KILL BILL NOVEL

Started by finlayr, August 22, 2003, 08:00:23 PM

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finlayr

Okay.  Somebody explain this one to me:

A while ago Kill Bill: The Novel was ready to pre-order from Amazon.com.  There was even a COVER for it that was cool!!  So that means, hey, HE MUST HAVE WROTE THE NOVEL.

So then..where is it...and why isn't Tarantino talking about it?

Why hasn't anybody mentioned it?

What, all of a sudden, the novel has just vanished???
Filmmaker

IHeartPTA

last i heard of it was lapril 2002, nothing after that

http://www.imdb.com/WN?20020423#11
"I want to confess as best I can, but my heart is void. The void is a mirror. I see my face and feel loathing and horror. My indifference to men has shut me out. I live now in a world of ghosts, a prisoner in my dreams. " -Antonius Block from The Seventh Seal

MacGuffin

According to Hyperion books, the Novel of Kill Bill has been cancelled. Instead, they will release the screenplay based on the film (which may include several stories or scenes not in the final movie).
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

finlayr

yeah okay, it was cancelled for whatever reason.  but that means it still exists since it was ready to pre-order and there was even a cover.  so a novel...a qt novel...tarantino prose exists somewhere....

But where???
Filmmaker

MacGuffin




From Publishers Weekly
This journal captures the two years Carradine spent making the two-part feature film Kill Bill with director Quentin Tarantino. As he describes the pre-production, production and promoting of the film, Carradine, who is best known for TV's Kung Fu, gives readers a glimpse into the up-and-down life of a B-list actor. Excited about landing the role of Bill, once ticketed for Warren Beatty, Carradine is simultaneously nervous about canceling the autograph conventions on which he pretty much supports himself. Along with subtly pointing out that he has worked with Martin Scorsese and won a Golden Globe, Carradine also knows that a Tarantino movie is his best shot at stardom, and it's that eternal hope, not his résumé, that pervades the book and makes him a narrator for whom readers will feel genuine affection. Along with laying bare his personal deliberations, Carradine also provides an informative exploration of the world of filmmaking, from what it takes to shoot in China to how many (soon to be bloodied) shirts you need for a fight scene. It's apparent that one of Carradine's longest-running love affairs, however tempestuous it might be, is with Hollywood. And for those who share that feeling, this book will remind them why, for better or for worse, they feel that way.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

MacGuffin



I'm not one for spiritual journeys where I discover crap inside myself but I know that if I ever went on one, I would want David Carradine with me. Carradine is best known as Caine the star of Kung Fu and more recently as the titular subject of Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill. For the first time in his 50 year career Carradine decided to keep a journal while working on Kill Bill. He ended up writing a whole book, The Kill Bill Diary: The Making of a Tarantino Classic as Seen Through the Eyes of a Screen Legend. I got a chance to talk with Carradine from his home in California.

Daniel Robert Epstein: What are you up to today?

David Carradine: I'm putting some stuff together for this art exhibit I'm going to have this month in Beverly Hills.

DRE:What are you showing?

DC:My artwork, paintings and drawings.

DRE:When did you start painting?

DC:I've always painted. This is a new thing for me, though. All of my paintings have just hung around and then I started painting on the computer. As long as you don't do a lot of crashes, those survive and it doesn't take up a lot of space.

DRE:So you draw on a tablet or do you draw stuff and then scan it in?

DC:I do a little bit of drawing stuff and scanning it in but by and large I paint on a tablet. I use a paint and graphics program that's on my Mac.

DRE:Have you ever sold paintings in the past?

DC:I never tried to sell paintings before. I painted a lot years ago but all my paintings and all my sculptures have disappeared. I can't even explain to you where they disappeared to. So then I started this new thing of working on the computer and now I'm finally going to get to do a show and it will be my debut.

DRE:Do you get nervous before debuting at something like this?

DC:Not exactly. I wouldn't call it nervous. There's a lot of work to get ready in time but I can't say that I get nervous. It is not fun getting nervous

DRE:I would imagine that you don't get nervous about much anymore.

DC:Nah, I don't think I ever did. I think the first time I was ever on stage I was pretty nervous. But now I never feel nervous while working. I'm nervous before something happens but not this time. This one I'm just going straight ahead.

DRE:In terms of the Kill Bill book, do you usually keep a journal when you're working on a film?

