Built

Tarantino Influence Graph

Predecessor to All Roads to Kill Bill. Python pipeline that fetched metadata for 37 films from TMDB, scraped relationships via Firecrawl, and generated a fully-linked Obsidian vault with YAML frontmatter and WikiLink connections. The foundation that became the live 3D visualization.

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Origin

The question was simple: what movies did Tarantino actually steal from to make Kill Bill?

The answer, it turned out, was 37 films — spaghetti westerns, samurai epics, kung fu classics, grindhouse exploitation, anime, blaxploitation. Each one connected to Kill Bill by something specific: a musical cue lifted whole, a shot composition duplicated, a narrative structure lifted directly.

The problem was these connections weren’t organized anywhere. They existed scattered across Reddit threads, film blogs, and the tarantino.info wiki. So I built a pipeline to collect, normalize, and visualize them.

How It Works

Stage 1: Data Collection

  • Scraped the Kill Bill References Wiki (tarantino.info) via Firecrawl to extract the raw influence list
  • Cross-referenced with Reddit’s r/movies, r/TrueFilm threads for additional connections
  • Validated and normalized film titles against TMDB API

Stage 2: Metadata Enrichment

  • TMDB API: genres, release year, director, cast, plot synopsis, poster images
  • 35/37 films had high-quality poster images (95% success rate)
  • Custom YAML schema: influenced_by, influences, genre_cloud, relationship_type per connection

Stage 3: Vault Generation

  • Claude Code wrote the Python script to generate all 37 markdown files
  • Each file: YAML frontmatter + embedded poster + WikiLink connections to influenced/influencing films
  • WikiLinks bi-directional — navigating from Kill Bill Vol. 1 takes you to Lady Snowblood; navigating from Lady Snowblood shows all films it influenced

Stage 4: Visualization

All 37 films live in Obsidian’s graph view, color-coded by genre cloud:

  • 🟠 Spaghetti Western
  • 🔵 Samurai Cinema
  • 🟡 Kung Fu / Martial Arts
  • 🟣 Anime
  • 🔴 Grindhouse

Why Obsidian

The choice to use Obsidian’s native graph view instead of a custom D3/vis.js visualization was deliberate. The WikiLink structure allows exploration that a static graph can’t — you click a node, you’re in the film’s note, with its poster and synopsis and all outgoing/incoming connections visible simultaneously.

The experience is qualitatively different from a visualization. It’s more like archaeology.

What It Became

This project was the technical foundation for All Roads to Kill Bill — the live 3D force-directed graph that now exists as a deployable web experience. The data pipeline, the YAML schema, and the relationship taxonomy all came from this project first.

Tools that helped

Python TMDB Firecrawl Obsidian
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