Lucy Liu (Charlie’s Angels, Chicago) is well-known for her fashion sense and has worn many different famous outfits on screen over the years. But her O-Ren Ishii wardrobe in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill might be one of the highlights of her career. Not because they were particularly flashy, but rather because they actually hide a secret nod to Pulp Fiction.
Thanks to the re-release of Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair and the release of the long-shelved, missing Kill Bill chapter titled “Yuki’s Revenge” for the Fortnite collaboration, the 2003 and 2004 movies are trending again.
Now, all these years later, Lucy Liu explained in a recent Vogue interview how she came up with O-Ren Ishii’s look for Kill Bill Vol. 1. “Kumiko Ogawa, she was the one who designed this kimono,” Liu said. “And this kimono almost wasn’t a kimono. Originally, [director Quentin Tarantino] wanted me to wear something very different, and he wanted me to wear this kind of communist gray.”
But the queen of the Tokyo underworld deserved more. “When I read the script, which was so beautifully written — and Quentin is really such an artist and a visionary,” Liu said. “I saw something very different. I just saw there was an elegance about her and a femininity that I wanted to retain.”
Thankfully, Tarantino agreed with her. “I said, ‘Why don’t we take what you are known for, like your Pulp Fiction?’ The black ties and the white shirts and the black suits, like the simplicity of what he did. Like, why don’t we take that and make that into something.”
That’s how O-Ren’s palette changed. And for the better. “For the first scene that you see O-Ren in, she’s in a black kimono with a white underneath the black kimono. And so that was representing, basically, Pulp Fiction,” Liu said.
Then she changed it up and remixed the outfit for the snow garden showdown. “Why don’t we reverse it and make it white on the outside and black on the inside?” Liu said. “He was willing to say yes, and it changed the direction of how O-Ren was able to be perceived.”
These might seem like small changes to the film, but they actually made a huge impact. You can see it on screen. The colors tell you who’s in control before anyone has even swung a sword.
For her efforts, Lucy Liu won Best Villain at the 2004 MTV Movie Awards for Kill Bill Volume 1. And it sounds like it was well-deserved.
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