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Uma Thurman Interview
UGO: Does martial arts make you feel sexy? Uma Thurman: Sexy? Well, it depends on how much you like long, sharp instruments in your romantic activities, I guess. I can't quite say that that would be my weapon of choice in bed. But, going through that whole process and doing the three months of training with master Wu-ping...I went through three months of training with master Wu-Ping and his team. They trained me five days a week for three months, from nine in the morning until five o'clock at night, and we were not to be late and I never got to leave early. So, just surviving that was really empowering. I'm the last person that would've thought that I would be ever asked to be so tough. So, it was a big reach to kind of go through all that. It was very empowering to make it out alive from the House of Blue Leaves with my joints semi-intact. UGO: Any mishaps in the Vivica fight scene? UT: That scene actually went remarkably quickly. We did that scene when we got back to Los Angeles after I'd been in China for four months. I shot the entire House of Blue Leaves sequence before that, so for me, it was just like hey, this is no problem. That whole section, the Tokyo interior section, was all Beijing. UGO: Learning Japanese? UT: [Speaks a line to Japanese journalist] I had actually started way before we started shooting, months before we started shooting, I had a Japanese tutor come. So before I even had the lines that I was going to say in Japanese, I just took general sort of colloquial lessons, just to get a sense of the sound and to be able to feel comfortable acting while I'm also memorizing the lines. It was difficult, and also that oath that I take, that you heard some of that Sonny Chiba does. I had to learn that, which was in the old, old-style Samurai language. It's very difficult. He didn't give me any tasks to give me a walk. He didn't give me any walks on this one. Everything was pretty tough. UGO: You didn't cheat? UT: I had to really not cheat. I had to really, really know, because particularly when you're acting in a language that you don't really understand, that is not familiar to you, you don't speak it, you really have to get so comfortable with it that you are very much honest in your performance when you're using the lines, that you mean what you say. Just because you're saying it in another language, it doesn't separate for you. UGO: Where did you get the emotion? UT: That's one of the fun things with Quentin, to emotionally turn on the dime. The opportunities were there all over the character, but it is switching. His movies always switch from one feeling to another very quickly. So, as an actor and also understanding his style really well, feeling the security, the support to work for a director that you know is not going to go wrong like put you being funny when actually you shouldn't be being funny, you should be serious and it's a disaster. He has an incredibly sensitive pulse in his films, and so it gives you a lot of confidence to try crazy things and do one thing very funny and the next scene very intense and to believe that the director actually encompasses enough tonal range that that actually would work in one movie, which is really unusual. UGO: Was it all in the script? UT: We worked on that. The character is very much like a steel rod. She's a very tough character. What he had me there to do was to bring her humanity to the situation. For the House of Blue Leaves sequence, there I was shooting that one sequence for eight weeks. The normal thing for an actor is, you have scenes, you have dialogue, and things that are familiar that you're skilled to work towards your whole career. You know what to do when you get in a scene with dialogue, and here I was in this giant scene, him going mad with the blood and the this and the that. I just treated it like I was Lillian Gish. I was in a silent film and to keep my sanity, just go through the sequence moment for moment, close-up to close-up to fight moment and do what I do and make it real. UGO: How do you deal with rage? UT: Suppress it. UGO: Why do audience like girl fights? UT: I think it's sort of thrilling. I mean, when I was watching it, it was like, "Ooh." Because you don't see it. And also, I think particularly as a female, you're taught to be defensive your whole life. You're taught not to be aggressive, you're taught not to provoke violence because you're instructed from such a young age that you will be the recipient of it and you will lose. This message comes down the pike from this big. Don't start a fight, girl, because you're going down. And for me, just having to make contact with these guys training me and having to actually contact a body with a sword, and with Quentin, who's relentless, 'Harder, harder, more, more, more, harder.' Oh geez, I'm not hitting him any harder than that, no. You go put your pads on. Because you know, the stunt men always want to be tough and you can feel it. You make the contact and you can feel that you're hitting skin, you're hitting a body, not hitting a pad. And I'd get so mad. 'I can't do my job if you don't put those pads on. I don't care how tough, you're tough already. OK? Just get some pads on so I can hit you with abandon.' But just going through that thing of my whole life- - I remember one scene once I had with John Hurt, it was Even Cowgirls Get the Blues with Gus Van Sant, and I had to slap him in the face. You could really see it, so I had to actually hit his face, and he was going to [turn away], you know how you do it. And one time, the timing was off and I clocked him right slap in the face, and I burst into tears, because I didn't want to hurt him. It upset me to make contact. And here, all those instincts, all that stuff was a struggle. I had to get there. I had to be like- - and also, you've got to be really precise, because I'm swinging those swords and even the stunt sword is still a wooden spike with a tip on it, and you're swinging it within inches of eyes and things that can't be protected, and it caused me tremendous anxiety. UGO: Were you ever a playground fighter? UT: I have three brothers, so I've been thrown through some walls. But no, I was not- - I'm not a violent person, and I can talk, so I usually get around a lot of stuff. UGO: What's the toughest stunt from this movie? UT: The toughest