More heart than blood

“Killing can work as a metaphor for human relationships, if that makes any sense.”

-- Quentin Tarantino

Filmmaker Quentin Tarantino, the 41-year old maestro of “Reservoir Dogs,” “Pulp Fiction” and the coming “Kill Bill: Vol. 2,” is perched in the family room of his Mulholland mansion, popping strange Japanese cheese munchies in his mouth and trying to explain that “Kill Bill,” which seemed like a chick revenge movie in “Vol. 1,” actually turns out to be a love story in “Vol. 2.” A twisted, cracked love story, to be sure, but “a legitimate love story, all right,” Tarantino says.

“You’re dealing with men and women and relationships in this weird alternate universe.”

Indeed, the Bride and Bill, played by Uma Thurman and David Carradine, are the very embodiment of the adage “Can’t live with ‘em; can’t live without ‘em,” and the stakes are high because both parties are trained killers.

Tarantino thinks that this is part of the film -- as opposed to the fleets of ninja killers, the teenage girl psychopath and redneck assassins -- that the audience will actually identify with. He himself got choked up while shooting the last gasping moments of the finale -- paradoxically, for a self-conscious action film, a 40-minute talk scene -- where Bill, as the title demands, gets his just desserts. “I think it’s sad because these two kinda belong together. And because of this and that and the other, they’re not. It’s not too different from ‘Othello,’ if you think of it that way.” Many people might miss this allusion, but they’re not Tarantino.

Being with Tarantino is like entering a one-man hothouse of movies and memories of movies, of imaginary characters who are more real and vivid than living ones. It’s twilight in his castle-like dwelling, with its cavernous ceilings and brightly colored Italian and French movie posters plastered to the walls. The director appears to be wearing a “Simpsons” T-shirt bearing his own likeness spouting off about violence. His jeans are falling off his bear-sized figure, and over the whole ensemble is a striped button-down shirt. He has one of the most memorable mugs in all of director-dom; it’s an amalgam of anima and animus, with a wide forehead, almond-shaped eyes, hair that seems to perpetually want to grow into a monk’s bowl, a ruddy complexion that makes him look 10 years younger, an aquiline nose and curiously feminine lips.

His demeanor is sweet and weirdly indefatigable as he nears the end of his 11-year saga with the Bride and Bill, the central characters driving the narrative in both volumes of “Kill Bill.” They were first hatched on the set of 1994’s “Pulp Fiction” with Thurman, sent into cold storage until he ran into the actress at a Miramax Oscar party in 2000. Thurman asked whatever happened to their creation. He went home that night, dug out the 30 pages he’d written, and worked on it for the next four years, writing a 222-page script -- divided up and titled in 10 chapters like a novel; shooting for a marathon 155 days across Japan, China, Mexico and L.A.; editing one film; selling it across the globe; and then, like a page from “Groundhog Day,” editing a whole separate film, which debuts Friday.

The sum of that effort -- all million or so feet of film -- now stands like his own private army in the family room.

For a man perpetually dubbed as ironic, Tarantino loves his characters with unreserved passion. Not only has he dreamed up elaborate personal histories and the complete etiology and warrior code of the “Kill Bill” universe, but they inhabit the house he lives in, from the full-size replica of Gogo -- the teenage girl killer from “Kill Bill: Vol. 1,” who greets visitors in the foyer, to the skads of action figures, in boxes and out, from “Reservoir Dogs” and other Tarantino films. One gigantic floor-to-ceiling bookshelf dominates his living room, and it’s crammed with movie artifacts -- DVDs of his films, copies of his scripts for “Pulp Fiction” and “Jackie Brown” in different languages. For his recent birthday, friends even installed the pink-and-white chrome bar from “Kill Bill: Vol. 1” in his basement, complete with operating photo booth and giant bowls of Bazooka bubble gum. The Bride’s banana yellow pickup truck sits in the driveway.

