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STEVE PERSALLHollywood had long forgotten actor David Carradine when Kill Bill director Quentin Tarantino came calling, looking to resurrect another career.
LOS ANGELES -- Only Quentin Tarantino knows where he gets his casting ideas, hiring actors who haven't been hot since the 1970s the filmmaker adores.
For the latest recycling project, 67-year-old David Carradine, it's simply a matter of now and Zen.
"It's not reaching back, it's reaching out," Carradine says, defiantly puffing imported cigarettes on a nonsmoking floor at the Four Seasons Hotel early this month.
A wooden flute - Carradine plays it in Tarantino's Kill Bill, Volume 2 and a forgettable martial arts flick before that - rests on an armchair, next to the Hattori Hanzo sword, reminders of his mesmerizing death pimp role. For the moment, Carradine sounds 30 years younger and much more passive, as when he walked the Old West as Kwai Chang Caine in the cult TV series Kung Fu.
"Quentin feels he has a mission, and it's not just to make movies," says Carradine, on a publicity tour for Kill Bill with Tarantino and co-star Michael Madsen. "One part of that mission is finding beautiful plants in the garden that are being ignored, or treated as weeds, cultivating them and showing they really are great."
The craggy serenity of Carradine's face never changes as he lists the beneficiaries of Tarantino's nostalgic intuition: John Travolta was washed up (again) when Pulp Fiction made him bulletproof. Robert Forster earned an Oscar nomination for Jackie Brown, which also proved that Pam Grier could still heat up the screen. Michael Parks (Then Came Bronson) will benefit when people realize he's playing two juicy roles - a Texas sheriff and a Mexican brothel owner - in the Kill Bill volumes.
"He hasn't just made a comeback for them; it's a renaissance," Carradine says. "He has shown the actor that he can do more than he thought he could do."
Is that what happened with Carradine?
"No doubt about it," he says. "Quentin tweaked my instincts to just let it all come out. But not loud; he doesn't do it in the open. All his directions to me were whispered. Nobody else knew what the (heck) he was saying. And I'm not going to tell.
"But he freed me from a lot of the limitations I put on myself. Part of it was being a second-generation actor (from his father, John Carradine, alongside brothers Keith and Robert). I lived and breathed this stuff as a kid. But part of it was the cabinetmaker's aspect of me as an actor - constructing everything and doing it just that way for take after take after take.
"When you do a television series, one thing you do is help the editor. You match. You make it easier for him to use as an editing element. You always have to have the cup of coffee in the same place or a cigarette ash has to be the same length each time. That's the cabinetmaker thing I had to eliminate."
After his performance in Kill Bill, it's suggested that the movie industry underestimated Carradine, who sounds like he underestimated himself.
"I think it was a little of both," he says before tipping the scales to Hollywood's fault:
" "The industry.' That's just like saying "the corporation.' It's not effective people. There are a lot of new people running studios who weren't running them back then. They cop an attitude. A lot of people in the industry probably have no conception that I'm capable of doing anything except being a half-Chinese hobo, which has nothing to do with who I am."
Perhaps it's because Carradine came along in days when long hair and having a child out of wedlock with Barbara Hershey (who called herself Seagull for a while, in a sign of the times) was too counter to Hollywood culture. Carradine was portrayed in gossip circles as a family embarrassment. "We lived in a little shack on top of a mountain," says Carradine. "Didn't own a TV set. I didn't read newspapers or anything."
Maybe fame fleeted because Carradine's best previous roles - Caine in Kung Fu, folk musician Woody Guthrie in Bound for Glory (1976) and outlaw Cole Younger in The Long Riders (1980) - are deceptively effortless. He isn't an actor given to emotional peaks; his angriest moments onscreen are likely to be his quietest. Carradine is an artifact from 1970s film culture - a rare American who acted for Ingmar Bergman - when cryptic, conflicted drama relied on poker faces to tell the stories.