scene, it's difficult to say. Everything had to be tough. I mean, the character goes through an ordeal. And wait 'til you see the second half, OK?. It's not over. It goes on and on and on and he needs to feel that it's real. He doesn't want shortcuts. He wants to see it real. He wants to see it tricked. He wants to see it every which way. And I don't think he believes in the easy hit. He would laugh to me about the scene where I'm in the car, I'm struggling. He goes, 'I was watching this footage and you were struggling and I see your tears run down your face and you've got this weird muscle you've developed in your hand, I never saw that. I loved when you're sweating and you look awful, it was so great. And then I realized I made you do it 15 more times.' So we explored every single moment to the nth degree. So it's hard to tell you what's the toughest. UGO: How many takes for a fight scene? UT: He doesn't always necessarily do that many takes unless it's really physically difficult and then it sort of thrills him to make it happen again and again. With the drama, he actually gets in and gets out, especially when he knows he's got you, you're together, you're sort of dancing. Sometimes he would do more, sometimes less. Really, the guy is not- - he's improvisational. He always wants to do something differently. He always wants to reinvent the wheel. He always wants to re-experience something and he gets bored really quickly. So even if something is really good, if you've seen it before, it's boring. He wants to destabilize a situation. He wants to do something to make it hard again, so it's thrilling. UGO: When you read the script, did you imagine what it would take to pull off, with the training and all? UT: No, no, no. He always likes to let you know at the last moment. The training I found out about earlier. In this case, it sort of was different, because I was always inside and around this movie as it was created, so I never actually had the normal thing. You would see the script, you'd know or you don't know the director and you read it and either it hits you, it doesn't hit you, you think 'I want, I don't want.' It's very primal, it's very simple. In this case, I spent years with him by the time I got this script, hearing chapter after chapter and sections rewritten and redeveloped. She was an assassin and in the very beginning, earliest idea, she was an assassin and she was going around wasting people in all these fun La Femme Nikita kind of ways. The Samurai stuff came much later. The Samurai stuff came in the last three years. It was not part of the original thought. It came from his inspiration, Hong Kong film and Japanese cinema and Samurai swords. There is a samurai sword in Pulp Fiction, so you can see there is a lineage of his fascination with that. UGO: You committed before the final script? UT: Yeah. I mean, in a way, the day the project was born, the night that the project was born, which could have gone away as well, but we were bantering together him and I, just back and forth, him going on about genre filmmaking and revenge films and particularly female revenge films, which is something that people, even before Alien, there's Coffy, there's the Japanese versions. In genre filmmaking, women were given these kind of roles before they hit mainstream. And he was kind of talking about that. When I started talking about this character, I wanted to play this character and the idea of the blood spattered bride was born right then. It was in a back and forth between us. Right on the spot, he was like, 'Yeah, and the guy in charge of it all, his name is Bill and he's the agent for assassins. And the movie's called Kill Bill!' And it was just in a barroom conversation. But you can do that with Quentin 10 times. And he got so excited about it that he went and wrote eight pages with this character. And Bill. And the opening sequence, because the original idea was the thing of this character in the wedding chapel massacre driving at that point to L.A., I think listening to, I don't know. So that was the beginning of the movie and that was 1992. Then he was all excited about it and it goes away. It's like oh, OK, no big deal. So he went and did Jackie Brown and this and that, and I went and did my life. It was about seven years later that I ran into him and asked him what he was doing, and he was writing a war epic film. And I said, 'Oh, whatever happened to those pages that you wrote? Did you lose them?' He was like, 'No, no, I didn't. I still have them.' And I was like, 'Oh, that's good. Anyway, blah blah blah blah blah blah.' For some reason, he went home and he dug them up and we read them and became infused with enthusiasm to go back to it and it was a few months later then we were in touch again, but mysterious to me, little did I know he was there squirreling away with his little felt tip pens and his little legal pads, writing away. That's how he writes. And then on my birthday, he wrote to me saying that he wanted to give me the script for my birthday but it was two weeks away from being done. UGO: How is Paycheck? Did this prepare you for John Woo? UT: In Paycheck, I was the girl. I wasn't the action, I'm not the action force in that movie. John Woo, I think it was even 10 years ago, it was when we first talked about Kill Bill that Quentin screened The Killer for me. John Woo is a big inspiration. And so when I finished Kill Bill and I was fit to be tied and didn't know what to do with myself, John Woo called me and asked me to come and do a part for him. Ben is very nice, Ben Affleck who's in it, and I thought, 'Oh, that's what I should do.' UGO: What is your weapon of choice? UT: My ethics, my code of ethics here, because there is one, is that- - there is a code. What she does really, it's sort of a suicide mission. I mean, she basically asks each person to choose whichever weapon they feel best in and she challenges them on- - notice in the Vivica scene, it goes by so quickly it's hard to catch all of it. She says your weapon of choice, we will observe Viper rules of honor. It's basically she challenges them to duels. And she gives them the advantage. That's what makes it sort of a kamikaze almost will to die sort of mission on her part. She wants to take them out but she's totally willing to give them the upper hand in winning. UGO: Could you take Tom Cruise (as a samurai)? UT: Someplace. |
