Tarantino mulls ''Kill Bill,'' ''Pulp Fiction'' spinoffs

The upcoming ”Kill Bill — Vol. 2” may not be the last installment in the ”Kill Bill” saga. The way Quentin Tarantino talks about it, his brainchild is practically unkillable, running rife with possible prequels, sequels, and spinoffs. ”Yeah, I?ve been thinking about revisiting the story in a couple of ways,” he told England’s Empire magazine. ”I?ve been thinking about doing it as an anime feature that would tell the entire origin of Bill, the marked-for-death crimelord played by David Carradine in the two films. The writer-director elaborated at a press junket over the weekend, telling Zap2It.com: ”I have an idea about writing, like I did for the animation section in ‘Vol. 1,’ a Japanese anime feature about the origins of Bill — how Bill became Bill, you know, and deal with his three godfathers — Esteban Vihaio, Hattori Hanzo and Pei Mei.”

Other ”Bill”-related ideas: a graphic novel about the DiVAS, the movies’ female assassin squad; and a feature-length sequel, possibly animated, possibly live, about Nikki, the little girl who sees her mother, Vernita ”Copperhead” Green (Vivica A. Fox), die at the hands of Uma Thurman’s Bride in ”Vol. 1.” Of course, Tarantino says, he’d shoot it in about 15 years, when the girl is an adult. ”It would be Nikki going out to get revenge on the Bride. Uma wouldn’t be the star, she’d kind of be the bad guy, because the little girl kind of deserves her revenge.”

Tarantino is also apparently still talking, as he has been for a decade, about ”The Vega Brothers,” a prequel to both ”Reservoir Dogs” and ”Pulp Fiction” that would tell the backstory of the gangsters played by Michael Madsen and John Travolta, respectively, in those earlier films. ”Kill Bill” costar Madsen told Zap2It that Tarantino had figured out a way around the fact that both actors have aged a decade since their characters first appeared. ”So, he’s going to do it and he has the idea and the idea works very well,” Madsen said. ”I think it’s just going to be a matter of getting the screenplay finished and actually getting out to shoot it because I think we’re going to do this World War II thing first,” he said, referring to ”Inglorious Bastards,” the WWII action movie Tarantino is actually committed to doing next, in which Madsen will also costar. As for Travolta, who was also doing a press junket this weekend for ”The Punisher” (which will open April 16 opposite ”Kill Bill”), he said he’s willing to do ”The Vega Brothers” whenever Tarantino is ready. ”But that’s up to Quentin,” Travolta told Zap2It. ”I don’t question him. I wouldn’t even ask him.”

As if Tarantino didn’t have enough on his back burner, he told SciFiWire he’d also been talking to Pierce Brosnan about the possibility of directing the next James Bond movie, a remake of ”Casino Royale.” Unlike the 1967 spoof, Tarantino’s version would be straight and would focus more on character and plot than on spectacle, he said. ”I won’t do anything that will ruin the series,” he said, offering an apparent open-letter pitch to the franchise’s producers. ”Wouldn’t it be great to have a James Bond movie that didn’t cost $115 million and only cost $40 million or something like that?” he said. ”You know it’s going to make its money back, and we [would] all do good. Maybe we win the critics this time, then you’re back in business the way you were before.”

Of course, it’s possible that none of these ideas will ever come to fruition. After all, Tarantino went three years without making a movie between ”Pulp Fiction” and ”Jackie Brown” and another six years before resurfacing with ”Kill Bill.”