Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003)
10 Oct 2003 ● English ● 1 hr 51 mins
This action-oriented thriller follows a woman initially identified as "The Bride", a former member of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad who is described as "the deadliest woman in the world". She is targeted by her former allies in the wedding chapel massacre, and falls into a coma.
When she awakens four years later, she embarks on a deadly trail of revenge against the perpetrators of the massacre.
Cast: Uma Thurman
Crew: Quentin Tarantino (Director), Robert Richardson (Director of Photography), RZA (Music Director)
Rating: R (Australia), 18 (Germany)
Genres: Action, Crime, Thriller
Release Dates: 10 Oct 2003 (India)
Tagline: Go for the kill.
Did you know? The shot where the Bride splits a baseball in two with a samurai sword was done for real on the set. It was done by Zoë Bell, Uma Thurman's stunt double. Read More
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as The Bride
as Nikki Bell
as Johnny Mo
as Gogo Yubari
as Elle Driver
as Bill
as Pretty Riki
as Edgar McGraw
as Trucker
as Sofie Fatale
as Boss Tanaka
as O-Ren Ishii
as Buck
as Budd
as Earl McGraw
as Hattori Hanzo
as Vernita Green
as Tokyo Business Man
Direction
Director
First Assistant Director
Second Assistant Director
Assistant Director
Production
Producer
Executive Producer
Associate Producer
Assistant Producer
Production Manager
Distribution
Distributor
Writers
Story Writer
Camera and Electrical
Director of Photography
Still Photographer
Key Grip
Electrician
Sound
Sound Editor
Foley Editor
Foley Artist
Sound Effects Editor
Art
Production Designer
Art Director
Prop Master
Set Decorator
Assistant Art Director
Painter
Casting
Casting Director
Casting Associate
Casting Assistant
Makeup and Hair
Hair Stylist
Post Production
Post Production Supervisor
Special Effects
Special Effects Coordinator
Special Effects Technician
Thanks
Special Thanks
Visual Effects
Digital Compositor
Film Type:
Feature
Language:
English
Spoken Languages:
French, Japanese
Colour Info:
Color
Sound Mix:
Dolby Digital, DTS
Frame Rate:
24 fps
Aspect Ratio:
2.39:1 (Scope)
Stereoscopy:
No
Taglines:
Go for the kill.
The Fourth Film by Quentin Tarantino.
Here comes the bride.
On October 10th, speak softly and carry a big sword.
On October 10th...a Quest for Revenge begins.
In the year 2003, Uma Thurman will kill Bill.
Will she kill Bill?
This October, Go For The Kill.
The Fourth Film by Quentin Tarantino.
Here comes the bride.
On October 10th, speak softly and carry a big sword.
On October 10th...a Quest for Revenge begins.
In the year 2003, Uma Thurman will kill Bill.
Will she kill Bill?
This October, Go For The Kill.
Movie Connection(s):
Followed by: Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (English)
Followed by: Kill Bill: Vol. 3 (English)
Referenced in: Karam (Hindi)
Reference: Aalavandaan (Tamil)
Followed by: Kill Bill: Vol. 3 (English)
Referenced in: Karam (Hindi)
Reference: Aalavandaan (Tamil)
Filming Locations:
Goofs:
Factual Mistake
The airplane the Bride is flying into Tokyo is a Boeing 747, an airplane with 4 engines. However the shot of the cockpit is from an airplane with only 2 engines. There are only 2 power levers on the throttle quadrant, and the instruments only show data for 2 engines.
Factual Mistake
The subtitles for Cottonmouth's speech say, "Whom in Okinawa made you this steel?" In correct English grammar, it should be "who," not "whom." In Japanese, they are the same word, "Dare."
Factual Mistake
When Oren was seen at the back of the car driven by Gogo, Gogo was driving the car on the left side. In Japan, cars are right-hand drive.
Factual Mistake
When the bride is laying comatose in her coma in the hospital ward, we hear the sound of a fly. It is the normal sound of a common house fly. Then we see the fly land on the bride, and it is a mosquito. A mosquito has a very distinctive sound (very high pitched) and is totally different from the sound of a house fly.
