20 facts you might not know about 'Kill Bill Vol. 1 & 2'

Tarantino is not afraid of a long movie. Just look at The Hateful Eight. However, even he realized that his original plan to make Kill Bill a single movie was too much. He turned it into two volumes instead of releasing a movie that was four hours long.

While working on Pulp Fiction , Tarantino and Uma Thurman started to strike up the idea for the Bride's character. The director hung out with Thurman while he was working on the film, and they shaped the movie together. While Tarantino gets the lone writing credit, he did credit the story to “Q & U.”

While the titular Bill is not seen physically in Vol. 1 , he is a key component of the story. After all, the Bride is driven by her desire to kill him. Originally, Tarantino was writing the role for Warren Beatty. Once he realized that some martial arts work would be necessary, he cast David Carradine into the role instead.

Actors get cast based on previous work fairly often. Leave it to Tarantino to get a little more esoteric with it. He says he cast Daryl Hannah as Elle Driver based on her starring role in First Target. Don’t feel bad if you don’t remember that one. It’s a 2000 made-for-TV movie aired on TBS in the United States.

Michael Parks has a role as Earl McGraw, a Texas Ranger investigating the wedding chapel massacre that puts the Bride in her coma. You may have seen McGraw before because Parks plays the same role in From Dusk ‘Til Dawn, which was written by Tarantino and directed by Robert Rodriguez. Parks went on to reprise the role in both segments of Grindhouse, the dual films directed by good buddies Tarantino and Rodriguez.

The Bride wears a very similar tracksuit to Bruce Lee in Game of Death. Tarantino also used the logo for the iconic Shaw Brothers Studio in the opening titles to up the vintage martial arts film ante. Additionally, legendary martial arts film star Sonny Chiba plays the role of swordmaker Hattori Hanzo.

 A lot of filmmakers will shoot movies out of order. They shoot when shooting is convenient. That was not Tarantino's method for Kill Bill, Vol. 1. He shot the movie in sequence.

The showpiece of the first volume is clearly the fight at the House of Blue Leaves, where the Bride takes down dozens of members from the Crazy 88s. Tarantino refused to use CGI for this scene, opting for practical effects. This may be why a section of the film that was supposed to take two weeks to shoot took a whopping eight weeks. That’s right, Tarantino spent two months on that fight scene alone.

While filming, Thurman was asked to drive a car for one scene. She wanted to use a stunt driver, but Tarantino prodded Thurman to handle the driving herself. Thurman lost control of the car and crashed into a tree, damaging her knees and suffering a concussion. This accident led to a loss of trust between Thurman and Tarantino and hurt their relationship for years.

The first Kill Bill is a violent, somewhat esoteric film. However, it was also a Quentin Tarantino movie, his first since Jackie Brown in 1997. Perhaps that led to the excitement for the film. Kill Bill Vol. 1 debuted atop the box office and made $180.9 million worldwide on a $30 million budget.

We mentioned Parks plays Earl McGraw in Vol. 1. Parks returns in Vol. 2, but in the role of Esteban Vihaio. On top of that, Gordon Liu, who played Johnny Mo in the first movie, plays Pai Mei in the second.

For much of the first film, we assume that the Bride lost her child during the attack at her wedding. Then, we find out her child is alive, and we even see her grown up in Vol. 2 when the Bride herself realizes her daughter survived. Tarantino was basically at the end of the writing process when he realized he could still have the daughter alive as a twist.

Much like its predecessor, Vol. 2 was made from a budget of $30 million. It was the first that ended the juggernaut of The Passion of the Christ at the top of the worldwide box office. In the end, Vol. 2 brought in $152.2 million.

Tarantino has won Oscars, and actors have won Oscars for his films. Shout out to Christoph Waltz! Apparently, the Academy didn’t have much affinity for kung fu flicks, though. Both Kill Bill movies were blanked at the Oscars, a rarity for Tarantino.

Uma Thurman picked up a Golden Globe nomination for both movies, though she didn’t win either. There were some wins, though, especially over at MTV. Both films received three MTV Movie Awards nominations and won awards. In fact, Kill Bill Vol. 1 went three-for-three on its nominations.

A director who always likes to tinker and mess around — he wrote a novelization for Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood just for the sake of it — Tarantino did eventually get an itch to turn these two films back into one. He combined both films with a lengthy animated sequence for what he called Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair. The film was screened in 2011 at the New Beverly Cinema, which Tarantino owns.

In 2004, Tarantino started talking about making a third Kill Bill movie. There was talk that it would focus on the daughter of Vivica A. Fox’s character seeking revenge for her mother against the Bride. Then, he said he would make two anime Kill Bill movies. Oh, and he said he would release a third Kill Bill in 2014 as his ninth film. That didn’t happen. As recently as 2019, Tarantino said he was considering making another Kill Bill, and then said he had changed his mind in the span of six months.

In 2007, a Norwegian film called “Kill Buljo” was released. It’s a parody of Kill Bill that seems pretty specific to Norwegian culture. We may not be able to parse it, but apparently, Tarantino signed off on the idea.

Tarantino has used scores in his film before, but the man likes to use the music he’s a fan of. All the music in the Kill Bill films was taken from other sources, often other movies. A lot of the music was sourced from Tarantino’s personal soundtrack collection.

A lot of people die in Kill Bill, Vol. 1, so much so that the number that gets reported changes. We’ve seen as low as 41 and as high as 95, though the number we feel most confident in is 62. It’s a lot easier to parse the death totals in Vol. 2. A mere three people are seen killed in the second movie. Of course, one of them is Bill, and his death is worth a bit extra.