“Heaven has no rage, like love to hatred turned,
Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.”

— from The Mourning Bride (1697)

by William Congreve

 

Those lines are the derivation of a popular adage that has stood the test of time. But it turns out there is something a lot more furious than a woman scorned. If you really want to piss a woman off, try to kill a pregnant assassin on her wedding day and mess it up. That’s the premise of Kill Bill, an exotic thriller, conceived by Quentin Tarantino (Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, etc.), who also scripted and directed the film.

 

A primal need for revenge is the emotional thread woven through the fabric of the story, however that is a substantial over simplification. Kill Bill: Volume 1 also explores the complex relationships linking an extraordinary band of female assassins. Uma Thurman plays The Bride, a.k.a. Black Mamba, who is targeted for assassination on her wedding day, because she may become a threat. Her guests are killed, but she awakens from a coma four years after the assassination attempt with a ravenous appetite for revenge.

 

The sub-text focuses on the complexities of human nature, including inbred instincts for revenge and survival. The Bride targets her former colleagues leaving Bill, played by David Carradine, the leader of the clan of killers for last. The cast includes Daryl Hannah as Elle Driver, a.k.a. California Mountain Snake, Michael Madsen as Budd, a.k.a. Sidewinder, Vivica Fox as Vernita Green, a.k.a. Cobra, Lucy Liu, O-Ren Ishi, a.k.a. Cottonmouth, Michael Jai White as Alburt, Chia Hui Liu as Gordon Liu, Chiaki Kuriyama as Go Go Yubari and Sonny Chiba as Hattori Hanzo.

 

Kill Bill was mainly filmed on stages in Peking, China, and also at locations in Japan, Los Angeles and Mexico. Each setting provided backgrounds for different chapters of the story. The film will be released in two parts. Kill Bill: Volume 1 opens in October with the climax slated to follow at a future date. Separate release prints are being made for Japan and other markets with subtle differences in colors, textures and contrast as well as content. In other words, this is no ordinary action film.

 

The idea for the story and previsualization percolated in Tarantino’s fertile imagination for four years before it was greenlighted for production by Miramax Films.  Robert Richardson, ASC received the script along with a bouquet of roses at his home in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, on Valentine’s Day in 2002. It was like he was being wooed by the director. Richardson was intrigued by the possibilities of collaborating with Tarantino and the potential dynamics of that relationship. He observes that much of the best visual storytelling has evolved from synergistic relationships between directors and cinematographers, citing Ingmar Bergman and Sven Nykvist, ASC, Bernardo Bertolucci and Vittorio Storaro, ASC, AIC, David Lean and Freddie Young, BSC, Joel and Ethan Coen and Roger Deakins, ASC, BSC, among others.

 

Richardson could have mentioned his own collaborations with another writer-director, Oliver Stone, on such memorable films as Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, JFK, Heaven on Earth, Wall Street, Natural Born Killers and Nixon, and his budding relationship with Martin Scorsese on Casino, Bringing Out the Dead and the future release The Aviator. 

 

Richardson brought both the sum of his life’s experiences and innate talent to the project. He was born and raised in the Cape Cod area. During his freshman year at the University of Vermont, Richardson saw a series of Bergman films, including Wild Strawberries, The Seventh Seal and Hour of the Wolf. That experience fueled his interest in the medium. He signed up for every film and theater arts class available. After exhausting the possibilities offered by the curriculum, Richardson took a year off to think about his future. During that hiatus, he worked as an usher at a hometown cinema.

 

Richardson decided to continue his undergraduate education at the Rhode Island School of Design, where he was nurtured by Peter O’Neal, a professor/friend/ teacher, who opened his eyes to the diversity of film as art. He studied and parsed the works of such filmmakers as Robert Flaherty (Nanook of the North), Michael Powell (The Red Shoes) and David and Albert Maysles (Salesman), and many others.

 

“I cannot say enough about the importance of that relationship … Peter O’Neal allowed clarity to re-enter and maintain by channeling my brooding energy,” he says.

 

After graduation, Richardson enrolled at the American Film Institute, where he focused on cinematography under the guidance of George Folsey, ASC.

