“I don’t have to kiss his ass”: the on-set argument that almost derailed ‘Kill Bill Vol. 1’

Posted On October 10, 2025October 10, 2025

Despite the fact that Quentin Tarantino is heralded as one of modern cinema’s most important directors, he’s no saint. The filmmaker has been embroiled in his fair share of controversy, with stories about questionable on-set conduct surrounding some of his films.

One of the most serious examples comes from Kill Bill, during which Tarantino decided to forgo health and safety regulations for the sake of his art, pressuring Uma Thurman into doing a driving stunt herself despite concerns that the car was not safe. She crashed, and the actor suffered serious injuries as a result.

When Tarantino has a vision, it seems like he’ll do anything possible to make it come to life, even if that involves putting his actors at risk. Regardless of Thurman voicing her worries about the car, he reassured her that she’d be fine, contrary to the evidence at hand, and it’s this creatively ambitious tunnel vision that led to disaster.

But that wasn’t the only source of tension to emerge from the Kill Bill set. In fact, actor Vivica A Fox, who played the former Deadly Viper Vernita Green, revealed that she butted heads with Tarantino during filming, unfamiliar with his rather intense (and unfair) treatment of his cast. She wasn’t going to let him treat her or the rest of her co-stars like shit when they were undergoing extensive hours of training to essentially become martial arts masters.

It was like a full-time job on top of learning their lines, but Tarantino didn’t seem to think anyone was working hard enough. “I thought I was in the damn Olympics or something,” Fox wrote in her book, Everyday I’m Hustling. “We’d do fight choreography, knife throwing, samurai lessons and hit the treadmill and weights in between.”

You’d think that Tarantino would be delighted by this dedication, but for him, it still wasn’t enough. I’m sure he wouldn’t be saying the same if he was the one forced into such strenuous exercise everyday. Fox revealed, “The first week Quentin cut into us, telling us we had to work harder. Okay, I can work harder. Second week, we got the same thing after we busted our asses. He said we weren’t giving it our all. Third Friday, I was so proud of all that our team had accomplished. I was sitting between cute little Lucy [Liu] and sweet Uma, and I was ready for a high five for all of us.”

You can probably guess how Tarantino reacted. “Quentin tore into us. Something about us lollygagging in the morning, taking too long to suit up and gabbing over coffee. He said we should get here at 8:30, a half hour early, if we wanted to do all that.”

The actor wasn’t going to take it, so she fought back. “And I lost it on him. ‘Is this a ‘beat us up’ contest?’ I asked. ‘Are we fucking doing anything right? Goddamn.’” Fox was defiant, and Thurman had to explain that Tarantino just worked like that, and soon she’d learn how to manipulate the situation. Still, Fox wasn’t having it. “I was all righteous. ‘I don’t have to manipulate nobody,’ I said. ‘That’s not me. I don’t have to kiss his ass.’”

With Thurman, who’d already worked with Tarantino on Pulp Fiction, as her guide, Fox soon came to learn how Tarantino operated. It wasn’t a case of pure manipulation, Thurman explained, but rather learning to “attack intelligently” since, at the end of day, he could fire you just like that. “That moment was pure sisterhood. She was honestly looking out for me. She wanted me to advocate for myself, but to do it in a way that was more constructive,” Fox added.

It seems like Tarantino certainly isn’t the easiest filmmaker to work with, and it’s about figuring out how he works to get the best out of the situation. Should it really have to be like that, though?

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