Some detailed additions and corrections
I was delighted to receive an email
from a helpful reader, offering various corrections. I have interspersed his
remarks with my response to form a quasi-dialogue.
PP: Time Code 00:35:08 (Vol. 1)
Yes, it is similar to one of his "trunk" shots. But several folks on the Mobius Home Video Forum brought up the visual comparison to the notorious movie poster for Wes Craven's Last House on the Left, another exploitation revenge story.
The poster features a shot from the film of Krug (David Hess) and his sicko buddies staring down at the mutilated body of one of their victims.
A similar shot also appears in Ferdinando Baldi's outrageous 3-D spaghetti western Comin' At Ya, in which a bride-to-be (Victoria Abril) is kidnapped at the altar by two slimeball brothers, and her gunslinger boyfriend (Tony Anthony) has to track them down. The POV shot mirrored in Kill Bill occurs when the brothers knock the bride to the floor – of the chapel! – and stare down at her.
PP: Time Code 01:14:18 (Vol. 1)
When I read the script I assumed like you that the arm hacking was a nod to Tenebrae. But in the actual film it looks just like Udo Kier's death-by-amputation in Paul Morrissey's Blood for Dracula (a.k.a., Andy Warhol's Dracula).
The bleeding stump effect is similarly goofy and Julie Dreyfus's wardrobe and hair bear a strong resemblance to Kier's. Strangely enough, the Monty Python boys also tipped a hat to this scene in their Holy Grail.
** Interesting. Hadn't considered this. Tarantino usually doesn't seem too interested in horror films, even Warhol parodies, unless they are Italian. DKH
PP: You mentioned that Tarantino only seems interested in horror films if they're Italian. That's a good point. Worth noting: although he only directed a few sequences for Morrissey/Warhol's Blood for Dracula, Anthony Dawson (Antonio Margheriti) was credited as the sole director in Italy. Of course Margheriti is one of Tarantino's favorite filmmakers. That may be the connection.
PP: Time Code: 01:53:59
The actress who jumps a motorcycle onto a speeding train in Supercop is actually Michelle Yeoh (a.k.a., Michelle Khan), not Maggie Cheung. Cheung does appear in the film as Jackie Chan's girlfriend – but she's nowhere in that scene.
** Grrrrr. I knew that I was going to confuse those two! DKH
PP: Also on your blog you reported that Tarantino directed the Del Toro/Brittany Murphy conversation that begins "The Big Fat Kill" in Sin City. This is incorrect. Tarantino actually directed the scene in which Clive Owen drives the car full of corpses to the tar pits, and imagines Del Toro's body has come alive and is speaking to him. There were a number of interviews with Rodriguez in which he described Tarantino's work on this sequence.
** Yes, I haven't fixed this yet, partly because my vanity won't let me believe that Tarantino directed a scene different from the one I assigned to him. I keep hoping that the "truth" will come out. The sequence with Del Toro at the door (very much a Tarantino set up) and ending with Del Toro's head in a toilet seems so like a Tarantino sequence. If nothing else, the sequence alerted me to a component of Tarantino 's films that I hadn't considered, which is how often crucial events occur in doorways.
PP: We may both be right about Sin City. Now I'm reading that Tarantino got along so well with Brittany Murphy he wanted to work with her, so he talked Miller and Rodriguez into letting him co-direct the Shellie/Jackie Boy sequence. I have no idea what he contributed, but according to more than a few reports he was definitely on the set that day to direct.
What follows is what I originally wrote in my column at MoviePoopShoot about Sin City, and the response from a reader which made me reluctantly pull it down.
Comment must be made on Tarantino's highly publicized participation in the film. Robert Rodriguez was cunning in his selection of the scene for Tarantino to direct. In fact, seeing Sin City in connection with watching Kill Bill yet again for another project, inspired a new critical insight into Tarantino's films, which is often crucial encounters occur in doorways.
