When Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill: Vol. 1 debuted last October, its title character, played by David Carradine, was hardly seen. The new Kill Bill: Vol. 2 is different. This time, the Kung Fu icon runs the show. His shaggy, silver, shoulder-length hair is parted just the way it was in the movie, his fingers are adorned with thick rings and his black suit has a Western feel. His vaguely sinister look is belied by his warm, open conversational skills. He complains of an ear problem affecting his hearing and balance, but he's in good humor, producing a pack of tropical Life Savers and offering the treats all around. "They got mangos in here," he says, amazed. "You never know what you're going to get next."
You have three incredible speeches: one about a kung fu move that can make a man's heart explode, one about a goldfish and one about Superman. How did you approach these?
I studied it very carefully like I would Shakespeare. I know this sounds a little funny, but in his own way, Quentin's not far away from Shakespeare. The way that he treats things, the way that he looks inside people, and the godlike stature of everybody in this movie. Part of the thing that I think Quentin's talking about, part of the samurai thing, and the spaghetti western thing and the gangster thing and the Chinese kung fu thing, is that betrayal cannot be forgiven. It has to be paid off. It doesn't matter how much love there is between these two people, and there's a lot of love—but when I shot her in the head, she betrayed me. And that's all. Somebody asked me how I like being the bad guy, and I thought, What are you talking about? This is a Quentin Tarantino movie. They're all bad and they're all good. You love them all. And none of them are pussies. Nobody's chicken. I love that about his stuff.
He's very good at letting characters have a lot of time to think and talk.
I wish he'd given it more time. I wish he'd said, "Screw it. I'm gonna make a two-and-a-half-hour movie here." Nobody would have walked out. But he felt his obligation was to give you a shorter movie and still a long movie. He keeps saying it's an exploitation movie.
I don't think it is.
No, it isn't! It's an epic. It has qualities of David Lean about it. One of his heroes is definitely Sergio Leone. And the two movies that Sergio did that way, Once Upon a Time in the West and Once Upon a Time in America, those are incredibly long and they're brilliant from beginning to end. And they do stand up to Lawrence of Arabia. In a way, this movie does that. You can see, particularly in the first movie, these moments of incredible, expansive moviemaking, where you realize that Quentin has those chops. He's a young guy. This is only his fourth movie. Who knows what he's going to come up with?
Did Quentin mine you for any movie stories?
I don't know about mining me. I'm a talker, but you can't talk that much to Quentin. But we eventually got to be close friends. And he'd listen to me. He wrote this character for me. He'd seen half the movies I've made, and he was a big fan of Kung Fu. He actually owns 16mm prints of some of the episodes. And he'd read my autobiography. So we had a lot to talk about. We had a good time doing all that. Some of the things, like the Superman monologue, is actually a conversation that Quentin and I had in a cigar lounge in Beijing. I felt almost like a collaborator at times. And that's a great feeling.