Quentin Tarantino Gave Uma Thurman Plenty of Homework Before Kill Bill

Quentin Tarantino is the kind of director who comes to his projects fully armed. He carefully selects the lucky ones who will work with him, handpicks the cast, and makes sure they are ready to bring their A-game to his movie.

Sometimes the actors even receive homework in order to fully embrace the character they are to portray. That’s actually the case with Tarantino and Uma Thurman before they started working together on Kill Bill.

The director asked the actress to watch three classic action movies from different corners of the world so that she could express the Bride with all her rage. The movies he had chosen are really cult classics: Jack Hill’s Coffy, Toshiya Fujita’s Lady Snowblood, and John Woo’s The Killer.

Tarantino has mentioned many times that he is not shy to steal something from great directors. There’s his famous quote “Great artists steal; they don’t do homages”.

That’s exactly what he did to Kill Bill, in fact. That’s why we have Bride wearing Bruce Lee’s iconic yellow jumpsuit from Game of Death, or why Ennio Morricone’s music is there in Kill Bill’s second chapter when the Bride exits the church to find Bill (the same song that was in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly).

And it seems like the approach paid off, as Kill Bill is now holding the title of his best movie ever created and even more.

“I think this might be one of the best films of the century so far. The way it uses different techniques for different sections of the film and how they go seamlessly into the next shows the possibilities of film as a medium in a way that few films dare,” Redditor inthebenefitofmrkite said.

So if you feel like rewatching the Kill Bill movies, you might want to watch the ones that were Uma Thurman's homework first!