Talk about a great week, first I got to see Kill Bill: Volume 2, then I get to interview David Carradine and then the DVD for Kill Bill: Volume 1 hits my doorstep for review. Wow, now I know why I got into this, but let’s now focus on what Carradine had to say about Mr. Bill.
Dressed in a brown leather jacket that had a patch on the arm that read “Super Cool Man Chu, makers of Kill Bill” Carradine sat in his chair smoking a cigarette ready to take on questions, and we hit him with a lot of them, and beware there are a few spoilers in here, but nothing that you really wouldn’t be able to assume after the first movie, but I felt I should let you know.
So let’s get to it…
RopeofSilicon: Tell me about the scenes that were deleted where you fought Michael Jai White and his henchmen, and if they were even shot.
David: Yeah it was shot. There was a scene in the picture with Michael Jai White and a bunch of henchmen that was supposed to happen in a poker game, and then Quentin wrote another scene that he thought superceded that and he didn’t think that he could have both scenes. So he basically cut it out of the picture before we shot it, but he loved the fight that he’d been working on for a couple of months and he really wanted Michael Jai White in the picture. So he invited him to Beijing just to do the fight and Michael said yes he would, so he wrote a new scene, but the thing is, he didn’t want to let go of this moment, but it didn’t really belong in the picture, at least that’s what Quentin thought, but it’ll be in the DVD.
RopeofSilicon: Where would it have gone in the storyline?
David: Well, that is the problem; nobody could quite figure that out. I could see one place where he could put it in but it would maybe slow the flow, and in its original concept it didn’t belong in there, wasn’t there. The thing they were trying to show had already been replaced by another scene he had written, so it didn’t really make sense, to Quentin at least, to keep it in, and also I think he was struggling with time.
That scene in the chapel is the scene that is not in the original script, that’s the scene that replaced the poker scene. We wanted to have this introduction of Bill. It’s the introduction, that’s what those scenes were made for, and you can’t introduce him twice. I think that’s why Michael’s scene went out.
Because when he cut the picture in two pieces, the part at which he decided to cut it had to be, according to him, before you meet Bill, and you meet Bill in the very first scene in the second picture, it’s actually pretty early in the script. So in the first movie he had a lot of space, there’s some moments that are really spread out, he takes his time with it. The second movie, all of a sudden he’s got all this material, and it’s maybe two-thirds of the 200-page script that he’s somehow gotta get into one movie, getting it down to two hours and nine minutes was really a problem and there’s a few things that were cut out, and they’re all juicy, everything we shot was pretty juicy, and I think most of it will get back into the DVD. That will be the life of the picture anyway. I mean people are gonna be watching it on DVD forever and we don’t expect to see a Quentin Tarantino movie on network television.
RopeofSilicon: I heard a rumor that there was almost enough footage for three films.
David: Well the original idea was two 90-minute movies, Quentin had always thought that he might shoot another couple of scenes. I don’t actually have a scene with Daryl Hannah and we wanted to have something that would delineate our relationship, how it happened that she got to be the number one lady, and it would also explain what’s the matter between me and my brother Bud (Michael Madsen) because he won’t talk to me and that can only be a woman, and it can only be Daryl, and you know that they hate each other. In the original concept none of that is to be explained, and at a certain point I asked Quentin, “So are you gonna shoot anymore footage like you were talking about?”
He said, “You know, if I can’t make two movies out of the amount of stuff I have already shot I don’t deserve to shoot anymore.”
We shot the equivalent of 1.2 million feet of film and that’s close to a record.
RopeofSilicon: Could you tell me about Bill’s gradual move to becoming a more powerful presence as the movies go on, and was it intentional to keep him a mystery until Volume 2?
David: Well, it wasn’t conceived that way at all, it was conceived as one movie and you’ve gotta keep Bill out of it for a while and wonder who is Bill and build up this idea that there’s this incredibly powerful, cruel, maybe monstrous guy and then meeting him and discovering that you’re like him. He is charming and all those kind of things, it was supposed to happen all in one movie. There was actually a close-up of me at the end of the first movie, and then he took that back out and he thought, “No, I’m gonna stick with this complete mystery.”