DC:No, never.

DRE:What made you feel like doing a journal this time?

DC:Well somebody I know told me that I'm a pretty good writer and that if I keep a journal I might get a book sale.

DRE:How did you like the process of keeping a diary on set and trying to remember stuff for a book?

DC:Oh it wasn't a problem because I did it, basically, day by day. I didn't have to remember. After I wrote the book, people would say, "God you have a great memory. How did you put it all back together?" I said I didn't put it back together, I just did it right then. Pretty much every evening I'd be in my trailer with nothing to do so I might as well write down what happened that day. Once in a while I'd slip a day or two and then I'd have to go, "What the hell happened the day before yesterday?" But by and large I just wrote it as it happened.

DRE:Did Kill Bill come out the way you expected it to?

DC:Oh yeah. Quentin is constantly writing. Quentin never stops writing. He wrote right up to the very end. Then after we finished shooting, he wrote some new stuff and we came back and did pickups. But it was all progressive. The editing process tends to pull things out but the writing process never really did that. The writing process actually always added to it.

DRE:After reading the book I'm amazed that there wasn't more uncontrolled insanity on the set.

DC:Why would you think there would be?

DRE:Just because it was such a complex film to make.

DC:Well the more complex it is the more we've got to hold it together. But the reason I asked why because a lot of people think Quentin is some lunatic and he just isn't. He's very didactic. He knows exactly what he's doing all the time. But he can also change. He's very malleable. He is totally in charge and totally working towards the end of the project. There is no insanity involved at all. So of course there's none in the book and I didn't want to make some up.

DRE:Were you surprised that Bill and Bea didn't get to have big drawn out fight at the end of Kill Bill 2?

DC:I think I might have been actually slightly responsible for that. In Quentin's original script, there was no big, long, drawn out fight. Then Quentin visited [Kill Bill fight choreographer] Woo-ping [Yuen] in Australia where he was shooting something. Quentin got really excited about using all those techniques. Then before we even started shooting I said, "Look I don't want to see a Woo-ping movie. I want to see a Quentin Tarantino movie. We don't go to your movies for the action. We go for the crazy things that people say." Quentin decided to go back to more of his original concept and also in-between I think Quentin had seen Matrix II, which is loaded with that stuff. It's also done by Woo-ping and Quentin hated the movie. I hated it too. I think almost everybody did.

DRE:Who didn't hate it?

DC:Yeah. Quentin said "I think this shit is over." He basically said to me that he didn't want me on wires. I had become a real expert at the wire. I was eager to do it just for the fun of it. But he said that he said he wanted people to really see that I was doing it. Even in that fight with Michael Jai White, which is not in the movie but is in the extras on the DVD, is quite a fight. But there are no special effects in it at all. In the whole movie, there's very little of that wirework that transcends what you think a human body could do. There is one sequence where Bea and the leader of the Crazy 88s run up a wall. Quentin used the wire just to make somebody a little bit more athletic, except for Pai Mei of course. But Pai Mei is a fantasy character so when Pai Mei stands on her sword, we like that. One of the great talents that Quentin has is knowing what the audience is going to like. He seems to really have that down. The other thing he's got down is never letting the audience know what is going to happen next. Whatever happens next is always going to be something of a surprise. But I can say I was a little disappointed that the fight with Michael Jai White didn't get in the picture. I wasn't really disappointed that I didn't get to do the wirework because I think he was right about it. I think that Matrix II and Matrix III and Charlie Angels II had really worn that out to where I don't think people would have been really happy about seeing another circus exposition, is that the right word? Probably not.

DRE:Well it is like a three ring circus of violence, that's the closest.

DC:Well my kung-fu master, Rob Moses, who was with me during the training, calls it a kung-fu circus. That's never what we did back in the old days on the Kung Fu series or our movies in America. We showed people standing on their own feet and kicking and punching and jumping and dancing, as they could. Then the Chinese came in and overwhelmed us with Crouching Tiger. Then there was the Matrix and all the Jet Li stuff. That's not the way that we made the stuff popular in the United States. We made it popular with Chinese people that are actually doing things. Matrix I certainly was an epiphany. We all went "Wow this is hot." You can't just go do it over and over again and expect people to be amazed by it.

DRE:I was a little surprised that you suspected that Woo-ping didn't like you.

