Kill Bill Vol on Blu-ray

By: Static Multimedia

Friday September 12, 2008

Tarantino tells about his Asian influences - Volume 1 and Volume 2
Strange as it may sound, some of the origin of Kill Bill is geographical. Tarantino spent his youth in the South Bay, the region south of Los Angeles in Orange County that includes Manhattan Beach. His previous movie, Jackie Brown (1997) is set in that vicinity and is a showcase for the area's many charms.

The South Bay was an area that still had second-run "grind houses," showing blaxploitation and kung fu films, long after the market had dried up in more northerly sections of the city. "I was a little kid when the kung fu explosion hit in the early '70's," Tarantino recalls, of his schooling in Old School Martial Arts Cinema. "For about two years they were showing all these kung fu films all the time. And even after the kung fu craze died out everywhere else, it was kept alive in the late 70's and early 80's in areas like the South Bay, in grind houses and ghetto theaters. I think it's one of the greatest genres of cinema that ever existed."

On television, Tarantino watched The Green Hornet, which featured a young Bruce Lee as the title hero’s masked sidekick, and later followed the exploits of David Carradine's Eurasian kung fu master, Caine, on the ABC-TV series Kung Fu. A few years later he extended his interest in Asian action genres, tuning in a local Japanese-language UHF station to follow the subtitled exploits of Sonny Chiba's ninja-detective, Hattori Hanzo, on the imported series Shadow Warriors. When the new wave of Hong Kong action cinema hit in the mid-1980s, Tarantino, by then a video store clerk in Manhattan Beach, was one of its earliest and most vociferous boosters.

Knowledgeable Tarantino-philes have been spotting the influence of these punchy films on the writer/director's work right from the beginning: Sonny Chiba’s ultra-violent Streetfighter films influenced the screenplay for True Romance and the Hong Kong action movie City of Fire was given a nod in his thunderous directorial debut, Reservoir Dogs (1992). “Sonny Chiba was to me right up there in the 1970s with Charles Bronson and Clint Eastwood as one of the greatest action stars,” Tarantino says.



“I’m a huge fan of the period martial pictures made in the ‘70s by the Shaw Brothers in Hong Kong,” he says. “If my life had two sides, one side would be Shaw Brothers and the other side would be Italian westerns. Actually they all have influences on each other. There are many things in Shaw Brothers movies which were borrowed from Italian westerns. During the 1970’s, movies from these two genres often used similar plots, images and shots. There’s a fairly deep kinship.”

The influence of Asian cinema on Kill Bill extends well beyond it storylines and visual style: Tarantino also created roles in the film for three of the martial arts genre's legendary actors. For Japanese cinema's renowned sword master Sonny Chiba, he revived the Ninja character Hattori Hanzo, from the series Shadow Warriors.

Tarantino cast Chinese martial artist/actor Gordon Liu Chia-hui as both Johnny Mo, his Reservoir Dogs black suit-clad leader of the Crazy 88 bodyguard squad in Tokyo, and as Pei Mei, a popular “white eyebrowed monk” character from several vintage Shaw Brothers films (featured in Kill Bill – Vol. 2). In this case he was casting against type: Liu always played stalwart (or occasionally comic) heroes in his Shaw films, while Pei Mei (often portrayed by actor Lo Lieh) was one of the studio’s darkest villains, betraying his martial brothers to the Manchu tyrants in pictures like Liu Jia-liang’s Executioners From Shaolin (1977).

Liu was impressed when he learned that David Carradine had been cast in the movie’s title role. During filming in China, he made a point of taking the actor aside to tell him how much he had admired the program. "That series was a very important part of people in the West understanding kung fu," Liu explains.

It is important to point out that Tarantino has not merely duplicated his genre sources in Kill Bill. He has transformed them; filtered them through the sensibility of a devoted American fan whose imagination functions as a melting pot (or as he would say, a duck press) that reveals the kinships between seemingly unrelated genres.

“I have said many times,” he explains, “that there are two different worlds that my movies take place in. One of them is the ‘Quentin Universe’ of Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown — it’s heightened but more or less realistic. The other is the Movie World. When characters in the Quentin Universe go to the movies, the stuff they see takes place in the Movie World. They act as a window into that world. Kill Bill is the first film I’ve made that takes place in the Movie World. This is me imagining what would happen if that world really existed, and I could take a film crew in there and make a Quentin Tarantino movie about those characters.

Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment includes the technical specs and special features for the upcoming Blu-ray releases of 'Kill Bill: Volume 1' and 'Kill Bill: Volume 2', due to hit store shelves on September 9th.