Revealing Mistakes
At The House of Blue Leaves, when O'Ren sticks her dagger into the banister just before the Crazy 88 arrive, you can see that the banister is actually two separate pieces of wood, allowing for easy insertion of the blade.
Revealing Mistakes
When Hatori Honzo writes "Bill" on the fogged window and The Bride erases it shortly after, you can see fogged-over smudged wipe marks as well as part of the letter 'B' where the scene had been done over numerous times.
Revealing Mistakes
During the fight scene between the Bride and Vernita Green when Vernita tries to impale the kitchen knife into the Bride on the dining table, you can see the rubber blade roll upwards as it strikes the tabletop.
Revealing Mistakes
When The Bride kills Buck and turns to rest lying her head on his torso, you can see she uses her legs for balance and stability in order to slam the door and reposition herself, yet in the next scene as she goes to the parking garage and gets in the Pussy Wagon she acts like there's utterly no feeling or strength in her legs.
Continuity
The scene in the end of the film in which Budd says "That woman deserves her revenge" is mirror inverted to that exact same scene in Kill Bill: Vol. 2. In Vol. 1 his face is on the left side of the screen whereas in Vol. 2 it's on the right.
Continuity
During the fight scene at the snowy garden, O-Ren suffers a leg wound bleeding down to her toes. However in a top shot, no bloody footprints are visible anywhere around her.
Continuity
During the animated sequence in which Oren is shooting the foot off the blue-suited henchmen, the scene in which the foot is shot depicts a red suit, identical in color to the henchman who was previously shot.
Continuity
At The House of Blue Leaves, when O-Ren suspects someone outside her private room, she throws a dart that sticks in a beam narrowly missing The Bride. When Go-Go goes to check things out, the dart is sticking in the beam in a downward angle when in the previous shot it was straight on. Also, considering O-Ren was seated and that the dart flew by the Bride at eye level, it would have been more conceivable for the dart to hit the beam at an upward angle, not downward.
Continuity
Oren's eyes are blue in the beginning of the film. In the later part of the film, they are brown.
Continuity
When the Bride is in the Pussywagon after escape from coma she is trying to move her toes. The foot shown in second shot is different from the first foot.
Errors in Geography
The wedding is supposed to take place in El Paso, Texas. However, a Joshua tree is clearly seen outside the chapel. Joshua trees only grow in the Mojave desert in California and in Arizona.
Errors in Geography
The Bride was shot in a chapel in El Paso, Texas. The radio music is from a fictional radio station in Wichita Falls, Texas. Since the two towns are separated by a distance of around 500 miles, it is unlikely that the radio could pick up a Wichita Falls station, unless it were at night, and the station was a high power AM station. Daytime (when the scene takes place) reception would be nearly impossible.
Factual Mistake
The details of Bill shooting The Bride are very detailed: hammer hitting primer, powder exploding in the cartridge, bullet exiting the rifled barrel of the pistol. But the bullet isn't spinning as one would do when exiting a rifled barrel.
Factual Mistake
During O-Ren's anime sequence, as she is taking aim with her rifle, we look back down the telescopic sight to see her eye enlarged. What we should see is the eye made smaller.
Continuity
When the Bride fights with Vernita Green in the kitchen scene, she plunges her dagger through the table, barely missing Vernita. In the next shot, she jumps over the table, chasing Vernita back to the living room. In the 'jumping over table' shot, the handle of the dagger can clearly be seen, still sticking out of the bottom of the table. In the next shot, the living room, the Bride is holding her dagger again, without having it pulled out of the table.
Continuity
When "#2" shows the picture of her daughter, she holds by the top/side between shots.
Continuity
When the Bride and Gogo face off. Gogo is shown twirling her mace like weapon counter-clockwise from the side, and clockwise from the front.
Continuity
O-ren's hands change positions when she opens her sword.
Continuity
When "The Bride" travels to Okinawa, she finds Honzo behind the bar in a small restaurant. At one point, aggravated at his employees slowness with regards to following his kitchen orders, Honzo takes a large knife from behind the counter and throws it behind him, where it lands perfectly into the knife holder mounted to the wall. At this point the shot changes to one that is further away and at a slightly different elevation. Honzo then reaches behind him to grasp for another knife out of that same rack, but the knife he had just thrown, however, is now lodged at a much different angle than it was just moments before.
