVD but not only that, the Japanese version is a special version I made in Japan for Japan and it’s only been shown in two places in the world: Hong Kong and Japan - the rest of Asia couldn’t handle it. So what will happen is after everything is all said and done I’m going to put the two Japanese versions together and that will be the four-hour movie that would have come out. I stopped short of calling it definitive for the simple reason that this movie is one of those weird movies where I’ll probably never do another one like it, there’s no definitive version. Each version is kind of unique and gives you a different experience



brianLL:

You can see all of the color photos from the Vol 2. magazine here: http://1900brian.com/killbill/. I’ll be posting the scans from Vol. 1 next weekend. Both books are about 95 pages, and dedicate about 25 pages to QT’s film making. They come wrapped in a resealable plastic cover. Well worth it.

QT said in an interview, that there will be also 2 different versions of Volume 2 - like Volume 1.

Has someone more information? Before reading this interview I thought there will be only one V 2 version.

Or did I understand the sentence wrong, cuz my english is so bad?



here is the part of the interview:



Q: Is it true you have plans to combine the two volumes into one movie?

QT: I did a special version of Volume 1 – and also of Volume 2 – for Japan and that‘s only been shown in two markets in the whole world, in Hong Kong and Japan. I‘ve kept the rights to the Japanese version, so what we‘re going to do is release that round the world at some point, and we‘ll put them both together. You won‘t have the closing credits of Volume 1 going on, it will be like a 60s roadshow attraction, a four hour movie with an intermission in the middle.



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