Text size:

A stone-cold killer returns in 'Kill Bill Vol. 2'

BY JOHN ANDERSON | STAFF WRITER

April 11, 2004

Los Angeles

When last we saw Uma Thurman, she was slicing and dicing her way through Lucy Liu's Crazy 88, her bodyguard-gang- cum-ballet troupe, as if they were Crenshaw melons and she was a long-legged Veg-O-Matic in yellow racing leathers. Limbs were flying around like the menu special on "Iron Chef." Blood spray was practically fogging the camera lens. Every law of physics was being flagrantly defied, defiled or simply ignored.

"It was like a Road Runner cartoon," Thurman says, those famously flattened lips spread in a smile. "With a little more blood..."

No kidding. But whether or not it was "operatic and cartoonish" (her words) "Kill Bill Vol. 1" allowed director Quentin Tarantino and "my actress" (his words) to rejigger the cocktail of Hong Kong kung-fu cinema. But the pure action of that film is a long way from the vastly more emotional punch of "Kill Bill Vol. 2" (opening Friday), the second of the two-part revenge adventure and an entirely different animal - different enough, in fact, to be unimaginable as part of the single movie "Kill Bill" allegedly was meant to be.

"I wouldn't want to say," Thurman says when asked whether the two-part structure was the real plan all along. But sitting in the Four Seasons Beverly Hills, in blue denim jacket, black pants and matching slippers, the phenomenally blond former fashion model agrees that making "Kill Bill" always felt like two films. And when it was announced last year that the project would be released in two parts, "it made everything make sense."

"If Quentin had released one even 100-minute movie from what we had shot," she says, "it would have been months of work on the floor."

And it was apparently a lot of work. "I trained a lot," she says. "For them to be able to choreograph something" - "them" being Tarantino and his near-legendary martial-arts consultant, Yuen Wo-Ping ("Crouching Tiger") - "I had to be able to do it. We used wires, but Quentin didn't want the action to become 'magical' because it makes it less hard-edged - you know, 'Oh I'm watching magic' - and it doesn't hurt anymore. But he wanted it to hurt, not to seem supernatural.

"The first film was like a giant dance number," she adds with a small bang of a laugh. "The first one had that theatrical wildness to it. This one is much more focused."

And a much more sophisticated movie, both critics and audiences are likely to conclude. In it, Thurman returns as The Bride, aka Black Mamba, the deadliest of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad (or DiVAS, more or less). In "Vol. 1," she awoke from a four-year coma with the nightmarish memory of her pregnant self - and the rest of her wedding party - having been massacred in church by her ex-employer Bill (David Carradine) and her former co-workers. Bill, administering what he expected to be the coup de grace, even shot his former lover in the head. But the bullet didn't take. And with payback on her mind, The Bride set out, custom-made samurai sword in hand, to kill Bill. And a lot of other people en route.

Thurman's roles have ranged from the bisexual hitchhiker with the voluptuous thumbs in "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues" (1994) to Henry James' heroine in the Merchant-Ivory "Golden Bowl" to Henry Miller's licentious wife in "Henry & June" (1990). She was the Botticellean Venus-on-the-halfshell in Terry Gilliam's "The Adventures of Baron von Munchausen" (1998), the kind of screen appearance that speaks for itself. In short, which Thurman certainly is not, her career has played itself out across a wide palette of genres, historical periods, points of view, modes of dress and undress, and nothing has given her the screen presence or professional push of "Kill Bill."

"He's certainly given me really incredibly physical, very freeing parts," she says of Tarantino, for whom she also played a major role (as gangster's wife and John Travolta's dance partner Mia Wallace) in 1994's "Pulp Fiction." "And in any actor's career, it takes people letting you go to kind of create that possibility. This part is not the kind that normally any woman would get to play anyway. Between its emotional depth and physicality...I mean, it's not 'The Avengers,' it's not 'Charlie's Angels,' it's not 'Tomb Raider,' it's not 'Batman.' It's not comic - although it's comic. I don't know, it's hard to explain. She's a tough, heartbroken, funny, totally unusual character to get to play."

The Bride - who does acquire a real name in "Vol. 2," along with a few other surprise packages - is a stone-cold killer; nobody in or out of the film can deny that. The difference among Tarantino's characters, to paraphrase Carradine, is who's the rottenest apple in the barrel. The Bride's grueling training in the martial arts, alongside veteran Hong Kong actor Gordon Liu ("The 36th Chamber of Shaolin"), makes up a good chunk of "KB2" - she earns her nasty stripes. But what changes the character is pregnancy - making Tarantino's entire thesis uncharacteristically female.

"To me" Thurman says, "the story always was that this killer has this pivotal experience, finds out she's responsible for another human soul. She's lived sort of without her soul, and this makes her change - she's suddenly a life-giver; she's not going to be a life-taker anymore. So she gives up everything to try and protect that, and they come and they [try to] kill her...

"That's why the first film is completely straight: She's like a wraith, a phoenix. She fears no death because [in her mind] she's dead, and her child is dead, so there's nothing to live for - it makes her unbeatable in a way because she doesn't feel pain, really, and she doesn't fear death. The one thing left to do is take these people out of this world with her."

Thurman is a mother of two; she had a rather celebrated breakup early this year with their father, Ethan Hawke, after six years of marriage; she has made conciliatory statements about him and made them, it is clear, for the benefit of the kids. She also, in answer to a question, says she hasn't taken the violence of either "Kill Bill" or the Tarantino oeuvre lightly at all.

"I've thought about it a lot," she says. "But then you look at the Japanese - all the violence in their cinema and the complete lack of violence on the streets. To me, there's a far more complicated correlation [in the United States] between the two, internally and externally, on the street, in the house, in the home - I don't know why we are such a violent group of people, but we really are. It's really fascinating.

"To me," she adds, "movie violence really depends on execution. I think that violence is simply a large part of storytelling - it was in Shakespeare's time, you know, bloody heads hanging from people's hands. And to simply say you should whitewash violence from storytelling is kind of weird; a weird denial and vacuum. It's impossible to avoid, and it's so much a part of culture. It's part of the scenery."

It certainly is in "Kill Bill Vol. 2," which includes less spectacular action than its predecessor - no "dance numbers," per se - but plenty of bloodshed and in many ways is a far more psychologically traumatizing movie: While "Vol. 1" involved large set pieces and mostly medium and long shots, "Kill Bill Vol. 2" seems to be one long unnerving closeup.

"In a way, the story is focusing," Thurman suggests. "It starts out with masses of struggle, and then it limits and limits and limits itself, until I almost die and then there's only one person left. The shape is very funneled and telescopic - and the camera is doing the same thing."

Like Black Mamba, Thurman has gone through some changes. Raised in ivy-covered Amherst, Mass., to academic parents, she is now a hard-core Manhattanite who really can't imagine living anywhere else. And from doing films that have occasionally skirted the edge of quality ("The Avengers," "Batman & Robin," "Gattaca," "The Truth About Cats and Dogs"), she has become a mud-and-blood-drenched sex symbol for cinephiles, martial-arts freaks and Tarantinologists, as well as being the fetish-actress of one of this country's most iconic and iconoclastic directors. And she's not ungrateful.

"Quentin's work is kind of a genre unto itself," she says. "He's a total visionary auteur-director, one who creates his own worlds. And it's an amazing thing to be intrinsically a part of that."