[P.S.: Currently, I'm going with story that Tarantino directed the scene in Murphy's apartment. That's because Michael Fleming of Variety reported so in his June 28, 2004 column: "Tarantino filmed a scene in the final segment featuring Clive Owen, Benicio Del Toro and Brittany Murphy." On the other hand, Entertainment Weekly's Jeff Jensen wrote, in a cover story that appeared just before the film opened, that Tarantino helmed a different scene: "One Sin City player did attempt to revolt against the tech tyranny: Quentin Tarantino, whom Rodriguez asked to helm a truly Tarantinoesque passage – a long drive-and-talk between Owen and Del Toro. It was a challenge to the Kill Bill director, designed to settle a debate between them. Digital filmmaking: bliss or blasphemy? At first, Tarantino insisted on a real car. But after one take, the director became bothered by the limited range of camera angles, ditched the wheels, and put the actors on crates. (Not surprisingly, Rodriguez takes great pleasure in telling this story.)"]<P>
We all know about Tarantino and bathrooms; doorways are another signature location. These doorstop confrontations begin in Kill Bill with the Bride and Vernita at the Bells'. The Sheriff meets Son No. 1 at the Chapel door (just near the porch, really). The Bride bashes in Buck's head in a doorframe. Budd faces down Bill, and later the Bride in the door of his trailer. The entrance to Hanzo's cafe is a curtain. At the beginning of Vol. 2, the Bride runs into Bill on the porch of the chapel. The Bride makes a dynamic entrance into Budd's trailer. There are several doorway "blockings," or stagings – at least four – in Bill's apartment.
In Tarantino's films in general, doorways are the sites for confrontations and introductions, from the hideout doorway in Reservoir Dogs, to the first hit that Vince and Jules commit in Pulp Fiction, to Max Cherry's shop, where Ordell refuses to respect the boundary. Jackie Brown has at least two significant encounters in her own doorway, and her transition from jail to freedom reverses the usual psychological trajectory of doorway meanings mentioned below. Four Rooms is all about doors (do trunk lids count? There are plenty of trunk lids in Tarantino, including one at the end of Vol. 1).
Doorways and porches are thresholds, transitions from the cool outside to intimacy, from the wild to civilization, from our public faces to our private lives. Porches (a uniquely American invention) themselves are perches from which the bored and lonely can monitor their neighbors or spot a newcomer in the distance. The most famous doorway in the movies is the frame within a frame of the doorway at the beginning and end of The Searchers. Tarantino mimics that trope in Kill Bill as well. In line with this discussion, Tarantino's moment is another "doorway scene" with Benicio Del Toro trying to get into the apartment of his girlfriend, Brittany Murphy. It also ends up a bathroom scene, and we all know how large bathrooms loom in Tarantino's universe. This short sequence is a significant addition in our understanding of how Tarantino's films work.
Reader Andrew Lindo then supplied chapter and verse from the media on why the Tarantino scene is actually the head-in-the-car dialogue:
Sources: Roger Ebert :
"Frank Miller and Quentin Tarantino are credited as co-directors, Miller because his comic books essentially act as storyboards which Rodriguez follows with ferocity, and because he was on the set every day, interacting with the actors; Tarantino because he directed one brief scene on a day when Rodriquez was determined to wean him away from celluloid and lure him over the dark side of digital. (It's the scene in the car with Owen and Del Toro, who has a pistol stuck in his head.)"
Movies on Line :
"One Sin City player did attempt to revolt against the tech tyranny: Quentin Tarantino, whom Rodriguez asked to helm a truly Tarantinoesque passage-a long drive-and-talk between Owen and Del Toro. It was a challenge to the Kill Bill director, designed to settle a debate between them. Digital filmmaking: bliss or blasphemy? At first, Tarantino insisted on a real car: But after one take, the director became bothered by the limited range of camera angles, ditched the wheels, and put the actors on crates."
And finally, in Rodriguez' own words :
"Originally, I had thought there would be more shorter stories in the movie, as well when I first told [Quentin] about it and then it ended up being the longer ones. So, I told him 'Well, you can direct one of the sequences' because Frank originally issued them in small issues.' That's why you always see these characters die every ten minutes because he always wanted you to come back to the next comic book. So, each book was made up of several smaller issues. I had to basically do an issue which was where Benicio and Clive were in the car together and Benicio's got the gun barrel and he's talking. It was Quentin's idea to have him speak in an outer voice, where it was voice over, to actually speak it out. He did something kind of like that in Reservoir Dogs and Clive didn't know until the day. Quentin was like 'Wait a minute. All this monologue that you were going to do with voice over later, you should do it on the set. Can you learn it real quick?' Clive really impressed the hell out of Quentin. That's all he ever talks about is the fact that Clive went away for five minutes and did the whole monologue right there off the cuff. Especially since he's trying to do an American accent so he had to figure that out as well right there on the day. Quentin came in so prepared. Frank and I had been shooting already. This was our last episode. He was afraid he'd be unprepared so he over prepared and made Frank and I look like bums. He came in with every shot written up, all this visionary stuff ... We just blasted through it. He had a blast doing it."
