If you attended San Diego Comic-Con over the weekend, you might have come across director Quentin Tarantino making the rounds to promote his Django Unchained/Zorro crossover comic. In light of this and other news, it turns out the retro cinema throwback visionary auteur best known for his work on cult hits like Resevoir Dogs, Jackie Brown and the incomparable Pulp Fiction is currently doing business with The Weinstein Company to theatrically a longer verison of his two-part martial arts spaghett-western kunoichi smash hit, Kill Bill.
What’s going on with that is originally back when Kill Bill was going to be one movie, I wrote an even longer anime sequence. So you see in the movie [O-Ren] kill her boss but then there was that long hair guy… The big sequence was her fighting that guy. I.G. [The Japanese Anime Studio] who did Ghost in the Shell said we can’t do that and finish it in time for your thing. And [plus] you can’t have a thirty-minute piece in your movie. I said okay. It was my favorite part but it was the part you could drop. So we dropped it and then later when I.G. heard we were talking about doing Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair — they still had the script so without even being commissioned, they just did it and paid for it themselves. It’s really terrific. Anyway, The Weinstein Company and myself were talking about actually coming out with it sometime, not before the year is out, but within the next year with limited theatrical engagement as well.
The film is an historical contribution to the martial arts action genre for modern day filmgoers, and a spiritual window into the Asian action classics of yesteryear, namely with the presence of stars like Sonny Chiba and Gordon Liu, and even made martial arts action maestro Yuen Woo-Ping a household name. Headlined by actress Uma Thurman with a stellar hit list featuring Vivica A. Fox, Lucy Liu, Daryl Hannah, Michael Madsen and late actor David Carradine who tragically passed away six summers ago, the film delivers all the glorious tropes of old-school martial arts action, Japanese anime and old-fashioned western thrills, with memorable costumes and weapons, and a story that kept fans on the edges of their seats so many years ago.