Despite the overflow of Quentin-abilia, it comes off as less of a shrine and more the abundance of a mad collector, who happens to specialize in artifacts from his own life. Nothing seems precious; everything seems accessible, including an original script, sprawled in piles across the living room -- all written in his distinctive blocky handwriting (a la fourth grade) across lined paper in different-colored ink.

The division of “Kill Bill” into two films was officially suggested by Miramax head Harvey Weinstein, and as a business decision looks provident -- the shooting cost $55 million, and the first installment alone has earned $170 million at the box office.

As an artist, Tarantino seems reconciled. “Vol. 1” after all offered up a heady dose of violence, so much mayhem in fact that there was an outcry.

“I think, actually, most people who see ‘Vol. 1,’ they don’t want 90 minutes more of movie.... Forget two hours more of movie after that. They’re tired,” Tarantino says.

Just to be sure, he tested his theory, asking people if they wanted to see the whole film in one sitting or two. “And every time they’d say, ‘I’d probably go with tomorrow,’ ” the director says. “And that gave me validation -- for the average moviegoer.”

Fans are a big part of the Tarantino gestalt. He refers to them frequently, like friends whose concerns he watches out for. For him, a film is not finished until the audience sees it, not just a recruited audience, but “a bunch of people that can do anything in the world they want to do that night and what they’d decided to do with their night is go see your movie,” says Tarantino, who feeds off their energy. “It’s all going in the right direction towards the screen, and it’s just incomparable. Until I get that -- I’m not done.”

At its heart, “Kill Bill” is a distillation of his own fandom -- a homage to the martial arts flicks and westerns that he watched as a kid in the grind houses, the rundown movie palaces of Southern California. As Tarantino explains, “Vol. 1” was an ode to the traditions of Japan, with a dash of Shaw Brothers Hong Kong flavor. With gobs of gore, it told the tale of how the Bride wreaked revenge on her former colleagues, the dastardly members of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad who mowed her down, on her wedding day, while she was pregnant no less, and left her in a coma.

“Vol. 2” is “a spaghetti western major with an Eastern minor,” he says. The body count goes down to 13, and there are no more geysers of spurting blood. The challenges -- such as getting buried alive -- require more ingenuity from the Bride than slicing bravado.

No favorites among his scenes

The plan for the evening is for Tarantino to discuss several scenes from the film -- a live one-time DVD narrative if you will -- but as perhaps is Tarantino’s way, he doesn’t get far. He doesn’t have favorite scenes. That’s like choosing among his children, although he cops to looking forward, even anticipating certain moments.

One is the final mano a mano in a dilapidated trailer between Thurman and her archnemesis and doppelganger, the one-eyed Elle Driver, played with demented fervor by Daryl Hannah, plucked out of career obscurity by Tarantino, who wrote the part for her after catching her one night in a cable flick. Another is this, a sequence titled “The Cruel Tutelage of Pai Mei,” the kind of illumination of character, a plot digression, which surely would have been dramatically shortened if “Kill Bill” had been left as one movie.

“This is one of my favorite shots in the whole movie. This shot of him walking forward,” the director says. Tarantino’s now lying back on his couch, feet slung on the table, watching one of the simplest of sequences in the film. Gordon Liu simply glides purposefully toward the camera. As Pai Mei, he’s garbed in a white martial-arts tunic with a long white Fu Manchu beard.

At this moment, Tarantino seems more the ardent fan than the director, thrilled to have landed a childhood hero, a star of such seminal Hong Kong flicks as “36th Chamber of Shaolin” and “The Eight Diagram Pole Fighter.”

This is a classic moment from kung fu lore, where the hero learns how to be a warrior under the vicious instruction of a venerable and very old killer, Pai Mei. For Westerners, it’s reminiscent of the Yoda scenes from “The Empire Strikes Back,” although Tarantino says, when he saw that film as a kid, “I thought, ‘Oh! This is like the Brian Keith sequences in ‘Nevada Smith,’ the Steve McQueen revenge Western.’ The kid’s parents are killed, and four people did it, and he tracks ‘em down, and Brian Keith is like the cool gunfighter that he meets along the way and teaches him.”

