Tarantino's East-meets-West ninja revenge tale opens Oct. 10.
This article doesn't tell us much more than the previous sentence about the plot,
but it tells you all you may want to know about the importance of soundtracks to a movie.
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THE SOUNDTRACK OF TARANTINO'S MIND
The Los Angeles Times
By Steve Hochman
Special to The Times
August 31 2003

For a lot of movie fans, it's impossible to hear the 1973 Stealers Wheel hit "Stuck in the Middle With You" without thinking about Michael Madsen slicing off Kirk Baltz's ear in "Reservoir Dogs."

For many, it's also impossible to hear Dick Dale's surf instrumental "Miserlou" without picturing Tim Roth and Amanda Plummer knocking over a restaurant in "Pulp Fiction."

Quentin Tarantino hopes the same phenomenon will apply to Nancy Sinatra's singing "Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)" coupled with an image of Thurman, in full bridal regalia, lying wounded in a church.

That's the opening scene of "Kill Bill Part 1," Tarantino's first movie in six years. The
East-meets-West ninja revenge tale opens Oct. 10.

"I think you'll have a hard time hearing that after seeing the movie and not thinking about the bride lying in the church," says the writer-director. "It's the opening credits. That was in my head six years ago when I first came up with 'Kill Bill.' Along with the whole story, I came up with the idea of using that with the opening credits.

"One of the things I do when first thinking about a movie is I go into my record collection and listen and need to find the opening credit sequence, music the movie will work to the beat of."

That passion extends to the soundtrack albums for the films. With 1992's "Reservoir Dogs" and even more with 1994's "Pulp Fiction," he set standards for dizzying mixes of musical styles and pop culture evocations, woven with bits of movie dialogue — a now common practice. He continued that approach with the '70s funk- powered "Jackie Brown" in 1997.

For this one, with the album due Sept. 23 from Maverick Records, he built the soundtrack around other soundtrack recordings drawn largely from his own collection, which he's been building since childhood.

"In this album I'm using soundtrack cuts the way I used surf music in 'Pulp Fiction,' " he says, taking a short break from a deadline editing session.

Those cuts range from a "Twisted Nerve" cue by composer Bernard Herrmann to Al Hirt playing Billy May's "Green Hornet" TV theme to "The Flower of Carnage," from an obscure '70s Japanese kung fu movie, "Lady Slow Blood."

"That's by Meiko Kaji," he says. "She was a huge star in Japan in the '70s, doing revenge female action movies. She even wrote the lyrics and sang it, so it's cool for her to give benediction to Uma Thurman's carnage."

Helping Tarantino find selections was hip-hop producer RZA, who shares the filmmaker's mania for oddball movie music, especially kung fu soundtracks.

RZA also wrote and performed "The Ode to Oren Ishii," a narrative summarizing the plot. The first original song ever in a Tarantino project, it will be on the soundtrack album but not in the movie itself, unless the director tags it onto the closing credits.

Other tracks include Santa Esmerelda's 1977 Latin-disco version of the Animals' "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" and "The Lonely Shepherd" by Romanian pan-flutist Zamfir,-- a track brought in at the last minute by RZA after he heard it while eating at a Thai restaurant.

Part 2 of the film and a second soundtrack album will be released next year, though Tarantino wouldn't tip his hand as to what we'll be hearing then.

calendarlive.com: The soundtrack of Tarantino's mind
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