PP: Time Code 00:35:08 (Vol. 1)
Yes, it is similar to one of his "trunk" shots. But several folks on the Mobius Home Video Forum brought up the visual comparison to the notorious movie poster for Wes Craven's Last House on the Left, another exploitation revenge story.
The poster features a shot from the film of Krug (David Hess) and his sicko buddies staring down at the mutilated body of one of their victims.
A similar shot also appears in Ferdinando Baldi's outrageous 3-D spaghetti western Comin' At Ya, in which a bride-to-be (Victoria Abril) is kidnapped at the altar by two slimeball brothers, and her gunslinger boyfriend (Tony Anthony) has to track them down. The POV shot mirrored in Kill Bill occurs when the brothers knock the bride to the floor – of the chapel! – and stare down at her.
PP: Time Code 01:14:18 (Vol. 1)
When I read the script I assumed like you that the arm hacking was a nod to Tenebrae. But in the actual film it looks just like Udo Kier's death-by-amputation in Paul Morrissey's Blood for Dracula (a.k.a., Andy Warhol's Dracula).
The bleeding stump effect is similarly goofy and Julie Dreyfus's wardrobe and hair bear a strong resemblance to Kier's. Strangely enough, the Monty Python boys also tipped a hat to this scene in their Holy Grail.
** Interesting. Hadn't considered this. Tarantino usually doesn't seem too interested in horror films, even Warhol parodies, unless they are Italian. DKH
PP: You mentioned that Tarantino only seems interested in horror films if they're Italian. That's a good point. Worth noting: although he only directed a few sequences for Morrissey/Warhol's Blood for Dracula, Anthony Dawson (Antonio Margheriti) was credited as the sole director in Italy. Of course Margheriti is one of Tarantino's favorite filmmakers. That may be the connection.
PP: Time Code: 01:53:59
The actress who jumps a motorcycle onto a speeding train in Supercop is actually Michelle Yeoh (a.k.a., Michelle Khan), not Maggie Cheung. Cheung does appear in the film as Jackie Chan's girlfriend – but she's nowhere in that scene.
** Grrrrr. I knew that I was going to confuse those two! DKH
PP: Also on your blog you reported that Tarantino directed the Del Toro/Brittany Murphy conversation that begins "The Big Fat Kill" in Sin City. This is incorrect. Tarantino actually directed the scene in which Clive Owen drives the car full of corpses to the tar pits, and imagines Del Toro's body has come alive and is speaking to him. There were a number of interviews with Rodriguez in which he described Tarantino's work on this sequence.
** Yes, I haven't fixed this yet, partly because my vanity won't let me believe that Tarantino directed a scene different from the one I assigned to him. I keep hoping that the "truth" will come out. The sequence with Del Toro at the door (very much a Tarantino set up) and ending with Del Toro's head in a toilet seems so like a Tarantino sequence. If nothing else, the sequence alerted me to a component of Tarantino 's films that I hadn't considered, which is how often crucial events occur in doorways.
PP: We may both be right about Sin City. Now I'm reading that Tarantino got along so well with Brittany Murphy he wanted to work with her, so he talked Miller and Rodriguez into letting him co-direct the Shellie/Jackie Boy sequence. I have no idea what he contributed, but according to more than a few reports he was definitely on the set that day to direct.
What follows is what I originally wrote in my column at MoviePoopShoot about Sin City, and the response from a reader which made me reluctantly pull it down.
Comment must be made on Tarantino's highly publicized participation in the film. Robert Rodriguez was cunning in his selection of the scene for Tarantino to direct. In fact, seeing Sin City in connection with watching Kill Bill yet again for another project, inspired a new critical insight into Tarantino's films, which is often crucial encounters occur in doorways.
