Kill Bill: Volume 1 (originally advertised as simply Kill Bill) is a 2003 American martial arts action film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. It stars Uma Thurman as the Bride, who swears revenge on a team of assassins (Lucy Liu, Michael Madsen, Daryl Hannah and Vivica A. Fox) and their leader Bill (David Carradine) after they try to kill her and her unborn child. Her journey takes her to Japan, where she battles the Tokyo yakuza.
Tarantino conceived Kill Bill as a homage to "grindhouse" cinema including martial arts films, samurai cinema, blaxploitation films, and spaghetti westerns. It features an anime sequence animated by Production I.G. It is the first of two Kill Bill films produced simultaneously; the second, Kill Bill: Volume 2, was released in 2004. The films were originally set for a single release, but the film, with a runtime of over four hours, was divided in two. Vol 1 was released on October 10, 2003. It became Tarantino's highest-grossing film up to that point, earning over $180 million at the box office.