DC:I don't think that he was totally responsible for that, I don't like him very much either. He's very stand-offish. It was very difficult to talk to him. He pretended throughout the entire time that he couldn't speak English. I realized that it was a pose of his after a couple of months. I was not impressed about the attitude everyone else had toward him. They all called him the Master. I've known some masters. I've had interviews with the abbot of the Shaolin monastery a few times. He's a very humble, simple person. Woo-ping has too much arrogance for me to classify him as a master. He's a businessman. I would not want to run into him in a dark alley and have to fight my way past him. I'm sure he's very capable, he's a great choreographer. But that's what he is, he's a choreographer. Myself I'm a dancer, I'm a kung-fu artist, I am an actor. I got my own way to go and he can help me if he wants to. But he can't rule me.

DRE:It's interesting that you said he wasn't humble since it seems that humbleness is what martial arts are really all about.

DC:Not everybody does it that way. Bruce Lee did not do it that way, for sure. Woo-ping does not do it that way, he is an absolute autocrat. His people don't dare do anything that he doesn't want. He wants everything to be his own way. Remember that sword draw that I did where I throw it up in the air and catch it in the fight with Michael Jai White?

DRE:Yeah, it's fantastic.

DC:I had been practicing that for three months. Whenever I had nothing else to do in training I would practice trying to see if I could do that. On the day of the fight suddenly Quentin said "I want you to do that sword draw." Woo-ping said "No, no, no, no." I finally said, "Look, that's the draw I'm going to do." That's all there is to it. It's not just me saying it, the director said it. I didn't say this but I could have, "Who the fuck are you? Telling me what I'm going to do and what I'm not going to do. I've been in this business for 50 years. I'm one of the people who made martial arts a famous thing in the world and I practiced this thing for three months. This is what I'm going to do." Then there was a whole protocol thing going on. I walked away and Quentin came over and he had already talked to Woo-ping. I said, "I thought it was wonderful the way you dealt with him so diplomatically." Quentin goes "There's this protocol problem we got." I said "Look, I don't want to fuck with Woo-ping but on the other hand I really want to fuck with Woo-ping." Quentin laughed and said, "Okay." We went back and we continued with his version. Quentin gets what he wants without ruffling anybody's feathers. Since everyone was setting this guy up as such a master I figured I had to shoot him down.

DRE:I am really shocked that you didn't get the amount of respect you deserve.

DC:I think Woo-ping respected me. I just don't think he quite knew what to do with me. I think he was reticent to try to teach me his stuff because he had that respect. That's one of the things that came up early on. I said, "They're not using me." Quentin said, "Well, they're afraid of you." I said, "Look, I'm here. I'm working out eight hours a day, five days a week. What's the point of it if they don't lean on me and make me better." The trainers got that. I really don't know whether Woo-ping got that or not because, like I said, he's sort of inaccessible. He doesn't talk to you. I look a little askance at people that would allow people to treat them that way.

DRE:I love the story in the book where Harry Knowles doesn't want to get out of range of you throwing a knife. Did you find that there are a lot of people like that?

DC:Harry Knowles is really special. There's only one of him.

DRE:You also wrote in the book that you were hoping that this film would cause a resurgence for you like Pulp Fiction did for John Travolta, do you feel like that's happened?

DC:Oh yeah. I've made a few movies since then that maybe wouldn't have happened without Kill Bill. People called me as their first choice for some great parts. I did three or four of them last year. You haven't seen them yet, but they'll be out soon.

There's nothing more fun than being the central character in a film. Particularly being a force that changes the shape of the film or controls the shape of the film. I've done that a lot in my own television series and most of the movies have been one man shows. That's the highest position there is to be in and if you're the villain you may be very important but you're not the primary artist in the project. It's a lot more fun to be the primary artist. People say that the villains are the best parts. Maybe they've never been in that other position. I don't know. Maybe they're just trying to speak well about what it is they do. But I don't really enjoy playing villains much. I haven't played many villains, really. Maybe it is that I don't see them as villains. In real life people don't think they're villains. I don't think Lucky Luciano thought he was a villain. You see a lot of movies where people play the bad guy and are joyful about being a villain. I don't think that's the truth in real life. Even serial killers think they are heroes. That's a movie thing and I've never cottoned to it. When I play a bad guy I always refused to stick to the conventions like "The Leer." Where you're smiling, leering villain enjoying tearing people apart and shooting the shit out of every village. I don't think that's true. I think those people are serious about it. I don't think they're grinning. They're not having fun. I think most of them think they're doing God's work. So I try not to think of these guys as villains. I think of them as people who misguided themselves into a dark place and think it's the place to be.

