How long did you train to prepare for the physical part of your performance?

I trained for a solid three months before I started shooting. The training was pretty intense. I was there five days a week. It really took a lot from me.

There are a lot of shots of your feet and the feet of other people in this movie. Is Quentin Tarantino obsessed with your feet or feet in general?

I don't think it's me personally. I think it's feet in general. Quentin is widely accused of having a foot fetish. The joke was on the set of this film was that he could release an entire separate film of the foot shots he did during shooting. People with shoes. People without shoes. It was just part of his storytelling to have a foot shot. I think he denies this but he's regularly accused of it. I think it started during "Pulp Fiction" when Samuel Jackson gives the foot massage speech. I think that the accusations began there.

Quentin loves movie memorabilia. Did he let you keep the yellow tracksuit or the car that was named The Pussy Wagon.

I have the yellow track suit but Quentin has The Pussy Wagon. He drives The Pussy Wagon. He loves The Pussy Wagon. It was supposed have been blown up by Elle Driver in the desert and some point but I don't know what happened.

How do you think people will react to seeing such a fierce female protagonist?

It has a classic structure and I don't buy into the idea that it's worse because it's a female character. This is a very male character. The journey this character goes through wouldn't make you blink twice if it were "Mad Max" or Clint Eastwood. It's a revenge story. So, it's about someone being victimized who then claws their way back from the dead to avenge themselves. It's cinematic road kill. The difference is that I am a woman. The person fighting their way out of the grave and seeking revenge and taking a beating and coming back relentlessly is a woman. For people to find that anti-feminist is interesting. Many people find that disturbing but I think there are even more who find that inspiring and exciting to see a woman exhibiting as much strength and aggression and power as you'd expect from a male in storytelling.

So, with Quentin I think it's about people - not necessarily whether they're male or female. Certainly the moral compass of his films is its own thing and if you think films should be sterilized and should always say a certain thing than you probably don't like Tarantino films. And that's totally up to the viewer. What I find interesting about Quentin as a creative person is that he doesn't approach his material from the point of view of having a moral and then building a nice little story to feed the viewer his moral. He's a very organic, unconscious and kind of dream-like person who tells these stories and has these characters that just come from him.

In "Pulp Fiction" there's this moment where the entire film sort of pivots with Samuel Jackson's character having a revelation. The movie operates on this kind of entertainment level and then suddenly turns and changes and has this depth and poetry to it. And that's the mystery of Quentin's work for me. It's about faith. It's dangerous and it's uninhibited and it just comes out of him. He's not someone who's going to run everything through ten bleach cycles before he gives it to you. I think that's why audiences either love it or they hate it. They're experiencing something very, very raw.

So, for me to be given this very male challenge with my character is exciting. I don't think that because I'm a woman I shouldn't be knocked into the dirt by another character. I'm a woman and I got knocked into the dirt and then I got back up again and went at it. It's been a strange and interesting challenge. I can only say that what struck me was that as I watched "Kill Bill" that I didn't grow up watching films like this where women were portrayed as so tough, so strong and so fierce and brave. I didn't grow up seeing that. I saw a lot of other wonderful images but I didn't see that. So, if there was one thing I got back from all the pain that went into doing it, was that I got to see an image of that.

There's a sort of tongue-in-cheek quality to much of the violence and the story. How do you approach that as an actress when you create a character like this one?

It's very scary. The dance of it with Tarantino is an obsession. Usually a director establishes a tone and stays with it throughout the entire film and they're very proud of being so consistent with it. They never shake you up or break that reality. If it's a movie like "Ordinary People" the characters are touching their faces and being very real the whole way through the film. Quentin refuses to do that. What he really likes to do is scary business. What he really likes to do is go from scary violence to absurdist violence to a real emotion moment. You have to be very trusting and very agile to keep up. You have to trust that if it doesn't work he won't use it. It's an amazing skill he has to shift tone like that.