Continuity
In the anime sequence as eleven year old O-Ren sits on top of Matsumoto, he is wearing underwear. However, when the guards rush in and shoot at her and she uses Matsumoto's body as a shield, he is completely nude.
Continuity
As Elle is buttoning up her blouse at the hospital, you can see that she is wearing a fuchsia colored bra. In the hospital room with The Bride, it has changed to a white bra.
Continuity
When The Bride and O-Ren Ishii are fighting in the courtyard in the House of Blue Leaves, The Bride suffers a serious cut to the back and falls to the ground. Even though the close shot of her wound shows heavy blood loss, when The Bride stands back up in the next wide shot, there is no evidence of blood in the snow anywhere in the area.
Continuity
In the anime-sequence when O-Ren is about to kill the man in the limousine, we can see her nails are painted red, but when she shoots, her nails are clean.
Continuity
When Gogo hits the Bride on the chest with the iron ball, the bride has her mouth filled with blood. At the next scene she has nice white teeth.
Continuity
When The Bride enters the restaurant, she only has a T-Shirt on. When they enter the attic in the scene directly after, she suddenly has a jacket on. Also, Hattori is suddenly missing his headband when entering the attic.
Continuity
After the kitchen fight Vernita Green fires a round at Bride over her left shoulder punching a hole in the wall between the door and the cabinet. After Bride throws her knife and Green slides down the cabinet to her demise the next shot shows Bride standing in the same spot without the bullet hole in the wall.
Continuity
In Vernita Green's kitchen you see that the Bride is wearing a knife holster around her leg. The camera moves away and them back on the Bride and the holster is gone. The camera moves away and then back to the Bride and the holster is back on her leg.
Audio/Video Mismatch
Immediately before the Bride awakes from her coma, there is a buzzing mosquito that lands and bites the Bride. The sound played is that of a common housefly, whereas in actual fact the beating wings of a mosquito produce a constant, almost perfect F-sharp.
Audio/Video Mismatch
When O-ren Ishii's motorbike guard is in the tunnel, you can hear the pitch rise and drop. The first time this happens, the motorcycle is at a fixed point with respect to the camera. In reality, the sound implies that the source is moving toward and then away from the observer, due to the Doppler effect.
Character Error
In the "Origin of O-Ren Ishii" sequence, during the introduction of the character Sofie Fatale, the voice-over says Sofie is to O-Ren's right, when actually Sofie is to the camera's right, or O-Ren's left.
Character Error
When The Bride is in the back of Buck's Pussy Wagon, she says, "As I lay in the back of Buck's truck, trying to will my limbs out of entropy... ." The term that should have been used would have been atrophy, not entropy. (Some argue that entropy is perfectly acceptable as a term describing disrepair or disorder: actually, by the second principle of thermodynamic, "entropy" is just the tendency of a thermic system - thence a human body - to release heat and energy into outer ambient when not restrained).
Character Error
All the characters consistently mispronounce "yakuza" as "yah-KOO-zuh" instead of the correct "YAH-kuh-zuh."
Continuity
When we see the death list for the first time, all the people's names are written in red ink, later when we see her drawing a line through O-Ren's name the names are in black. Then when the Bride is seen to be writing the list on the plane, near the end of Volume one, she uses red ink to write all the names.
Continuity
During the second hospital scene, when Buck enters the room, we see the door behind him shut before he stares around the room. When the Bride is pulling him to the doorway to ask questions and slam his head, the door is open.
Continuity
When the bride fights the Crazy 88s. she unmasks a young kid who gives up. she throws him into several others, who land into a pool of bloody water. After the scene where she fights with the lights off, she narrowly avoids killing the same kid. He is fully dry, and his white dress shirt is stain free. She then chops his sword into pieces, he gives up and she spanks him.
The airplane the Bride is flying into Tokyo is a Boeing 747, an airplane with 4 engines. However the shot of the cockpit is from an airplane with only 2 engines. There are only 2 power levers on the throttle quadrant, and the instruments only show data for 2 engines.
Factual Mistake
The subtitles for Cottonmouth's speech say, "Whom in Okinawa made you this steel?" In correct English grammar, it should be "who," not "whom." In Japanese, they are the same word, "Dare."
