Where to watch Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003)

Trivia & production notes

• Quentin Tarantino and Uma Thurman first conceived the Bride character while working together on Pulp Fiction in 1994, nearly a decade before Kill Bill entered production.
• Tarantino spent a year and a half writing the script while living in New York City in 2000 and 2001, during which he spent time with Thurman and her newborn daughter Maya, an experience that shaped how he developed the Bride character.
• Warren Beatty was originally written the role of Bill but turned it down because he didn't want to be away from his family during location shooting in China.
• Tarantino cast Daryl Hannah as Elle Driver after watching her performance in the television film First Target, and the physical similarities between Hannah and Thurman influenced how he wrote the rivalry between their characters.
• An early draft included a gunfight scene between the Bride and Yuki, Gogo Yubari's vengeful sister, but it was cut to avoid making the film overlong and adding $1 million to the budget; Tarantino later adapted it as the animated short The Lost Chapter: Yuki's Revenge.
• Uma Thurman's pregnancy caused Tarantino to delay production, with Tarantino defending the decision by invoking the precedent of Josef Von Sternberg waiting for Marlene Dietrich.
• The film was shot in sequence despite the scenes being presented out of chronological order in the final cut, with principal photography lasting 155 days and costing $55 million.
• The anime sequence depicting O-Ren Ishii's backstory was directed by Kazuto Nakazawa and produced by Production I.G, the studio behind Ghost in the Shell and Blood: The Last Vampire.
• The House of Blue Leaves yakuza battle sequence took eight weeks to film, running six weeks over schedule, and Tarantino used practical effects inspired by 1970s Chinese cinema including fire extinguishers and condoms to create blood spurts rather than relying on CGI.
• Uma Thurman suffered a concussion and knee injuries when she lost control of a car and hit a tree during filming of the scene in which the Bride drives to Bill, after Tarantino assured her the car and road were safe despite her discomfort with driving.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Kill Bill: Volume 1, available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Rewritten for StreamShack; errors are ours — tell us about them.