Quentin Tarantino has been frank about finding inspiration for Uma Thurman’s character in Kill Bill from Michelle Yeoh’s performance in Jackie Chan’s 1992 comedy, Police Story 3. So why didn’t he cast Yeoh in his film? “I asked Quentin the same question,” Yeoh said in a new interview with Town & Country. “He’s very smart. He said, ‘Who would believe that Uma Thurman could kick your ass?’ ”
While they’ve never worked together, Tarantino and Yeoh are friends, and she credits the director with convincing her to come out of retirement after her terrifying fall from a bridge on the set of 1996’s The Stunt Woman. She broke several vertebrae. “I thought I broke my back. I thought I was paralyzed,” she explained. Every breath was agony.
Tarantino was in Hong Kong at the time screening his new film Pulp Fiction, and while Yeoh was in no mood to receive strange visitors, he insisted. “I must say, Quentin, he’s persistent,” Yeoh said. “He is who he is today because he’s full of passion and love, so he wore me down.”
She offered him five minutes, and he used that time to recount each of her stunts, blow by blow. “Suddenly we became animated,” Yeoh recalled. “So then I thought, ‘Maybe I’m not ready to give up on this.’”
“I was just a huge, huge fan of hers,” Tarantino said. “There was always a twinkle in her eye.”
Yeoh recently starred in the surprise indie smash Everything Everywhere All at Once, and this December she’s expected to anchor the prequel series The Witcher: Blood Origins. As for Tarantino, he still plans to stop making films after his next, 10th movie. But that may not be the end of his directing career, since he’s been linked to television shows like Justified: City Primeval. In June, he announced The Video Archives Podcast with Roger Avary.
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