Factual Mistake
When Oren was seen at the back of the car driven by Gogo, Gogo was driving the car on the left side. In Japan, cars are right-hand drive.
Factual Mistake
When the bride is laying comatose in her coma in the hospital ward, we hear the sound of a fly. It is the normal sound of a common house fly. Then we see the fly land on the bride, and it is a mosquito. A mosquito has a very distinctive sound (very high pitched) and is totally different from the sound of a house fly.
Revealing Mistakes
At The House of Blue Leaves, when O'Ren sticks her dagger into the banister just before the Crazy 88 arrive, you can see that the banister is actually two separate pieces of wood, allowing for easy insertion of the blade.
Revealing Mistakes
When Hatori Honzo writes "Bill" on the fogged window and The Bride erases it shortly after, you can see fogged-over smudged wipe marks as well as part of the letter 'B' where the scene had been done over numerous times.
Revealing Mistakes
During the fight scene between the Bride and Vernita Green when Vernita tries to impale the kitchen knife into the Bride on the dining table, you can see the rubber blade roll upwards as it strikes the tabletop.
Revealing Mistakes
When The Bride kills Buck and turns to rest lying her head on his torso, you can see she uses her legs for balance and stability in order to slam the door and reposition herself, yet in the next scene as she goes to the parking garage and gets in the Pussy Wagon she acts like there's utterly no feeling or strength in her legs.
Continuity
The scene in the end of the film in which Budd says "That woman deserves her revenge" is mirror inverted to that exact same scene in Kill Bill: Vol. 2. In Vol. 1 his face is on the left side of the screen whereas in Vol. 2 it's on the right.
Continuity
During the fight scene at the snowy garden, O-Ren suffers a leg wound bleeding down to her toes. However in a top shot, no bloody footprints are visible anywhere around her.
Continuity
During the animated sequence in which Oren is shooting the foot off the blue-suited henchmen, the scene in which the foot is shot depicts a red suit, identical in color to the henchman who was previously shot.
Continuity
At The House of Blue Leaves, when O-Ren suspects someone outside her private room, she throws a dart that sticks in a beam narrowly missing The Bride. When Go-Go goes to check things out, the dart is sticking in the beam in a downward angle when in the previous shot it was straight on. Also, considering O-Ren was seated and that the dart flew by the Bride at eye level, it would have been more conceivable for the dart to hit the beam at an upward angle, not downward.
Continuity
Oren's eyes are blue in the beginning of the film. In the later part of the film, they are brown.
Continuity
When the Bride is in the Pussywagon after escape from coma she is trying to move her toes. The foot shown in second shot is different from the first foot.
Errors in Geography
The wedding is supposed to take place in El Paso, Texas. However, a Joshua tree is clearly seen outside the chapel. Joshua trees only grow in the Mojave desert in California and in Arizona.
Errors in Geography
The Bride was shot in a chapel in El Paso, Texas. The radio music is from a fictional radio station in Wichita Falls, Texas. Since the two towns are separated by a distance of around 500 miles, it is unlikely that the radio could pick up a Wichita Falls station, unless it were at night, and the station was a high power AM station. Daytime (when the scene takes place) reception would be nearly impossible.
Factual Mistake
The details of Bill shooting The Bride are very detailed: hammer hitting primer, powder exploding in the cartridge, bullet exiting the rifled barrel of the pistol. But the bullet isn't spinning as one would do when exiting a rifled barrel.
Factual Mistake
During O-Ren's anime sequence, as she is taking aim with her rifle, we look back down the telescopic sight to see her eye enlarged. What we should see is the eye made smaller.
Continuity
When the Bride fights with Vernita Green in the kitchen scene, she plunges her dagger through the table, barely missing Vernita. In the next shot, she jumps over the table, chasing Vernita back to the living room. In the 'jumping over table' shot, the handle of the dagger can clearly be seen, still sticking out of the bottom of the table. In the next shot, the living room, the Bride is holding her dagger again, without having it pulled out of the table.
Continuity
When "#2" shows the picture of her daughter, she holds by the top/side between shots.
Continuity
When the Bride and Gogo face off. Gogo is shown twirling her mace like weapon counter-clockwise from the side, and clockwise from the front.
Continuity
O-ren's hands change positions when she opens her sword.
