There's no doubt about the authorship of Kill Bill. As the credits tell us: THE 4th FILM BY QUENTIN TARANTINO. That information leaves audiences in little doubt that the movie will be violent, both physically and verbally, with a cast featuring several ageing actors you thought were dead and a screenplay offering numerous references to old movies.

Tarantino doesn't disappoint with Kill Bill which had so much going for it that the finished film has been sliced in half for release in two parts. The first opens nationwide on Friday, the second follows early next year.

The big question, though, is why Tarantino waited so long to direct again?

Being cautious about finding the right project is one thing, but absence doesn't necessarily make an audience's heart grow fonder. Some of the greatest directors have come a cropper following up first-time hits.

Orson Welles never topped his first movie Citizen Kane, leaving films unfinished and earning money doing voiceovers for sherry commercials. Michael Cimino won a best director Oscar for The Deer Hunter, then made one of the most expensive flops ever with Heaven's Gate. His career's never recovered. And Badlands director Terrence Malick waited 20 years before returning behind the camera in The Thin Red Line.

Six years between pictures was a long time for a hot talent like Tarantino, who announced his arrival as a movie-maker at the Sundance Film Festival in 1992.

With Reservoir Dogs, there was no mistaking that here was a film-maker with talent, flair and daring. Equally obvious was that his blood-splattered form of violent cinema would upset as much as entertain. If the Daily Mail critic hadn't described the gorefest that is Kill Bill - Volume 1 as "the most pornographically violent movie in history", QT would probably have thought he'd failed.

British critics and audiences' good response to Reservoir Dogs helped established Tarantino's reputation through this story of men in dark suits and shades bungling a robbery. Tim Roth spent the movie bleeding profusely from a gunshot wound, while another man had his ear sliced off. Audiences were admiring and outraged in equal measure.

Pulp Fiction upped the level of blood and guts as well as reviving John Travolta's career in a story of hit men and assorted low lifes. Jackie Brown, his third film in 1997, was based on an Elmore Leonard bestseller but made his own by Tarantino as an homage to 1970s blaxploitation movies.

Then it all went quiet on the Tarantino front. He made a few not-very-convincing appearances as an actor, proof that his forte was definitely on the other side of the camera.

Now Kill Bill, so big and bloody he turned it into two movies when a relatively low budget, 90-minute movie emerged from production as a $13m over budget, three-and-a-half hour epic.

Uma Thurman stars as The Bride, an assassin left for dead after a wedding day massacre. Six years later, it's payback time as she embarks on a journey to kill those responsible with her samurai sword in an orgy of limb-lopping and blood-spurting.

Some will condemn Kill Bill for the level of violence, and Tarantino admits: "I have done violence before but never in such an outrageous way. But this film is definitely not taking place on Planet Earth, and I'm using a lot of Japanese film influences."

Undeniable is Tarantino's mastery of cinema language and genres. At 40, he shows little sign of growing up or losing his enthusiasm for his work as he gabbles away ten to the dozen about his latest project.

He hasn't felt the need to rush into making another film, saying: "I'm lucky enough to be in the position where I don't have to make a movie to pay for my pool. When I make a movie, I want it to be everything to me; like I would die for it."

Not that he's been idle over the past six years. The man who says that "movies are my religion and God is my patron" used his time away from directing "to live a little, to have a lot of sex, and watch as many movies as I could".

He's also been busy writing his Second World War project, Inglorious Bastards, as well as Kill Bill, an idea that's been in his mind since he and Thurman created the character of The Bride after working together on Pulp Fiction. Then filming had to be postponed for a year after his leading lady fell pregnant, and he refused to make Kill Bill with any other actress.

His love of movie genres and pop culture references is reflected in Kill Bill which pays homage to spaghetti westerns, Chinese martial arts films and Japanese samurai movies among others.

In the epic House of Blue Leaves sequence, Thurman's bride fights off 88 sword-wielding warriors in a restaurant. "I was trying to think up every inventive way I could to dismember and disembowel. I was working overtime," he says.

"What do I want to see? What haven't I seen? It took me about a year to write the fight sequence. I'd include scenes from a cool kung fu movie I knew and put in the space. During the course of the year I'd rewrite those scenes with my own ideas."

One type of film that he didn't include was "Victorian drama movies" - about what he calls people knuckling under to society, explaining: "Movies about people who are following rules aren't interesting to me. I like movies about people who break rules or are mavericks.

"Biography movies don't make interesting cinema either, but great performances. If I was doing a biography movie, I'd follow someone around for three days, not do their whole life."

Tarantino become a very hands-on director during shooting the marathon fight in the House of Blue Leaves. While praising the make-up crew, he noted they did everything the modern way, involving hidden tubes and canisters of blood. He had other ideas. "Let's pretend we're little lads and making a movie in our backyard. Ingenuity is important," he told them.

He resorted to a method used by one of his favourite Chinese directors, Cheng Chang, whose Five Fingers Of Death introduced US audiences to kung fu movies. Tarantino filled a Chinese condom with fake blood. The actor would hold this in one hand and, when they were struck by a sword, would squeeze the condom. Filmed from behind, it looked like blood was spurting from their wound.

"I used it for a girl fighter who has her throat cut. We did it ten, 12, 13 times and the blood kept going down her front instead of spraying at the back," he recalls.

"At some point I felt Cheng Chang talk to me and say, 'hang on in there, it's going to work out, it's going to explode the right way once'. Sure enough, four takes later we did it perfectly."

l Kill Bill - Volume 1 (18) opens in cinemas on Friday.