It’s easy to get sidetracked talking to Tarantino. His brain is like a car full of circus clowns, where the clowns keep coming and coming. Given that there were three full-length biographies written about him before his 33rd birthday, most of his fans know he dropped out of school in ninth grade and worked as an usher in the Pussycat porno theater before logging the seminal five years as a clerk in Video Archives, the Manhattan Beach video shop, inhaling what few films might have previously escaped his omnivorous hunger.

The Pai Mei sequence is not just an ode to one of his favorite genres but to memory. For this chapter, the film stock has been purposely degraded to look grainy and bedraggled, exactly how those martial arts films really looked in the ghetto theaters where Tarantino saw them.

“I was watching dupes!” he recalls with glee before giving a mini-lecture on how the Shaw brothers, the venerable Chinese producers, released their films in the United States. “So I said, ‘Well, that’s what we gotta do.’ The idea was to never go to negative. We strike a print and then we dupe it and keep duping it.”

Then he turns to the music, ‘70s soul, blaxploitation music, a piece from Isaac Hayes that originally scored a film called “Three Tough Guys.”

“This rip has fit into a couple of different kung fu movies,” Tarantino says. In those days, film scores were often just stolen. “I paid for it,” he says. He points out “the cool zooms we did.” Every time Thurman’s ponytail swings, it’s accompanied by the sound of slicing; Pai Mei constantly throws his long beard over his shoulder with a defiant harrumph.

Tarantino gets so jazzed, he runs to get a copy of the gargantuan script and does a reading of a passage that was cut out -- in which Thurman fails to catch a rat in a pit but eats the heart to please her master.

“How does victory taste?” Tarantino asks as Pai Mei.

Screwing up his face, he replies as the Bride: “Bitter.” It’s hammy, but it’s easy to see how Tarantino could amuse himself for months writing this stuff.

On screen, Thurman practices and practices trying to shove her hand through a thick piece of wood. At one point, there’s a shot of her hand, all pulsing, ripped muscle, the hand equivalent of Munch’s “The Scream.”

“I love this shot of Uma’s hand doing that,” Tarantino sighs. “There are not many woman who have a big hand like that and can pull that off. Part of the cool thing in writing for Uma is you can write exactly to her physicality.” And Tarantino has. The film thoroughly makes use of Thurman’s lanky, girlish whipsaw figure, as she wields swords, twirls, kicks, pummels, jabs, gouges and thrashes. It’s hard to think of another actress in all of cinema who flings her body in as many ways as Thurman.

Tarantino wrote many of the characters specifically for the actors who eventually played them, for Hannah, and Lucy Liu, who played Yakuza Queen O-Ren Ishii in “Vol. 1,” and most particularly for Thurman, whose wry, sweet cadences he stole for the Bride so the role would fit her like a glove. “I wrote it, but I read her everything I wrote, every scene, every rewrite, every fourth rewrite.”

“We were truly partners on this,” says Tarantino, although to be truthful, the person who really played the Bride, particularly during the writing of “Kill Bill,” was Tarantino.

“I’m a method writer,” he explains, noting that in previous efforts, such as “Pulp Fiction” and “Jackie Brown,” he was whatever character Samuel L. Jackson ended up playing. “And that’s what you do. You become the people and they become you. It’s an equal trade. It can all relate to my life, or none of it has to relate to my life.” For someone who can talk a lot, Tarantino doesn’t elaborate, but maybe given the kind of totally synthetic movie creation “Kill Bill” is, it’s besides the point to lay its creator on the couch.

Someone’s going to pay

Tarantino set out to make a movie-movie, and that’s what he relates to. He likes the black and white justice of the cinema universe. The perpetual entertainer, he begins to do a rant from inside the Bride’s head, about all the assassins who tried to take her down.

“Bud has fallen on hard times.... Doesn’t matter. He’s gonna pay,” he says, his voice breathy but determined. “Oh, Vernita’s changed her life around. Too bad. She’s gonna pay.” He sneers.