Continuity
When "The Bride" travels to Okinawa, she finds Honzo behind the bar in a small restaurant. At one point, aggravated at his employees slowness with regards to following his kitchen orders, Honzo takes a large knife from behind the counter and throws it behind him, where it lands perfectly into the knife holder mounted to the wall. At this point the shot changes to one that is further away and at a slightly different elevation. Honzo then reaches behind him to grasp for another knife out of that same rack, but the knife he had just thrown, however, is now lodged at a much different angle than it was just moments before.
Continuity
In the anime sequence as eleven year old O-Ren sits on top of Matsumoto, he is wearing underwear. However, when the guards rush in and shoot at her and she uses Matsumoto's body as a shield, he is completely nude.
Continuity
As Elle is buttoning up her blouse at the hospital, you can see that she is wearing a fuchsia colored bra. In the hospital room with The Bride, it has changed to a white bra.
Continuity
When The Bride and O-Ren Ishii are fighting in the courtyard in the House of Blue Leaves, The Bride suffers a serious cut to the back and falls to the ground. Even though the close shot of her wound shows heavy blood loss, when The Bride stands back up in the next wide shot, there is no evidence of blood in the snow anywhere in the area.
Continuity
In the anime-sequence when O-Ren is about to kill the man in the limousine, we can see her nails are painted red, but when she shoots, her nails are clean.
Continuity
When Gogo hits the Bride on the chest with the iron ball, the bride has her mouth filled with blood. At the next scene she has nice white teeth.
Continuity
When The Bride enters the restaurant, she only has a T-Shirt on. When they enter the attic in the scene directly after, she suddenly has a jacket on. Also, Hattori is suddenly missing his headband when entering the attic.
Continuity
After the kitchen fight Vernita Green fires a round at Bride over her left shoulder punching a hole in the wall between the door and the cabinet. After Bride throws her knife and Green slides down the cabinet to her demise the next shot shows Bride standing in the same spot without the bullet hole in the wall.
Continuity
In Vernita Green's kitchen you see that the Bride is wearing a knife holster around her leg. The camera moves away and them back on the Bride and the holster is gone. The camera moves away and then back to the Bride and the holster is back on her leg.
Audio/Video Mismatch
Immediately before the Bride awakes from her coma, there is a buzzing mosquito that lands and bites the Bride. The sound played is that of a common housefly, whereas in actual fact the beating wings of a mosquito produce a constant, almost perfect F-sharp.
Audio/Video Mismatch
When O-ren Ishii's motorbike guard is in the tunnel, you can hear the pitch rise and drop. The first time this happens, the motorcycle is at a fixed point with respect to the camera. In reality, the sound implies that the source is moving toward and then away from the observer, due to the Doppler effect.
Character Error
In the "Origin of O-Ren Ishii" sequence, during the introduction of the character Sofie Fatale, the voice-over says Sofie is to O-Ren's right, when actually Sofie is to the camera's right, or O-Ren's left.
Character Error
When The Bride is in the back of Buck's Pussy Wagon, she says, "As I lay in the back of Buck's truck, trying to will my limbs out of entropy... ." The term that should have been used would have been atrophy, not entropy. (Some argue that entropy is perfectly acceptable as a term describing disrepair or disorder: actually, by the second principle of thermodynamic, "entropy" is just the tendency of a thermic system - thence a human body - to release heat and energy into outer ambient when not restrained).
Character Error
All the characters consistently mispronounce "yakuza" as "yah-KOO-zuh" instead of the correct "YAH-kuh-zuh."
Continuity
When we see the death list for the first time, all the people's names are written in red ink, later when we see her drawing a line through O-Ren's name the names are in black. Then when the Bride is seen to be writing the list on the plane, near the end of Volume one, she uses red ink to write all the names.
Continuity
During the second hospital scene, when Buck enters the room, we see the door behind him shut before he stares around the room. When the Bride is pulling him to the doorway to ask questions and slam his head, the door is open.
Continuity
When the bride fights the Crazy 88s. she unmasks a young kid who gives up. she throws him into several others, who land into a pool of bloody water. After the scene where she fights with the lights off, she narrowly avoids killing the same kid. He is fully dry, and his white dress shirt is stain free. She then chops his sword into pieces, he gives up and she spanks him.