 

“He inspired me to analyze the men who photographed the films that were instrumental in my life,” says Richardson, citing Nykvist, Jack Cardiff, BSC, Giuseppe Rotunno, ASC, AIC, Raoul Coutard, Gregg Toland, ASC, Stanley Cortez, ASC and others.

 

Richardson discovered that a master’s degree in fine arts didn’t open doors in Hollywood. He spent seven years mainly shooting documentaries with occasional insert and second unit work. His breakthrough came in the wake of filming Crossfire, a documentary about the civil war in El Salvador. In 1986, Stone hired Ramon Mendez, the soundman on Crossfire, as a technical consultant when he was preparing to shoot Salvador. Stone was a successful screenwriter taking his first turn at the helm. Mendez introduced Richardson to Stone. It was the beginning of their collaboration.

 

Richardson earned his first Oscar nomination for Platoon (1986), his second film with Stone. He was nominated again for Born on the Fourth of July (1990), and took top honors for JFK (1991). Richardson collected a fourth nomination for Snow Falling on Cedars (1999).

 

His collaboration with Tarantino opened new paths to explore. “Quentin carried Kill Bill like a child in the womb for four long years,” says Richardson. “My role (as a cinematographer) is to give birth to what the director imagines. It is a confounding relationship. Sometimes there is a catastrophic collision of egos and at other times it’s a marriage of shared artistic interests that are as pure as poetry. Each film has a singular identity that begins with the director and the script. From there, I facilitate––beginning with the director and stretching outward to the story––the plot and characters. Quentin has a strong aversion to pretentiousness. His vision is not conventional. If I had come to him with a fully developed visual treatment and attempted to attach my vision atop of Kill Bill, I wouldn’t have survived the first cup of coffee.”

 

Tarantino showed Richardson films and sent him DVDs, laser discs and tapes that inspired aspects of his vision for Kill Bill, including the use of colors, composition, camera music and the choreographing of images with music. Richardson estimates that he viewed more than 200 films in preparation for shooting. Probably few, if any of them, are on Roger Ebert’s or Leonard Maltin’s must watch lists. The titles ranged from Godzilla to Street Fighter and Tokyo Mafia.

 

When Richardson came onboard 10 weeks before the first day of photography, Tarantino already had a vision for a visual style etched in his mind. The director had laid the foundation that with production designers David Wasco, a frequent collaborator, and Yohei Taneda, augmented by costumers Kumiko Ogawa and Catherine Marie Thomas. Richardson had his say during preproduction, regarding the choice of locations and to a lesser extent the color palette.

 

“Quentin is a passionate filmmaker … film is life to him,” Richardson says. “He is a lot like Marty Scorsese that way. Though their tastes are vastly different, their love of the art is virtually identical … and this love comes with a vast reservoir of knowledge. … Day by day, the two of us learned how to communicate with each other. I was patient not to rush for answers. It has taken me years to learn that lesson.”

 

Tarantino wasn’t enthusiastic about shooting makeup, hair or costume tests. He agreed to allocate part of one day for Richardson to experiment with lighting Thurman. The rest came down to Richardson’s eye and instincts at the moment of photography.

 

“Stylistically the film oscillates between actors bathed in soft lighting where colors take on a muted feel (at the end) to high key and loud lighting, and a ‘dupe’ quality for the Pai Mei sequences (where a martial arts teacher is instructing The Bride),” Richardson says. “We move in and out of the various signature styles of genres, including Westerns, melodrama, thrillers and horror films. Saturated and bloody images run atop of brutal and harsh shots while Kramer Vs. Kramer beckons us from the wings.”

 

Tarantino always visualized Kill Bill as a widescreen (2.4:1 aspect ratio) movie. Richardson prefers shooting in anamorphic format, because of the degradation of image quality inherent to the optical extraction required by the Super 35 format.

 

“Casino was the only film I’ve shot in Super 35 format,” he says, “and I was terribly disappointed with the release print quality. It was devastating to me. Quentin had a similar experience with Reservoir Dogs. Films stocks and lenses have improved, but there is still a chasm (separating the Super 35 and anamorphic formats).”

