Uma Thurman Talks 'Kill Bill' Kung-Fu

"I never, ever saw myself as even having an auxiliary part in an action movie," Thurman said backstage at the Golden Globes, shortly after winning a Best Actress award for the TV movie "Hysterical Blindness." "Now I'm there punching and kicking and fighting, day in and day out. So, it's kind of a career anomaly."

Before he started making "Kill Bill" last year, Tarantino, the chatterbox filmmaker behind dialogue-and-violence-heavy classics "Pulp Fiction" and "Reservoir Dogs," hadn't directed a movie since 1997's "Jackie Brown." In "Kill Bill," Thurman stars as "The Bride," a pregnant assassin who is shot down at her wedding by her boss Bill (David Carradine of TV's "Kung Fu") and other killers. Years later she awakens from a coma and scours the world to take revenge, killing off her attackers one by one in China, Japan, Mexico and California until her ultimate showdown with Bill.

Much of the look and feel of "Kill Bill" will be a noirish tribute to Asian cinema. Tarantino, who has long championed many obscure Hong Kong films, called upon a kung-fu-flick-inclined musician to help out with his latest project. "That's our common denominator," explained Wu-Tang Clan leader RZA, who scored director Jim Jarmusch's similarly minded "Ghost Dog" in 1999 and has now teamed up with Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich for the "Kill Bill" score. "I thought I knew every [kung-fu] flick in the world [and Quentin] knew one I didn't know," RZA said. "He thought he knew every flick in the world, I knew one he didn't know. That's how it started, like flipping baseball cards. I finally met a muthaf---er in the entertainment world that's into the martial-arts genre like that.