Kill Bill follows The Bride after she wakes up from a four-year coma that was inflicted upon her when fellow assassins murdered everyone at her wedding and assumed her to be dead. After she wakes up, she tracks down the all of the assassins and the leader of the assassins, Bill. She was pregnant, at the time of her wedding, and when she wakes up, she realizes that her baby has been killed as well. Having had a relationship with the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad leader Bill, the baby was his, and she left the group, resulting in their attack at her wedding.

Quentin Tarantino began to develop the idea of The Bride during the filming of Pulp Fiction, Uma Thurman’s first collaboration with Tarantino before playing The Bride in Kill Bill. Pulp Fiction was released in 1994, but Tarantino did not begin writing the screenplay until 2000 and it took a year and a half to write, the longest it took to write a screenplay. The character of The Bride was rewritten after Uma Thurman aged seven years and had a newborn baby. The aspect of a more mature woman and a especially a mother, influenced the new direction of the character. If you read both of my blogs from this week, you will notice that the character of Bill is portrayed by David Carradine, who was the white actor that Warner Brothers picked to play a Shaolin monk over Bruce Lee. After being casted in this role, he learned martial arts and became very famous, which led to Tarantino choosing David Carradine to play Bill.

Tarantino always has several influences and inspirations that he pays homage to in his films. It was inspired by grindhouse cinema, which is cheaply made, low budget action films from the 1970s, like Kung Fu movies, blaxploitation films, and spaghetti westerns, all of which inspired other movies of his as well. The Bride’s iconic yellow jumpsuit is an homage to Bruce Lee’s jumpsuit in Game of Death, and the film features an anime backstory for one of its characters. Two films have very similar plots and serve as inspiration for the idea of Kill Bill and those are the French film The Bride Wore Black and Japanese film Lady Snowblood, both of which are about a bride enacted revenge on a gang. At one point in the film, one of the assassins is whistling an eerie tune, which is from the 1968 film Twisted Nerve. This whistle has become so iconic that it has been featured in many things, such as episodes of American Horror Story and it was sampled in the 2015 rap song, Chill Bill by Rob $tone.