 

The problem was that Tarantino had written specific “zoom” lens shots into the script. Richardson felt that the anamorphic zoom lenses available from Panavision didn’t provide a fast enough T-stop to properly execute those shots. That drove the decision to use a digital intermediate process. That approach enabled Richardson to shoot with spherical lenses in Super 35 format and “squeeze” the images into a 2.4:1 aspect ratio during digital mastering. Basically, the edited cut of the negative is scanned and converted to digital files. The images are timed for shot-to-shot and scene-to-scene continuity in a digital suite, and then recorded out to an intermediate film used as a master for release printing. It’s a familiar tactic for Richardson, who has shot many commercials that have been converted to digital format and manipulated in telecine suites. However, this is his first experience with a “film-out” from a digital intermediate.

 

He suggested shooting Kill Bill in three-perforation 35mm format. That trimmed film and lab costs by 25 percent. Richardson explains that essentially covered costs for the digital intermediate process. There is no downside, since the digital files can be recorded out to a four-perf 35mm color intermediate film with no loss of picture quality.

 

Front-end processing and release printing were slated for Technicolor Labs, in Los Angeles. Tarantino agreed with Richardson’s suggestion about creating and timing a digital file at Technique, the lab’s subsidiary in the Los Angeles area.

 

Richardson, Tarantino, and the cast and crew spent close to three months shooting on stages at Peking Studios with some additional scenes filmed at practical locations. It was an aesthetic decision. Tarantino is a Kung Fu purist. He felt that for authenticity it was essential to shoot vital martial arts scenes in China. Richardson says that enabled the company to draw on the talents of people who are most familiar with the art.

 

“There is a textural sensibility and craftsmanship that would have been extremely difficult to attain in a Western country,” he says. “One of the obvious challenges was language. I learned to relinquish my arrogance and assimilated.”

 

Locations in Japan were primarily used for filming driving sequences with The Bride and a character named Sofie Fatale, played by Julie Dreyfus. The main locations were a desert setting abutting Los Angeles where The Bride exacts her revenge on The Sidewalker, and in a home in Pasadena, California, which served as The Cobra’s home. There were also scenes filmed on sets built in Los Angeles, including the final confrontation between The Bride and Bill. Locations in Mexico provided exteriors for Bill’s hacienda and also for driving sequences.

 

Richardson’s camera package consisted of a few Panaflex Platinum bodies and a range of Primo prime and zoom lenses. Tarantino would show up everyday with shot lists written with red ink on white paper. He used frequent rehearsals as opportunities to block the action and accommodate suggestions from the actors. Dialogue scenes were mainly shot with one camera, and action sequences with two to provide coverage from different angles. Cameras were usually traveling on a Steadicam, crane or on tracks, anticipating the words and the action with a blend of subjective and objective point-of-view shots.

 

“We did a series of rather complicated Steadicam/crane shots that Quentin devised out of the evil side of his mind,” Richardson recalls. “One such shot required (camera/Steadicam operator) Larry McConkey to do an eight-minute tracking shot where he had to move nimbly between a mounted and cabled pedestal that lifted him 30 feet into the air, and then deposited him back on the ground where he once again had to adjust to a walking mode ending up on a crane that lifted him above a crowd.”

 

That shot was for a challenging sequence dubbed “Crazy 88” indicating the number of Yakuza thugs The Bride kills during an early sequence after she snaps out of her coma. The Bride traces Cobra to a Japanese nightclub created in precise detail on the Peking stage. The shot begins behind the bandstand where an all-girl band is bobbing their heads to a retro beat. McConkey flows to his right passing under a stairway and revealing The Bride moving into the frame. The camera seems to float behind her as she strides down a hallway and moves behind a screen, where she is seen in silhouette.

 

McConkey steps onto a Pegasus crane, which rises and follows The Bride. It descends and McConkey steps off following her as she enters a stall in a restroom. The Bride changes her clothes and dons a tracksuit. She is ready for action. The Bride leaves the stall walking toward McConkey’s moving camera and returns to the main floor of the club. As she walks up another staircase, McConkey steps back onto the crane, which rises and reveals the room from The Bride’s perspective. It’s like you are inside her mind.  

 

It looks spontaneous, but the cast and crew moved in perfect synchronization. Dolly grip David Merrill used bilingual flashcards to “speak” with Chinese members of the crew, and gaffer Ian Kincaid was precisely controlling lighting with a dimmer board. Richardson notes that at times hundreds of lights were linked to a single cue. Kincaid was able to control some 400 lighting channels with a remote board that he handheld, usually standing behind the camera next to Richardson. The cinematographer and gaffer have been working together for years, which enhanced their communications.

