Character
Kill Bill: Volume 1 is a 2003 American martial arts film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. It stars Uma Thurman as the Bride, a mercenary who swears revenge on a group of…
Read and enrich the people, organizations and context referenced in case files.
Explore the cases that include this wiki entry.
No case files include this entry yet.
Investigate this subjectKill Bill: Volume 1 is a 2003 American martial arts film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. It stars Uma Thurman as the Bride, a mercenary who swears revenge on a group of assassins (Lucy Liu, Daryl Hannah, Vivica A.
Kill Bill: Volume 1 is a 2003 American martial arts film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. It stars Uma Thurman as the Bride, a mercenary who swears revenge on a group of assassins (Lucy Liu, Daryl Hannah, Vivica A. Fox and Michael Madsen) and their leader, Bill (David Carradine), after they try to kill her and her unborn child. Her mission takes her to Tokyo, where she battles the yakuza.
Kill Bill was inspired by 1970s exploitation films and martial arts films. It features an anime sequence by Production I.G and a black-and-white sequence. Volume 1 is the first of two Kill Bill films made in a single production; Volume 2 was released six months later. They were originally set for a single release, but the film, with a runtime of over four hours, was divided in two. This meant Tarantino did not have to cut scenes.
Kill Bill was theatrically released by Miramax Films in the United States on October 10, 2003. It received positive reviews and grossed $180.9 million worldwide on a $30 million budget, achieving the highest-grossing opening weekend of a Tarantino film to that point. A single film combining both parts, Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair, was theatrically released on December 5, 2025.
In 1999, the Bride, a former member of the Deadly Viper assassination squad, is rehearsing her marriage at a chapel in rural El Paso, Texas. The Deadly Vipers, led by Bill, attack the chapel, shooting everyone. As the Bride lies wounded, she tells Bill he is the father of her unborn child just as he shoots her in the head.
The Bride falls into a coma. In the hospital, Elle Driver, one of the Deadly Vipers, prepares to assassinate her via lethal injection. Bill aborts the mission at the last minute, as he considers it dishonorable to kill her while she is defenseless. The Bride awakens four years later and is horrified to discover she is no longer pregnant. She kills a man who intends to rape her, and a hospital worker who has been selling her body while she was comatose. She takes the hospital worker's truck and vows to kill Bill and the other Deadly Vipers.
The Bride goes to the home of Vernita Green, a former Deadly Viper who now leads a normal suburban life. They engage in a knife fight, which is interrupted when Vernita's young daughter, Nakia, arrives home. When Vernita tries to shoot the Bride with a pistol hidden in a box of cereal, the Bride throws a knife into her chest, killing her. Realizing Nakia witnessed her mother's death, the Bride invites Nakia to find her when she's older if she still wants vengeance.
The Bride goes to Okinawa to obtain a sword from the legendary swordsmith Hattori Hanzō, who has sworn never to forge a sword again. After learning that her target is Bill, his former student, he crafts his finest sword for her. The Bride travels to Tokyo to find another Deadly Viper, O-Ren Ishii, now the leader of the Tokyo yakuza. After witnessing the yakuza murder her parents when she was a child, O-Ren took vengeance on the yakuza boss and ultimately, replaced him after training as an elite assassin.
The Bride tracks O-Ren Ishii to a restaurant, where she mutilates O-Ren's French majordomo and lawyer, Sofie Fatale, by amputating her arm. The Bride defeats O-Ren's squad of elite fighters, the Crazy 88, and kills O-Ren's bodyguard, the schoolgirl Gogo Yubari. O-Ren and the Bride duel in the restaurant's Japanese garden. The Bride kills O-Ren by slicing off the top of her head. She tortures Sofie for information about the other Deadly Vipers, and leaves her alive as a threat. Bill finds Sofie and asks her if the Bride knows that her daughter is alive.
Quentin Tarantino and Uma Thurman conceived the Bride character during the production of Tarantino's 1994 film Pulp Fiction; Kill Bill credits the Bride character to "Q & U". Tarantino spent a year and a half writing the script while he was living in New York City in 2000 and 2001, spending time with Thurman and her newborn daughter Maya. Reuniting with the more mature Thurman, now a mother, influenced the way Tarantino wrote the Bride character. He did not realize that her child could still be alive until the end of the writing process.
Tarantino developed many of the Bride's characteristics for the character of Shosanna Dreyfus in his 2009 film Inglourious Basterds, which he worked on before Kill Bill. Dreyfus was to be an assassin with a list of Nazis she would cross off as she killed. Tarantino switched the character to the Bride and redeveloped Dreyfus. Thurman cited Clint Eastwood's performance as Blondie in the 1966 film The Good, the Bad and the Ugly as an inspiration. In her words, Eastwood "says almost nothing but somehow manages to portray a whole character".
Tarantino originally wrote Bill for Warren Beatty, but as the character developed and the role required greater screen time and martial arts training, he rewrote it for David Carradine. Beatty said he turned the role down, as he did not want to be away from his family while shooting in China. Tarantino also considered Bruce Willis for the role. He cast Daryl Hannah as Elle Driver after seeing her performance in the television film First Target. The physical similarities between Thurman and Hannah inspired how he wrote the rivalry between the characters. Michelle Yeoh met with Tarantino about a role.
An early draft included a chapter set after the confrontation with Vernita in which the Bride has a gunfight with Gogo Yubari's vengeful sister Yuki. It was cut because it would have made the film overlong and added $1 million to the budget. Tarantino later adapted the chapter as the short animation The Lost Chapter: Yuki's Revenge, released in 2025. Another draft featured a scene in which the Bride's car is blown up by Elle Driver.
When Thurman became pregnant as shooting was ready to begin, Tarantino delayed the production, saying: "If Josef Von Sternberg is getting ready to make Morocco and Marlene Dietrich gets pregnant, he waits for Dietrich!" Principal photogra
Source: Kill Bill: Volume 1 (CC BY-SA)
We label verified structured information, user opinions, and AI-discovered relationships separately.
Be the first to comment.
