Will 'Kill Bill' Revive Tarantino?

ByABC News
October 6, 2003, 1:36 PM

Oct. 7 -- When you take a part in a Quentin Tarantino movie, you take the chance your character will meet a blood-soaked end that'll frighten the most hardened movie-goer. But Lucy Liu says she's ready.

"I understand Quentin Tarantino's mentality and his creative being," Liu told Good Morning America Monday as the film heads toward release Friday.

"The blood and all that is so over the top that it's not meant to be taken seriously."

Liu plays Japan's top crime boss in Kill Bill - Vol. 1, Tarantino's twist on the kung fu genre, his first film after six years conspicuously out of the spotlight.

In the early 1990s, Tarantino was Hollywood's biggest success story, a former video store clerk who became the town's most talked about director after the groundbreaking success of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction.

But Tarantino's last film, Jackie Brown, a modest box office success in 1997, languished in the shadows of his past success. And reports emerged that the man once hailed as Hollywood's future had been struggling with writer's block and looking for a new direction.

Now that's about to end, and in a big way, as Tarantino gambles on a kung fu comeback that might be gory enough to rightfully be called Overkill Bill.

But if Tarantino still has a pulse on contemporary audiences, the 40-year-old director stands to reassert his standing as one of America's most daring filmmakers.

Can Old Reservoir Dogs Learn New Tricks?

In Kill Bill, Tarantino brings back a familiar face from Pulp Fiction, but in a most unlikely casting choice.

Uma Thurman played a drug-addled moll in Pulp Fiction, and audiences best remember her sexy dance with John Travolta.

In the new movie, she's a pregnant, Samurai-trained bride who's bent on revenge, after the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad slaughters her entire wedding party.