"I think I would probably drive a speeding car into the crowd," says Quentin Tarantino looking at the mass of people outside the Empire Leicester Square. But the director is in no way contemplating the mass slaughter of his fans, rather he's musing on how he would shoot a premiere opening in his own inimitable style. Arriving with his stars at the UK premiere of Kill Bill: Volume 1, the master of bloody on-screen mayhem declared a special bond with the British public and explained why to Empire Online
"It feels like coming home. I'm not just saying that 'cause I'm talking to you now - it was the UK that embraced Reservoir Dogs, embraced my first movie. It did well around the world but it was the UK that really took it and made it the success that it was. I've always thought of it as America and all these other countries, they caught up with Britain. So when I come back to the UK there's always a sense of coming back to the true fans, the true believers."
Tarantino's fourth film arrives six years after his third, Elmore Leonard adaptation, Jackie Brown, and rather than being a pop-culture-referencing, snappy dialogue-spouting feature like his previous films, Kill Bill is a good, old-fashioned kung fu flick where the flying fists and feet do the talking. Uma Thurman stars as an assassin betrayed and left for dead before returning to take her revenge on Bill, her former boss, and the fellow assassins who tried to kill her. The first instalment climaxes with a massive showdown in a Japanese restaurant that sees Thurman literally hack limb from limb a mob of eighty yakuza henchmen with only a very sharp sword and a rather natty tracksuit at her disposal.
"When they started to show me the giant sword fight, I'd watch it and go, 'okay'," said Thurman. "Then it would go on and I'd say, 'okay' and it would go on and go on. Finally I turned to master Wu-Ping and said 'just give me one machine gun, one grenade. Please!'" Arriving very late to the evening's festivities, Thurman was rushed past fans but (bless her) the actress returned to the crowds after the film had started to sign more autographs and generally spread the love around.
Joining Thurman were co-stars Julie Dreyfus, Michael Madsen and Daryl Hannah, all present to give Tarantino's return the send-off it deserved. But the question on everybody's lips was: will we have to wait another six years for Tarantino movie number five? "No," he reassured us. "I'm a writer and you don't write on talk shows, you go off and you write. I've written a bunch of stuff to do, I wrote two war films during that time so I'll be able to get right back into it." Watch this space.