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Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill is many things. For starters, it is a blood-soaked ballet and a love letter to martial arts cinema. But more than anything it is a reminder that the director plays by his own rules and rarely, if ever, listens to anyone telling him to keep it short.
Tarantino, one of the very few directors in Hollywood blessed with near-absolute creative control, hasn’t faced real studio pressure to trim down his increasingly lengthy films in over a decade and he’s taken full advantage of that. The days of the tight and taut Reservoir Dogs which clocked in at a swift 99 minutes, feel like a distant memory. Fast-forward to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and you’re watching for nearly three hours, wondering if your legs will ever forgive you.
However, Tarantino doesn’t just make long movies for the sake of it and truth be told, there’s a method to his madness. He hasn’t delivered a single film under two and a half hours since Death Proof and even that one had a catch. Death Proof was only half of the Grindhouse double feature, which, when combined with Planet Terror, ran for over three hours. And if you prefer to think of Kill Bill as one singular saga instead of two neat volumes, well, that throws the runtime average even further off the charts.
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The truth is Tarantino does not care, nor should he. If anyone’s earned the right to let scenes breathe or bleed , it’s him. The man is hellbent on crafting a legacy, one deliberate frame at a time where every moment and every lingering shot means something to him. So when he talks about cutting content, it actually means something too.
Take the infamous Esteban Vihaio scene. While developing Kill Bill as a single film, Tarantino once floated the idea that this sequence where Michael Parks plays a soft-spoken, silk-robed retired pimp, might be the first to go. It is not because he didn’t love it, but because, as he put it as per IGN, “If you’re trying to tell your story in three hours or so, you don’t need that scene.” Now, that’s a rare confession from a filmmaker who usually refuses to budge.
However, when Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair finally screened, guess who was still in it. It was none other than Esteban Vihaio, alive and brooding in all his unsettling charm and the scene which Tarantino once casually considered trimming remained untouched, while other tweaks and enhancements were made elsewhere.
The changes in The Whole Bloody Affair were no minor edits. The House of Blue Leaves massacre now runs in full, vivid color instead of black and white. The anime sequence, famously chopped down to avoid an X-rating in the US, was restored in its violent glory. The opening Klingon proverb was replaced with a somber tribute to Japanese filmmaker Kinji Fukasaku. Sofia Fatale, already short an arm, loses the other and yet, Vihaio remained.
If that tells you anything, it’s that Tarantino always circles back to what matters most to him, regardless of what he says he’ll sacrifice.
For more such stories, check out Hollywood News
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