'Sin City' Secrets and Sequels: Robert Rodriguez
By Scott Huver, Hollywood.com Staff
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Tuesday, August 16, 2005
Slipping Back Into Sin City
Two back-to-back Sin City sequels have been announced. Will you have the same working relationship with Frank as co-director on the sequel?
Rodriguez: "Yeah. We're still writing the script to see if there's enough for a third one or if we're just going to do the second one. We're supposed to shoot in January."
Is Frank eager to direct on his own films?
Rodriguez: "He wants to, yeah. He says, 'Well, I can see why you want to do this all the time!' He can't wait to get back on the film."
Have you decided which of the published Sin City stories you'll use in the sequel?
Rodriguez: "'A Dame to Kill For' is probably the basis of it. Marv [Mickey Rourke] comes back, before he died. Dwight's [Clive Owen] in that one. Gail's [Rosario Dawson] in that one. Both Goldie and Wendy [Jaime King] are together, she's still alive. You see the twins together like one is black and white."
Do you have all the actors already signed?
Rodriguez: "No. But they would come do it. It was, like, two days of their life, you know? They'd be like, 'Yeah, I'll go do that again. I have a free weekend, this weekend.'"
Have you looked at 'Hell and Back,' which uses full-color in the lengthy hallucinatory sequences?
Rodriguez: "Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Yeah, totally thought about 'Hell and Back.' And 'Family Values.' There're so many good books. It's really just kind of picking and choosing. We're starting with 'A Dame To Kill For,' and a couple of other short ones, to kind of see how they work together."
You mentioned the sequels will be on a grander scale. Has your filmmaking technology already improved that quickly?
Rodriguez: "Yeah, yeah. We did it on each Spy Kids movie. The movies just got cheaper. The third one had the most effects--it had 3-D even--and it was less expensive than the first one. It was made three years later."
Where did you come up with this green-screen-centric concept and style of filmmaking?
Rodriguez: "It was gradual, because Spy Kids, I started doing stuff green screen, with 'Spy Kids 2' we had more, full sequences that were done green. And in Spy Kids 3 because there was the video game, it had to be done all CG, once they got in, even the props, they'd just hold their hand like that, and I could put in a prop, so it would look like it was generated by the video game. And that was just so fun, that when I went to look at Sin City, I thought 'Oh, I know how to do this now.' It's all on green screen, that's the only way to shoot photographically, because you can't match with a photograph, can't bend light like that. So you have to do it on green."
'Grind'-ing with Tarantino
Do you have any desire to do a really massive prolonged shoot on a mega-scale--something Lord of the Rings style?
Rodriguez: "Nah. I mean, I'm gonna do something, but it's still fast. I'm doing an exploitation movie with Quentin, a double feature called Grind House. There will be a lot of location stuff on that. But we'll be shooting it really fast, because it'll be like an old '50s drive in type movie."
When do you start on that?
Rodriguez: "As soon as we finish the script. I'm at his house writing our script, so probably in the fall."
Are you scripting the movies separately?
Rodriguez: "They're two different movies, yeah. When he reads them, he acts out, he reads out his stuff, and he'll throw in stuff that I do…We just did our own thing. But got probably the best character I've ever come up with in my film. It's like so cool. They're separate movies, but it's like seeing a double feature. I'm gonna DP his movie…I was thinking of doing it before Sin City--I had an idea to do a double feature. And then I kind of forgot about an old double feature poster, it had two movie posters on the same poster. Two hot rod flicks together: Drag Strip Girl and Rock All Night, or something like that, and I thought 'Ah, that's cool.' A truncated feature, like an hour--each one's like an hour. I went to Quentin's house to show him. I forgot about it, and I went to show him. And he had the same poster on his floor, I said 'Hey! I thought about doing a double feature! You should do one, I'll do the other one, and he's like 'Oh f**k yeah, we'll call it Grind House!' I said 'Oh yeah, and we'll do fake trailers in between for movies that don't exist!' So we just kept going, 'Ah, this is going to be great!' So we're just having so much fun."
You and Quentin have great complementary styles. Can you compare and contrast your approaches?
Rodriguez: "We're unique. I think we just have an enthusiasm for the material. And we've just got our own approach to it, but we borrow from each other all the time, so. He likes to learn from me things I'm doing, and vice versa. I think we're willing to try anything. We had dinner with Tony Scott last night. We were talking about that same thing. He was like trying to pull out of us how we're doing these movies [laughs]. And we're trying to figure out how he makes his, and he's trying to figure out how we make ours. I don't understand how you guys do it, on the green screen and all this, I want to get into some of that!"
So much of your best work has been in conjunction with the Weinsteins. Do Bob and Harvey, who are known to be frequently hands-on, give you complete creative control?
Rodriguez: "Oh, totally, yeah. That's why I like working with them. It's sort of like Sin City. You know, you go all ready to a regular studio, 'Yeah, I want to do a movie that's black and white, all voiceovers, an anthology. What do you think about that? Rated R.'"
Will the stories in Grind House intersect or overlap at all?
Rodriguez: "Some of my cast will show up in his movie--just as characters in his movie, almost like it's a troupe of actors--and in the trailers: Like, feature the cast of his movie in another movie, and like his doesn't exist, but all of those actors that are gonna be famous for that little action movie are gonna show up in these trailers. I'll tell you one of the trailers: it's a exploitation movie starring Danny Trejo, where he's a hero and it's really cool."
Will Quentin cameo in your portion of Grind House?
Rodriguez: "He said if I have a part for him, he'd love to do it. Because he'd love to work with people, like he loved what he did on Dusk Till Dawn--something that's different from what he normally does. I'm gonna finish writing the script first, then I'll go and say, 'Hey let's see if any of these guys are for you.' I wrote the Danny Trejo part in 'Once Upon a Time in Mexico' for [Quentin] to play. He was gonna play the Mexican guy, that's why I came up with that line: 'Are you a Mexican or a Mexi-can't, so that he could say, I'm a Mexican. But he couldn't do it, he was doing Kill Bill, so Danny did it. But originally that was for Quentin. He could have a Fu Manchu and everything."