Trivia:
Bill calls The Bride by her last name, Kiddo, in the film's opening scene. The audience, not knowing her last name, is meant to assume it is simply a term of endearment. However, on the Bride's plane tickets you can see the name 'Beatrix Kiddo' which is never actually said in the film.
Quentin Tarantino delayed the start of the production because Uma Thurman was pregnant.
The church scene was shot in the Mojave Desert outside of Lancaster, CA. Keep an eye out during this scene for a cameo by Samuel L. Jackson as the dead organ player and Bo Svenson as the preacher.
Okinawa is widely regarded as one of the worst possible places to get good sushi. In other words, a sushi joint in Okinawa would make a fine hiding place.
The closing title card, "Based on the character of 'The Bride' created by Q and U", refers to the first initials of Quentin Tarantino and Uma Thurman.
The Japanese symbols on the background of the poster spell "kirubiru" which is the Japanese spelling for "Kill Bill".
The black and white photography is ultimately an homage to '70s and '80s US television airings of kung fu movies. Black and white (as well as black and red), were used to conceal the shedding of blood from television censors. Originally, no black and white photographic effects were going to be used (and in the Japanese version none are), but the MPAA demanded measures be taken to tone the scene down. Tarantino merely used the old trick for its intended purpose, rather than merely as an homage.
Shin'ichi Chiba makes katanas in real life. In the movie, his character Hattori Hanzo is a renowned katana maker who has taken a blood oath to never create an instrument of death again.
The shot where the Bride splits a baseball in two with a samurai sword was done for real on the set. It was done by Zoë Bell, Uma Thurman's stunt double.
Ellie Driver's codename, the California Mountain Kingsnake, is the only one of the 5 that isn't a venomous snake. Incidentally, when The Bride is in a coma, Ellie can't kill her by injecting poison into her IV.
Uma Thurman was offered the script to Kill Bill, and her role as "The Bride", as a 30th Birthday present from Quentin Tarantino.
Christopher Allen Nelson, who worked on the special effects, revealed in interview that over 450 gallons of fake blood were used in the two Kill Bill movies.
As Quentin Tarantino was leaving Japan after initial location scouting and securing the studios, he heard the all girl band "The 5,6,7,8's" playing over the store's speakers. He was so intrigued by the music that he asked a clerk who the band was. When he was told, Tarantino, who didn't have enough time to go to a music shop to get their CD, begged the clerk to sell him their copy. Quentin took the disc home, listened to it, and immediately signed the band to play during the "Showdown at the House of Blue Leaves" segment. All of the band's songs, including the stand-out "Woo Hoo" are covers of early 60's surfer songs.
This became the first feature-length film directed by Quentin Tarantino to feature fewer than 100 uses of the word "fuck." It is used 17 times.
Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah) was actually whistling "Twisted Nerve" whilst entering the hospital for the scene. It sounded quite professional, but it was masked over; the instrumental was taken off, and the sole whistling from Herrman's song was what we hear until she enters a changing ward.
According to Quentin Tarantino and Uma Thurman in the DVD documentary the idea for doing "Kill Bill" began during the filming of Pulp Fiction (1994). The two began talking about the kinds of movies that they would like to do and Quentin said he would like to do a 70's style kung-fu flick. Uma came up with the film's opening shot of her beaten up and wearing a wedding gown.
The infamous long take scene took 6 hours to rehearse and was shot in 17 takes. After that, Steadicam operator Larry McConkey was rumored to have passed out in exhaustion.
When Chiaki Kuriyama (Gogo) was shooting the scene where she flings her ball and chain out, she accidentally hit Quentin Tarantino on the head while he stood by the camera.
At the beginning of the fight scene between O-Ren and The Bride, after O-Ren says, in Japanese, "I hope you saved your energy. If you haven't you may not last 5 minutes", it is exactly 4 minutes and 59 seconds from the time she steps forward and the music cues, until the fatal blow of the duel.
“The script was 216 pages. I read it and said, ‘This script is amazing.’ Quentin said, ‘Don’t you think this script is too long for a movie? Tell me the truth.’ I go, ‘I don’t think it’s too long, I think it’s two movies.’” – Harvey Weinstein on making Kill Bill Vol. 1 and 2 with Quentin Tarantino.
