Would you consider producing?
No, I don’t like doing that now. Making a movie is hard work, man. If I’m not making my own movie, I don’t want to make a movie. I’d rather watch it. I want to have a life and not get all caught up in the business crap.
What do you do when you’re not making movies?
What you’d expect – read, listen to music, hang out with friends, watch my video and DVD collection. Get obsessions about this or that. I’m a film historian so I’m always trying to feed my brain. All of a sudden you watch a movie with Aldo Ray, and then you have go see all of Ray’s movies.
What kinds of books do you read?
All kinds of stuff. For a fun read, I’m more attracted to genre-oriented stuff, like crime stories or mysteries. I’m not really into science fiction. Stuff that’s a little more story oriented. But if somebody turns me on to a writer that I like, then it’s not about story or genre. Then it’s just about the writer’s point of view. One of my favorite books of all time is Larry McMurtry’s ‘‘All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers.’’ It’s a very influential book to me. I always use McMurtry as an example of what I’m trying to do in one way or another. I’ve always like the way he moves characters from book to book. When I sell my movies, I always retain the rights to characters so I can follow them. I can follow Butch or anybody and it’s not ‘‘Pulp Fiction II.’’ If I want to put Pumpkin and Honey Bunny in a movie, it’s like, no worries.
What’s next? Will it be the much-discussed ‘‘Inglorious Bastards’’ – what you’ve described as your ‘‘Dirty Dozen’’?
I’m going to take a little break – not as long as the last time – but I’ll probably do something small, something modest, in between, and then do the war movie. I have to finish that script, but I also have this weird thing of, Do I want to dive in? Do I want to climb Mount Everest again?
Do you ever worry that your moment has passed? As popular as ‘‘Kill Bill’’ was, it didn’t have nearly the water-cooler buzz of ‘‘Reservoir Dogs’’ or ‘‘Pulp Fiction.’’
It’s not really anything I think about. Maybe thirty thousand people saw ‘‘Reservoir Dogs’’ at the theater, so if they were talking about the movie they were talking about a movie they hadn’t seen. ‘‘Pulp Fiction’’ was a phenomenon. You can’t count on making a phenomenon every time out of the gate or you’re going to be one sorry bastard. And when you make a movie as violent as ‘‘Kill Bill,’’ you can’t be surprised when people don’t want to see it. Harvey Weinstein always says, ‘‘We could make 100 million dollars if people weren’t DROWNING IN BLOOD!’’ [Laughs] But considering the gore, he’s thrilled with the business we did. I didn’t realize you had to grade on a curve with violence.
It’s been reported that you might work with your friend Robert Rodriguez on his next film, ‘‘Sin City.’’
It could very well happen sometime this summer. It’s based on one of Frank Miller’s graphic novels, and I totally want to do it. I’d be a special guest director. [Rodriguez] wrote the score for ‘‘Kill Bill – Vol. 2’’ and he charged me a dollar to do it, so I’ll charge him one dollar for directing.
And can we can expect to see ‘‘Kill Bill – Vol. 3’’ in about 15 years?
I don’t know if I’ll call it ‘‘Vol. 3.’’ And Uma won’t be the star of it, though she’ll be in it. The star will be Vernita Green’s [Vivica A. Fox’s] daughter, Nikki [Ambrosia Kelley]. And I know everything that will take her up to this time. Sofie Fatale [Julie Dreyfus] will get all of Bill’s money, and she will raise Nikki, and she will go to take on the Bride. Nikki deserves her revenge every bit as much as the Bride deserved hers. I might even, a year from now, shoot a couple of scenes for it and put it in the vault for 15 years from now so I can get the actresses while they’re this age. It’s really exciting to know that somewhere out there is a little girl who’s going to grow up to be my leading lady.
One critic suggested that a person with children could never have written the scene where the Bride kills Vernita in front of her child in ‘‘Kill Bill – Vol. 1.’’
I completely and utterly disagree. When you’re dealing in the genres of Hong Kong kung fu films and spaghetti Westerns, or even American Westerns, that is an absolute staple of those movies–the 4-year-old child is on the prairie and they’ve seen their parents slaughtered and they spend the rest of their lives avenging the deaths. At that moment the child is dead and the warrior is born – that’s the symbolism.