It’s hard to talk about the concept because splitting into two movies totally kind of changes the concept anyway and the result is you have two very different movies. The first movie is pure action and the second movie moves a lot faster actually, the cutting is much more choppy and much more Tarantino and GET IT ON, but the content is rambling and all over the place, which is more like what we are used to with Tarantino. I like the second movie better, of course I’m in it, and you know that helps too. [laughing]
RopeofSilicon: The scenes with the little girl had a real natural kind of paternal flow to them; you had a real natural relationship together. What tools did you use as an actor to balance the gentle fatherly figure with the murderous Bill?
David: You know, I can’t even answer that, you know I just show up for work and do it, and you know I get along well with kids. If you think about it, in my career I’ve always been working with kids and I’ve already been kind of a mentor to the kids. In my series “Shane” you got that little kid and I was always dealing with little kids in “Kung Fu,” Jodie Foster at ten years old is a great example. That comes totally natural to me and I live in a household with four kids, five-year-old twins that remind me a lot of the little girl in Kill Bill 2, and with Uma I was itching to work with her all the time, actually by the time we did this Uma and I knew each other pretty well, we’d already done the scene in the chapel and the stuff in Beijing.
RopeofSilicon: It seemed to come pretty natural to you; the whole final scene didn’t even seem like acting.
David: Yeah, it didn’t seem like acting to me either. I had a hard time watching it wondering if I’m really any good. Everybody is just telling me I’m wonderful, I knew I was getting away with it, but people saying, “You’re great!” and I am thinking is that okay? Because it’s just there, it’s not like a constructive performance, which I am used to doing. Quentin kind of got me out of what I’ve done my whole career, which is constructive characters that had nothing to do with me; Oklahoma folk singer, the guy that started the Civil War, a Chinese shaolin kung-fu master priest, none of this is me, and with Bill Quentin just kept opening me to just be there, it was a new experience for me.
RopeofSilicon: How much input into the Bill character did you have?
David: Well, I guess a whole lot in that Quentin wrote it for me. Quentin was reading my autobiography and he’d seen a whole lot of my movies and he was a “Kung Fu” fan, he actually collects 16mm prints of “Kung Fu” and “Shane,” he owns prints of that and that’s hard to find and he can actually recite Americana, the picture I directed.
So I had a whole lot of influence on Bill’s character before he even called me and we always talked a lot and sometimes I’d tell him something about the movie and then he’d change what he was doing and I’d go, ‘God what have I done?’ [laughing] But it seemed to work out.
RopeofSilicon: You were the Tarantino new comer in this cast, how did it feel to be working with so many of his regulars? How did it feel like being part of the Quentin Tarantino family?
David: It felt like there was a romance between me and Quentin it was specific, had nothing to do with the rest of it. It was very clear that Uma was his muse and she was like his queen there, she wasn’t any kind of charming courtier. She ran him to a certain extent, but she didn’t, she didn’t allow herself to do that, but you could see that she actually had control over Quentin if she wanted to exercise it.
I fell in love with Michael Madsen, Michael Parks (Sheriff Earl McGraw) is kind of a mentor of mine, the very first movie I made he was the star of it and we got to be friends, and Daryl I’ve known for a few years. The other thing is, the freshman I may be, but I was the oldest guy in the show, I was almost the oldest guy on the crew, I think maybe I was.
RopeofSilicon: How much improvisation was made on your monologues?
David: The whole Superman thing actually came from when we were in pre-production in Beijing and the cast is working out all day and Quentin is building sets and stuff and back at the hotel one evening I got a call from him and he asked, “Do you smoke cigars?” and I said yeah and he said, “Well there’s a cigar lounge in this hotel you want to meet me up there?”
So we went up and we smoked cigars and we had this conversation about Superman and superheroes and all that and six days later there was a rewrite and there it was in the movie.
RopeofSilicon: Where does this movie rank in your career?
David: Number one.
It was nothing but fun, this whole picture. I think anybody who has ever worked with Quentin would run to his side. I don’t think there’s anybody who wouldn’t. Quentin is constantly reinventing himself. I mean, yes, Michael Madsen has worked with him before, Michael Bowen has worked with him before, and he has this thing about working with Uma for the rest of her career, but he does move on. He can think up something new and work with new people, he wants to do that all the time, so who knows if I’ll ever get another chance to work with him, but I would certainly run to his side.