DRE:I got to interview Roger Corman last year and he said that he's proud and still has affection for all his films that he has made. Of course he's not really in his films.

DC:He's not an actor.

DRE:Are there films that you wish you never did or do you feel that it's all part of the deal?

DC:I don't think there are films that I wish I never did. There are films I don't like. But most of the time when I was making a film, I thought it was going to be a good film. I've made a 120 feature movies and I don't know how much television and once in a while you do something that you initially felt was beneath you. Sometimes it turns out you found some way to make it up to your standards or above them. Sometimes you're making a film that you think is going to be a great movie or a great performance or something and then you see the film and you go, "Well that didn't work, did it?" I'm not proud of every film but I'm not ashamed enough of anything to want to run away from it.

DRE:Corman sold the remake rights to Death Race 2000. If they remade it would you be interested in being involved?

DC:I don't think they are thinking about me. I'm not going to be a charming courtier and try to campaign for the part. I think Warner Bros purchased the rights to do it from Roger and they've been talking about Tom Cruise playing a part. I don't even want to get into that with Warners. I've never had an easy time with Warners. I made my all of my Kung Fu series with Warner and even though I probably made hundreds of millions of dollars for them. But they don't come to me. I don't know what they're pissed off about [laughs], maybe it is because I walked off the first series.

DRE:Do you have good memories of making Death Race 2000?

DC:Yeah I have good memories. It all went very fast. We shot it in three weeks and it was raining all the time. You can't see it because of my black vinyl costume. It was difficult to shoot because of that. We couldn't spend as much time shooting as we wanted to because sometimes we had to change things because of the rain. I had no idea it was going to be something that would last forever. I believe it is the highest grossing film in the entire history of Roger Corman which meant a lot of money for me. I had a big piece of it but it never occurred to me that piece was going to amount to much. It was a little movie I made in three weeks and that movie just keeps going on. Now that they've sold it to Warner Bros, I get a piece of that too. If they want me to be in the picture, I would be in the picture, but when they remake these things they very rarely use the people who were in them the first time around. They always recast them. I know there's talk at Warner Bros about doing a feature version of Kung Fu and they're talking about going back and telling the original pilot movie story over again with a young actor. It would have to be a young actor because he's studying up at the monastery. He starts out as child and a teenager. I'm 70 years old so I couldn't play that part. But I think they're making a mistake because it'll be like Wild Wild West. For the movie they recast it and unless you are a geek TV fan, no one remembers who originally played the parts. But Kung Fu is a little bit different. I can't imagine how they can expect to get a huge audience with somebody else playing Kwai Chang Caine because I'm entirely too identified with it. I ought to know because I have to live with it. But the sensible thing that they should do is a sequel where we see what the hell happened to this guy. What's he like in 1906? Years ago I got tired of trying to convince Warner Bros of my opinions about things. I got other things to do. If they want me involved in any of these projects I would certainly think about it. But I've got so much on my plate, I don't need it and I am getting tired of talking about it.

DRE:Have you ever seen David Carradine related tattoo on somebody?

DC:I don't think a lot of people show me their tattoos. But I have a lot of tattoos myself. I don't have them on my arms so I don't show them a lot on the road. When I originally started getting tattoos I started putting them in places where I didn't think they would get in the way of my movie career. That was before we knew there were ways to cover them up. I have one on my forearm. It looks like a seagull but it's actually a flying tern and it covers a V shaped scar. I got tired of the scar there so I made it look like a seagull but as I said it's a blind tern. Because that's a pun.

DRE:[laughs] What was the last one you got?

DC:The last one I got was a pretty big dragon on my left thigh and it's still not finished. I always wanted a dragon there and I was about to do Kill Bill and I was on my way to China. I thought, "I should have this dragon before I go there". So I got a hold of this guy that came to my house and I spent an entire weekend, about 20 hours of tattooing, to get the dragon on. It still isn't finished. I don't think I will ever finish it because who's got the time. People ask me how many tattoos I have and I say one because I do think of them as one entire painting or theme. I don't know if it is true or not but that's the way I think about it.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks