Quentin Tarantino knew something was up when he walked into his first encounter with Fortnite.
“I showed up at the meeting thinking they’d like to license characters and they’d like my ideas about what might be a fun thing to do,” he told a packed audience at a special Fortnite now Playing event at his Vista Theater in Los Angeles. “But no, they had something else in mind.”
The “something else” was an unexpected request: “Do you have anything eight to 12 minutes long that would be good for our purposes?” They didn’t mention his iconic characters directly, he added, “But it was implied.”
Fortunately, Tarantino had just the thing – an unshot sequence buried in his original Kill Bill draft. The short, The Lost Chapter: Yuki’s Revenge, is about Yuki, Gogo Yubari’s twin sister, who seeks revenge on Uma Thurman’s The Bride. He had cut the material years ago because “it was just too crazy, it was just too much action.”
He dusted it off, sent it to Fortnite, “and they said, ‘Let’s do this.’ And here we are.”
Thurman, who returns as The Bride through voice work and motion capture, joined him for the event. When asked how it felt to reprise the role, she said, “I thought it was so cool… it’s such a new audience for the film.”
The project also reunited her with Tarantino: “We’ve had an amazing life in movies together… I dare anyone to have more extraordinary experiences than I’ve had with this man.”
Tarantino, who also voices Bill in the short, said the crossover between Fortnite and Kill Bill fans made the collaboration feel natural. “This is a lost chapter that I’ve always wanted to see the light of day.”
The Lost Chapter: Yuki’s Revenge premieres in Fortnite on November 30 and will be shown in cinemas with Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair begins on December 5.