 

“We didn’t do much motivated lighting in a classic sense,” Richardson observes. “It is a more stylized than naturalistic look, usually visually punctuating psychological moments in the story.”

 

Tarantino was also always around the camera and actors, rather than isolating himself in a “video village.” He and Richardson were frequently in eye-to-eye contact, which expedited spontaneous decisions when “happy accidents” occurred.

 

Tarantino wanted a clean, unfiltered look, so Richardson took a minimalist approach to using glass diffusion. He used either number 85 or 81EF color correction filters when recording daylight exteriors onto tungsten-balanced film, and at times, Richardson opted for a one-quarter Black Pro-Mist or similarly light diffusion.

 

The cinematographer armed himself with a large arsenal of emulsions, including Kodachrome 40 movie film, a color positive, Eastman Double-X black-and-white film, and five color negatives, including Eastman EXR 5248 (100T), Eastman EXR 5293 (200T), Kodak Vision 5277 (320T), Kodak Vision 5279 (500T), and Kodak Vision 5289 (800T). Each film provided unique imaging characteristics, enabling him to take a painterly approach to rendering looks.

 

“Each stock offers distinct values, including speed, grain and sensitivity, but more importantly they provide a distinct texture, which I believe the audience feels,” he says.

 

There is no formula or textbook explanation for choosing the right camera film for any situation, Richardson comments. The variables are incalculable. It has to do with the individual cinematographer’s experience, tastes and interpretations of how different emulsions respond to light, and how that will match the director’s vision.

 

For example, when Tarantino said he wanted a “Sergio Leone” look, typical of that director’s Spaghetti Westerns for a sequence where The Bride is being coached by a wise monk to sharpen her Kung Fu skills, Richardson chose a color reversal stock with more contrast. The exposed film was shepherded through several generations of duplication until Tarantino was satisfied with the degraded, contrasty and scratchy look.

 

There are various paths Richardson could have followed to achieve similar results, but he didn’t want something similar. One of the options available to him was the possibility of selectively altering colors, contrast or other aspects of images during digital timing. One of the advantages of timing films digitally is that elements of shots can be isolated with Power Windows software without altering anything else. 

 

“I knew what I could do in post,” he says. “If the situation arose, where I could isolate a wall to make it darker during timing, and we could save significant time lighting, it gave us another option. That gave us the flexibility to move more rapidly with more assurance that we weren’t making compromises that affected our product. That type of flexibility also made it easier and faster for us to adjust to changes in weather, knowing we could match the sky (when parts of a scene were filmed in sunlight and parts in clouds). I don’t want to insinuate that a ‘Don Quixote’ moment can be repaired. Far from it; but small shifts in color temperatures are less troubling to the mind.”

 

That brings us to “Sparkle” (a.k.a. Steve Arkle), the colorist at Complete Post, which is now part of Technicolor Creative Services in Los Angeles. During the bulk of production, Richardson was shooting film literally half-way around the world. The exposed negative, approximately a million feet in all, was being flown to Los Angeles, where it was processed by Technicolor. High-definition dailies were timed by Sparkle. Richardson says that he and Sparkle spoke by telephone nearly every day. In his notes, and in their conversations, Richardson described the nuances he envisioned shot by shot. Sparkle, in turn, provided observations, suggestions and insights.

 

“I have worked extensively with Sparkle on commercials over the years, and my relationship with him was vital,” says Richardson. “In fact, I wouldn’t have felt as comfortable without him. He is brilliant, and I don’t say that lightly.”

 

There was typically a one week delay from the time film was exposed until Richardson received dailies in HD format. He had an HD projector set up in a room where he could screen dailies, usually with his crew. Tarantino only rarely sat in on those sessions. The dailies gave Richardson fodder for his communications with Sparkle. Technique produced a film-out, which was used to produce prints for previews.

 

Tarantino insisted that preview audiences experience Kill Bill: Volume 1 projected on film rather than with a digital projector. He wanted the audience to experience the visual nuances. The response reported by critics was “wildly enthusiastic.” •