“This samurai-samurai stuff, I take seriously,” he says, reverting to his director self. “I like it so much that I did a movie about it. There’s some things a man’ll do, some things a man won’t do. Your honor, your word, all that is very valuable.”

This said, as an artist, he’s also a thief. A little while later, he’s watching another one of his favorite scenes, in which Thurman seeks out a former mentor of Bill’s, the pimp Estaban Vihaio, played by one of his favorite actors, Michael Parks.

They shot in a real Mexican brothel, a tattered shack with makeshift tables, and real whores lying in hammocks.

Tarantino loves to have a set that’s fully designed -- in this instance by Yohei Taneda and David Wasco. “You shouldn’t even see half the stuff there until you start breaking it down into smaller shots,” the director says, pointing to the jukebox, which as the camera pulls into Parks’ face, becomes simply twinkling carnival-like lights. “Always something to keep the eye stimulated.”

Estaban smokes a cigarette and reeks of oil-slicked courtliness. He welcomes the Bride, now dressed in black. They flirt. “I’m susceptible to female flattery,” he tells her.

It brings a big chuckle from Tarantino. “I started saying that in real life. If a pretty woman flatters me now, it just trips off the tongue.” Estaban then tells the Bride a story of taking Bill, then a child, to see a Lana Turner film and watching the prepubescent killer suck his thumb “an obscene amount,” entranced by her feminine power.

“Let me tell you something about my writing style,” Tarantino says. “Sixty-five percent of being a good writer, especially if you’re dealing with dialogue, is having a good memory. Because you’re basically thinking about writing all the time.

“I was told that story by an actor who I admired for a long, long time. Never met him. I was at a dinner party. He was there. It was Kurt Russell. We hit it off and I told him how Goldie Hawn was one of the first crushes I ever had. I went and saw ‘Cactus Flower’ and when I went home, I was in love. He goes ‘Yeah’ and then he told me his story of seeing Marilyn Monroe in this movie. His dad told him he began sucking his thumb when Marilyn Monroe came on screen. OK, I know what he’s all about. I’ve never seen Kurt Russell since. It was a charming story. I put it away. Three years later, I’m writing the Estaban Vihaio scene. That story rises to the top.”

The pearls of other people’s lives all stay in the vault, untouched and pristine, unless he’s writing. “My characters have access almost more to it than I do,” he says with a sigh. “I wish I could talk like my characters in real life. But in real life I am stuck with the same vocabulary that we all have.”

And it’s not just dialogue stored there, but images and thousands upon thousands of movies.

“I’ve always known much more than anybody,” he says, then stops, suddenly aware how this might sound. “Not anybody. I’ve always been way beyond my years in my knowledge of culture.”

He begins to digress into a story about the Three Stooges and the origins of the phrase “trip the light fantastic.” His irrepressibility quickly returns. Indeed, it can’t be stopped.

“I had a sense of the ‘30s and who was big in the ‘30s even when I was a little kid,” he says. “I was a man for all time ... if it was 20th century stuff. I was always proud of that.”

Rachel Abramowitz can be contacted at rachel.abramowitz@latimes.com.

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Tarantino speaks

‘Kill Bill: Prequel’?

Of Michael Parks, right, who plays a pimp named Estaban Vihaio (and Sheriff Earl McGraw), Tarantino says: “I know the origin of all these characters. I fully plan to do it -- a Japanese anime movie about the origins of Bill. It would start when Bill is 12 and deal with his three father figures: Estaban Vihaio, Hattori Hanzo and Pai Mei. How Bill became Bill.”

That shaman feeling

Of creating the scenes between Uma Thurman and Gordon Liu as Pai Mei: Tarantino stores overheard bits of dialogue and images in his brain. “I don’t have 24/7 access to it. Only when there’s a pen and paper in my hand and I’m trying to create a shamanistic experience with the characters.”

Bits of him in Bill

Of David Carradine’s portrayal of the title character, Tarantino says: “A lot of people who know me -- they saw me in the Bill character, especially in script form. Personality traits. You have to ask them. I’m not going to completely reveal all my secrets. But you might notice my cadence here or there.”