Quentin Tarantino Opens Up about Bringing KILL BILL’s Lost Chapter to Life With Uma Thurman
Fans of Quentin Tarantino and Uma Thurman are about to get an awesome treat. While Tarantino continues developing what he insists will be his final movie, there’s something cool heading to theaters in the meantime.
Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair, the full unified version of Kill Bill: Volume 1 and Volume 2, is finally getting a wide release in December. Even better, this cut includes a chapter audiences have never seen before, and it exists thanks to one of the most unexpected collaborators imaginable. Fortnite.
Fortnite has turned into a pop culture magnet. Nearly every major franchise has ended up inside Epic’s ever growing universe, and even Disneyland recently joined the fun.
The newest season folds in Kill Bill and introduces players to The Bride along with a collection of iconic elements from the films. In November, the game even premiered a brand new animated short titled The Lost Chapter: Yuki’s Revenge, a piece of Kill Bill lore that Tarantino wrote decades ago but never filmed.
Tarantino told THR how the whole thing came together, explaining the surprisingly simple question that kicked it off.
“They very innocently asked me, ‘Do you have something that’s, like, eight to 12 minutes long that could be good for our purposes?’ Now they didn’t say, ‘Can you make sure that your iconic characters are wrapped up inside of that?’ But that was implied.”
He admitted he originally assumed Fortnite only hoped to license some Kill Bill characters. Instead, they wanted a bite sized cinematic moment that could pull people into the game, similar to what Fortnite did with its animated Simpsons shorts when Springfield was added as a playable map.
Digging back through his original Kill Bill screenplay, Tarantino rediscovered a sequence that never made it before cameras. The scene centers on Yuki, the sister of Gogo Yubari, one of O-Ren Ishii’s deadliest bodyguards.
Yuki sets out to track down The Bride and settle the score. Tarantino explained why the moment never became part of the movies.
“We couldn’t do it, it was just too crazy, it was just too much action.”
That unfinished scene became the foundation of Yuki’s Revenge. Tarantino passed it off to the Fortnite team and they jumped on it, adapting the sequence into an animated short set clearly in the world of the game.
One of the coolest parts of this whole endeavor is that Uma Thurman came back to voice The Bride. She even performed motion capture to bring the character’s physicality into the Fortnite animation. Tarantino himself stepped in to voice an unseen Bill, taking over for the late David Carradine.
The short blends classic Kill Bill energy with Fortnite’s eccentric roster, which leads to moments like The Bride screaming at a sentient banana. Strange as it is, it still feels like a lost slice of Tarantino’s revenge saga, and he’s happy it finally exists.
“I think it’s a really good way to launch the new season. This is a lost chapter that I always wanted to see the light of day.”
If you missed Yuki’s Revenge in Fortnite, no worries. The short will be bundled with Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair when it hits select theaters on December 5. This is the single film Tarantino always intended Kill Bill to be, and now it includes a chapter fans have been waiting decades to experience.