The Bride's real name is exposed in Vol. 1 on the plane ticket she receives before flying to Okinawa, for a fraction of a second.
Quentin Tarantino delayed the start of the production because Uma Thurman was pregnant.
The church scene was shot in the Mojave Desert outside of Lancaster, CA. Keep an eye out during this scene for a cameo by Samuel L. Jackson as the dead organ player and Bo Svenson as the preacher.
Okinawa is widely regarded as one of the worst possible places to get good sushi. In other words, a sushi joint in Okinawa would make a fine hiding place.
The closing title card, "Based on the character of 'The Bride' created by Q and U", refers to the first initials of Quentin Tarantino and Uma Thurman.
The Japanese symbols on the background of the poster spell "kirubiru" which is the Japanese spelling for "Kill Bill".
The black and white photography is ultimately an homage to '70s and '80s US television airings of kung fu movies. Black and white (as well as black and red), were used to conceal the shedding of blood from television censors. Originally, no black and white photographic effects were going to be used (and in the Japanese version none are), but the MPAA demanded measures be taken to tone the scene down. Tarantino merely used the old trick for its intended purpose, rather than merely as an homage.
Shin'ichi Chiba makes katanas in real life. In the movie, his character Hattori Hanzo is a renowned katana maker who has taken a blood oath to never create an instrument of death again.
The shot where the Bride splits a baseball in two with a samurai sword was done for real on the set. It was done by Zoë Bell, Uma Thurman's stunt double.
Ellie Driver's codename, the California Mountain Kingsnake, is the only one of the 5 that isn't a venomous snake. Incidentally, when The Bride is in a coma, Ellie can't kill her by injecting poison into her IV.
Uma Thurman was offered the script to Kill Bill, and her role as "The Bride", as a 30th Birthday present from Quentin Tarantino.
Christopher Allen Nelson, who worked on the special effects, revealed in interview that over 450 gallons of fake blood were used in the two Kill Bill movies.
As Quentin Tarantino was leaving Japan after initial location scouting and securing the studios, he heard the all girl band "The 5,6,7,8's" playing over the store's speakers. He was so intrigued by the music that he asked a clerk who the band was. When he was told, Tarantino, who didn't have enough time to go to a music shop to get their CD, begged the clerk to sell him their copy. Quentin took the disc home, listened to it, and immediately signed the band to play during the "Showdown at the House of Blue Leaves" segment. All of the band's songs, including the stand-out "Woo Hoo" are covers of early 60's surfer songs.
This became the first feature-length film directed by Quentin Tarantino to feature fewer than 100 uses of the word "fuck." It is used 17 times.
Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah) was actually whistling "Twisted Nerve" whilst entering the hospital for the scene. It sounded quite professional, but it was masked over; the instrumental was taken off, and the sole whistling from Herrman's song was what we hear until she enters a changing ward.
According to Quentin Tarantino and Uma Thurman in the DVD documentary the idea for doing "Kill Bill" began during the filming of Pulp Fiction (1994). The two began talking about the kinds of movies that they would like to do and Quentin said he would like to do a 70's style kung-fu flick. Uma came up with the film's opening shot of her beaten up and wearing a wedding gown.
The infamous long take scene took 6 hours to rehearse and was shot in 17 takes. After that, Steadicam operator Larry McConkey was rumored to have passed out in exhaustion.
When Chiaki Kuriyama (Gogo) was shooting the scene where she flings her ball and chain out, she accidentally hit Quentin Tarantino on the head while he stood by the camera.
At the beginning of the fight scene between O-Ren and The Bride, after O-Ren says, in Japanese, "I hope you saved your energy. If you haven't you may not last 5 minutes", it is exactly 4 minutes and 59 seconds from the time she steps forward and the music cues, until the fatal blow of the duel.
“The script was 216 pages. I read it and said, ‘This script is amazing.’ Quentin said, ‘Don’t you think this script is too long for a movie? Tell me the truth.’ I go, ‘I don’t think it’s too long, I think it’s two movies.’” – Harvey Weinstein on making Kill Bill Vol. 1 and 2 with Quentin Tarantino.
The Bride's real name is exposed in Vol. 1 on the plane ticket she receives before flying to Okinawa, for a fraction of a second.
