In late March, Quentin Tarantino invited Entertainment Weekly’s executive editor Mary Kaye Schilling to his L.A. home, where she interviewed him for the magazine’s April 16 cover story. For those of you who don’t want to miss a detail (like the fact that the ‘‘Kill Bill’’ director has never seen ‘‘The Sopranos’’), here’s a special bonus: the complete transcript of their three-hour talk. Unlike some of the Bride’s victims, this interview is uncut.
Entertainment Weekly: Let’s start with ‘‘Kill Bill 2.’’ Turns out it’s a love story. Who knew? But I’m not just talking about Bill and the Bride. And somehow I don’t think we’ve seen the last of her.
Quentin Tarantino I love the Bride. I LOVE her, all right? I want her to be happy. I don’t want to come up with screwed-up scenarios that she has to fight the whole rest of her life. I killed myself to put her in a good place at the end of this long journey. So when I was even thinking about the idea of a trilogy, I wanted to give her 10 years of peace, 10 years of motherhood. She deserves peace after all this.
Without giving too much else away, after the Bride kills Bill, she seems to retire. Do you have a fantasy of what the Bride’s future is? Will she kill again?
Oh, I know what happens to her. Initially I was thinking this would be my ‘‘Dollars’’ trilogy. I was going to do a new one every 10 years – the first one starting when Uma was 30, the second when she’s 40, and the last when she’s 50. Now we’re not going to do that because I need at least 15 years before I do this again. Uma and I can do something else together, but picking this thing up again, we need distance, and a decade ain’t enough.
That passionate connection with your main characters – it really comes across in your films.
Well, the thing is, the characters are also me. I consider myself a Method writer. I am the Bride, and I started taking on little feminine tendencies during the writing process, and just like an actor you go with it. It was great to look at the world for [over a] year with that perspective.
One of the jokes in the first film is that Uma’s character is known only as the Bride; anytime she says her name, it’s bleeped. Bill refers to her as ‘‘kiddo,’’ and what you learn in ‘‘2’’ is that that’s actually her last name – Beatrix Kiddo. Where did that name come from?
You think they’ve been hiding her name, but Bill’s been saying it all along. Uma came up with the name Beatrix – she worked for somebody with that name. And I came up with Kiddo. That’s what I call women – when I really like a girl, I call her '‘kiddo.’'
Bill’s Superman monologue was inspired – a real geek-a-thon, not to mention Jungian. How did you come up with it?
The genesis was in the first subtextual piece I ever read in my life. Now I love textual film criticism – I love that the critic really gets to be the artist; it really doesn’t matter what the writer or director was thinking. But this piece was in this one big book about comic books – I don’t remember the name – and I was 12 or 13, and basically the point was that when Superman wakes up in the morning, he’s Superman. A radioactive spider didn’t bite him, nothing happened to him. He is who he is. Would he be so super on the Planet Krypton? No. But he’s not there. So over the years I would tell the story more and more, and flesh it out and start adding to the thesis and working it. The Madonna speech in ‘‘Reservoir Dogs,’’ or the Sicilian speech in ‘‘True Romance’’ – all that happened in the same way, with verbiage, going off on a thought, trying to be entertaining, thought-provoking, going for the laughs. That’s where the Superman speech came out of, but it was never intended for this movie until we were in Beijing preproduction. We all went out to dinner and that subject came up – this cool little story and everyone liked it.
So going with your premise that for Superman, unlike with other superheroes, the human part of him is the mask, the part being played, do you have a Clark Kent?
Oh gosh. Good – that is what really got me thinking about that question too. You know, I don’t think I do. Truth be told, I don’t think the people who like me want my act cleaned up. I think my outsider energy is one of the things people generally respond to. I might clean up, and sometimes I want to look handsome, dress in nice stuff…
