Kung fu fighting

The hypnotic notes of David Carradine’s bamboo meditation flute curl through the sunny, two-story living room of his house on a quiet street in Tarzana, the same flute you see him playing as Bill just before the wedding chapel massacre in “Kill Bill: Vol. 2.” He not only made the flute, he explains, for another film he made back in 1976, but he grew the bamboo.

Suddenly there’s a commotion with the photographer on the patio, and Carradine slips outside. “That’s a black widow,” he declares, snatching the notebook out of my hand and dispatching a nasty-looking spider with a splat. “Here you go,” Carradine says, handing the notebook back, then returns to his flute.

There really is a killer inside David Carradine. It just took Quentin Tarantino, the killer’s auteur, to provide perfect dialogue.

As Bill, the mesmerizing master assassin who is only a set of hands and a voice in “Kill Bill: Vol. 1,” but who fills the screen with an unearthly gravitas in “Vol. 2,” Carradine plays off the role he created in 1972, the Shaolin monk Kwai Chang Caine from the TV series “Kung Fu.” But unlike purely ironic appearances in films such as “Death Race 2000,” here the 67-year-old gets to call on his deep martial arts knowledge in a way that spotlights his natural dignity and nimble, wise-cracking demeanor. As he did for John Travolta in “Pulp Fiction,” Tarantino has facilitated the breakout performance of Carradine’s life.

“One of the things he was trying to do was not so much cast against type as actually write a part that was like me,” says Carradine, “that I could perform kinda straight-ahead. I’m playing off the history.”

That history includes nearly 40 years of work as an actor, of which only three were spent making the original “Kung Fu.” Still, no other role in more than 100 films or TV parts quite captured the public imagination the way Caine did; nor, perhaps, did a role so naturally spring from within him. Carradine, a Hollywood kid -- the son of character actor John Carradine, half brother of actors Keith and Robert Carradine -- has studied Northern Shaolin kung fu, among other styles, for 35 years. He’s made instructional videos and written books on the subject, including his 1991 memoir, “Spirit of Shaolin.”

But once drawn into the world of Tarantino -- by an accidental meeting, he says, and a shared obsession with Hong Kong cinema, Sergio Leone, Kurosawa, superhero comics and the Rodin sculpture garden in Paris -- Carradine found something there neither he nor Tarantino had explored quite this way before: a love story.

“He’s making a kung fu, samurai, spaghetti western, gangster, Japanese anime love story,” Carradine says, striking up another in a chain of filterless cigarettes. “The first half of the movie, you’re waiting to see: Who is this monster, this ruthless killer? Then when you meet him, you realize that’s just not what he is anymore. He’s a doting father, and he’s kinda devoted his life to keeping the child safe until the Bride [Uma Thurman] wakes up, which he fully expects is going to happen.”

Like all Tarantino characters, Bill is fearless, a killer so perfect he shoots the Bride in the head on her wedding day, pregnant with his own child, after one of the most tender scenes in any Tarantino film. Something about this combination was just right for Carradine. He can act like a warrior and still be sentimental and madly in love.

“Well, we are,” Carradine nods, slipping easily into talking about himself as the character. “There’s a little unfinished business between us, but I think that, once [the Bride] kinda calms down a little bit, she’s really glad to see me, and I’m certainly glad to see her.

“Like he says, it was impulsive, him blowing her head off. He ‘overreacted,’ right? I think he regretted that from the moment it happened.”

For all the cartoonish pure entertainment, the scenes between Thurman and Carradine achieve an almost un-Tarantino-like intimacy, a closeness enhanced by keeping Carradine at his most human. Carradine trained with master fight choreographer Yuen Wo-Ping, and got good at the wire work, but Tarantino scrubbed those techniques because he wanted to see Bill work flat-footed. Unlike the flying assassins of the Crazy 88s, or Gordon Liu’s character running up the walls, Bill and the Bride stay mostly on the ground, where they fight like mortals.

Carradine dazzles delivering Tarantino’s ecstatic monologues, given all the more impact by the wizened demeanor that has come with age. A Superman monologue, by the way, in which Bill posits the Man of Steel’s human guise as Clark Kent to be an interpretation of men as “weak and unsure of ourselves,” came from a conversation between Tarantino and Carradine in a Beijing cigar bar. But slipping in a few of Carradine’s words here and there didn’t mean Tarantino would let him create his own character. It remains, like all Tarantino characters, more a product of the writer himself. Bill, for instance, is left-handed. Carradine, who is reputedly one of Hollywood’s best quick-draw gunmen, is right-handed. Watch carefully and, yep, anytime he’s shooting, it’s in his left, and still looks natural.

One can sense, as Carradine describes this, that he’s not only proud to have shot well, left-handed, but that he would have liked to win the fight. He’s competitive. It’s not giving away anything to say that in the end, the Bride has to kill Bill, but not without some misgivings on the part of the man playing him.

“There is a line that we shot that’s not in the movie where Bill says that he actually hopes she wins. He’s not going to let her win, but he hopes she does,” he says. He gives a mischievous look and lights another cigarette. In his universe, Carradine probably would win. But it’s the movies, and one of the best he’s been in, and Carradine doesn’t hide the fact that he hopes more like this one come his way. “All of the good things that have happened to me, including this movie, have been a surprise, something that I was not prepared for, out of left field.”So now he’s keeping an eye on left field, for directors like Jim Jarmusch.

“Yeah. Right field, you don’t get enough work,” he chuckles. “Everybody tries not to hit the ball over there.”