Quentin Tarantino knew something was up when he walked into his first meeting with Fortnite.
“I showed up to the meeting thinking that they would want to license characters and they want to get my ideas about what could 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.”
That “something else” was an unexpected request: “Do you have something that’s, like, eight to 12 minutes long that could be good for our purposes?” They didn’t mention his iconic characters directly, he added, “But that was implied.”
Luckily, Tarantino had just the thing — an unshot sequence buried in his original Kill Bill draft. The short, The Lost Chapter: Yuki’s Revenge, centers on Yuki, the twin sister of Gogo Yubari, seeking vengeance 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 were, like, ‘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. Asked how it felt to revisit the role, she said, “I thought it was so cool… this is such a new audience for the movie.”
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 always wanted to see the light of day.”
The Lost Chapter: Yuki’s Revenge premieres in Fortnite on November 30 and screens theatrically with Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair beginning December 5.