"I don't want anybody to catch me acting," he says. "The performance should seem to be sort of an accident. I'll get it right, but you're not going to see the wheels turning. I have gotten a lot of reviews that said I was just playing myself, whether I'm an Oklahoma folk singer or the guy who started the Civil War or a wandering Shaolin priest. That's how I know it's working."
Even when Carradine's technique works, the movies haven't been widely seen. Much of his past quarter-century was spent making exploitation flicks, personally financing several for international distribution, mostly on home video. His favorite review from that period came from the Hollywood Reporter for the 1978 sci-fi thriller Deathsport: "Don't let the fact that David Carradine is terrific in this movie talk you into going to see it."
In between those low budget projects, Carradine retreated to a California ranch, raising horses rather than courting major studio decisionmakers.
"I was either unaware of, or just didn't pay any attention to, the litany that you can't play both sides of the coin," he says. "You can't do exploitation movies and still do the studio pictures. I did about 80 movies that went straight to video. I made that bed, and I kind of lie in it.
"At some point, I got divorced and I'm losing the ranch, losing some of the horses. And I just figured: You know? I've done 26 years of this. That's enough. I can walk away from this. I'll take my saddle with me. I'll move back to town, where the bright lights are."
Carradine heard from friends that Tarantino was writing a script with him in mind. He decided to be wherever Tarantino would be. Carradine scored an invitation to the Jackie Brown cast and crew screening. He visited Tarantino backstage when the filmmaker acted on Broadway in Wait Until Dark. Tarantino assured Carradine that they would work together, but it had to be the right thing.
"What could be the wrong thing?" the actor asked.
Carradine's last-ditch effort was a trip to Austin, where Tarantino was hosting a 14-hour marathon of revenge flicks. Carradine maxed out his Diners Club card to get there. What he didn't know was that, between movies, Tarantino was showing Kung Fu episodes to an appreciative crowd.
"Quentin brought me onstage, and it was very clear to everybody in Austin and to me that we were a great act," says Carradine. "We got our laughs and really got along."
Although Kill Bill was written with Carradine in mind, Tarantino offered the role to Warren Beatty, whose edginess in Bulworth impressed him. Beatty had dinner with Madsen to confirm their brotherly chemistry for the film. Two days later, Madsen got a call from Tarantino saying he "fired" Beatty.
(That's Madsen's word. For his part, Carradine says: "I would never say to anybody that Warren Beatty got fired. I think he and Quentin fell out of love.")
Madsen continues: "I asked, "Who's going to play Bill?' Quentin says: "Are you ready? David Carradine.'
"I remember I was completely, totally stunned. I would have never thought of David in a million years, but at the same time it made more sense than anything. I didn't doubt that he had the chops for a minute."
Convincing Miramax Films mogul Harvey Weinstein wasn't as easy. Swapping Beatty for Carradine doesn't make box office sense, and the actor's offbeat reputation raised questions.
"I have to have a serious conversation with Harvey about any of these offbeat ideas as opposed to casting a big star," says Tarantino. "But I kind of have a pretty good track record as far as this is concerned. I get a little slack. In the case of David Carradine, it was much less of a fight than I expected. He just got it right away. He asked me: "Is (Carradine) crazy?' I said, "No, man, he's cool.'
"Harvey brought up another star (not Beatty). I won't say who it was, but he would be good as Bill. I said: "You know, Harvey? That's a good idea. But David is more interesting.' He actually got it."
The question is whether anyone else with studio clout will get it. Carradine can't honestly expect a resurrection like Travolta has enjoyed. Having people know he's still around, maybe with a bit of box office cache like Grier and Forster, would probably be enough.
"Yeah, I do want to get back into the flow," he says. "Not to play the game, because I've never been much of a game player. But if somebody offers me a good script, I'm certainly going to do it.
"Why wouldn't I? I don't have that much time, for one thing. Another 10 years and I might be in a wheelchair. I'm on Social Security now."
And to show that he reads newspapers these days, Carradine smiles and adds: "By then I might not be on Social Security."