[P.S.: Currently, I'm going with story that Tarantino directed the scene in Murphy's apartment. That's because Michael Fleming of Variety reported so in his June 28, 2004 column: "Tarantino filmed a scene in the final segment featuring Clive Owen, Benicio Del Toro and Brittany Murphy." On the other hand, Entertainment Weekly's Jeff Jensen wrote, in a cover story that appeared just before the film opened, that Tarantino helmed a different scene: "One Sin City player did attempt to revolt against the tech tyranny: Quentin Tarantino, whom Rodriguez asked to helm a truly Tarantinoesque passage – a long drive-and-talk between Owen and Del Toro. It was a challenge to the Kill Bill director, designed to settle a debate between them. Digital filmmaking: bliss or blasphemy? At first, Tarantino insisted on a real car. But after one take, the director became bothered by the limited range of camera angles, ditched the wheels, and put the actors on crates. (Not surprisingly, Rodriguez takes great pleasure in telling this story.)"]<P>
We all know about Tarantino and bathrooms; doorways are another signature location. These doorstop confrontations begin in Kill Bill with the Bride and Vernita at the Bells'. The Sheriff meets Son No. 1 at the Chapel door (just near the porch, really). The Bride bashes in Buck's head in a doorframe. Budd faces down Bill, and later the Bride in the door of his trailer. The entrance to Hanzo's cafe is a curtain. At the beginning of Vol. 2, the Bride runs into Bill on the porch of the chapel. The Bride makes a dynamic entrance into Budd's trailer. There are several doorway "blockings," or stagings – at least four – in Bill's apartment.
In Tarantino's films in general, doorways are the sites for confrontations and introductions, from the hideout doorway in Reservoir Dogs, to the first hit that Vince and Jules commit in Pulp Fiction, to Max Cherry's shop, where Ordell refuses to respect the boundary. Jackie Brown has at least two significant encounters in her own doorway, and her transition from jail to freedom reverses the usual psychological trajectory of doorway meanings mentioned below. Four Rooms is all about doors (do trunk lids count? There are plenty of trunk lids in Tarantino, including one at the end of Vol. 1).
Doorways and porches are thresholds, transitions from the cool outside to intimacy, from the wild to civilization, from our public faces to our private lives. Porches (a uniquely American invention) themselves are perches from which the bored and lonely can monitor their neighbors or spot a newcomer in the distance. The most famous doorway in the movies is the frame within a frame of the doorway at the beginning and end of The Searchers. Tarantino mimics that trope in Kill Bill as well. In line with this discussion, Tarantino's moment is another "doorway scene" with Benicio Del Toro trying to get into the apartment of his girlfriend, Brittany Murphy. It also ends up a bathroom scene, and we all know how large bathrooms loom in Tarantino's universe. This short sequence is a significant addition in our understanding of how Tarantino's films work.
Reader Andrew Lindo then supplied chapter and verse from the media on why the Tarantino scene is actually the head-in-the-car dialogue:
Sources: Roger Ebert :
"Frank Miller and Quentin Tarantino are credited as co-directors, Miller because his comic books essentially act as storyboards which Rodriguez follows with ferocity, and because he was on the set every day, interacting with the actors; Tarantino because he directed one brief scene on a day when Rodriquez was determined to wean him away from celluloid and lure him over the dark side of digital. (It's the scene in the car with Owen and Del Toro, who has a pistol stuck in his head.)"
Movies on Line :
"One Sin City player did attempt to revolt against the tech tyranny: Quentin Tarantino, whom Rodriguez asked to helm a truly Tarantinoesque passage-a long drive-and-talk between Owen and Del Toro. It was a challenge to the Kill Bill director, designed to settle a debate between them. Digital filmmaking: bliss or blasphemy? At first, Tarantino insisted on a real car: But after one take, the director became bothered by the limited range of camera angles, ditched the wheels, and put the actors on crates."
And finally, in Rodriguez' own words :
"Originally, I had thought there would be more shorter stories in the movie, as well when I first told [Quentin] about it and then it ended up being the longer ones. So, I told him 'Well, you can direct one of the sequences' because Frank originally issued them in small issues.' That's why you always see these characters die every ten minutes because he always wanted you to come back to the next comic book. So, each book was made up of several smaller issues. I had to basically do an issue which was where Benicio and Clive were in the car together and Benicio's got the gun barrel and he's talking. It was Quentin's idea to have him speak in an outer voice, where it was voice over, to actually speak it out. He did something kind of like that in Reservoir Dogs and Clive didn't know until the day. Quentin was like 'Wait a minute. All this monologue that you were going to do with voice over later, you should do it on the set. Can you learn it real quick?' Clive really impressed the hell out of Quentin. That's all he ever talks about is the fact that Clive went away for five minutes and did the whole monologue right there off the cuff. Especially since he's trying to do an American accent so he had to figure that out as well right there on the day. Quentin came in so prepared. Frank and I had been shooting already. This was our last episode. He was afraid he'd be unprepared so he over prepared and made Frank and I look like bums. He came in with every shot written up, all this visionary stuff ... We just blasted through it. He had a blast doing it."
Posted: Tue - May 3, 2005 at 03:08 PM
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Published On: Dec 08, 2006 08:21 PM
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