This first Sin City DVD edition is bare-bones, with little by way of extras, but there will be a fully-tricked out second DVD set out by the end of the year?
Robert Rodriguez: “Usually I just put out one. This one, they’re already putting out and it’s just bare-bones. I have not put anything extra on that, because I didn’t have time to finish my DVD extras. They put that one out four months [after the theatrical release], because of piracy and stuff like that. So I was like ‘Make sure you don’t put anything on there, so that they know, well, this isn’t the real DVD.’ The real DVD should come out fairly quick–the double disc with all the goodies on there.”
You’ve said before you planned all along to create a DVD edition where each storyline could be viewed completely on its own.
Robert Rodriguez: “When I was doing Sin City, you’re just very aware that, OK, there’s a theatrical release, which is pretty much a one-shot: people go and see it at the theatre for a couple weeks and they kind of forget about that. And then whatever comes out later is a more definitive version. So I told Frank [Miller], let’s just do three stories–and I know it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense–but we’ll cram three stories together. We’ll shoot the full books, but in editing, I’ll just figure out what stuff we need to cut out to make it flow as a feature, for the theatrical release, so people can sit there and in under two hours see sort of a resemblance of what the movie is. But when it goes to DVD, we’ll do a special edition where a second disc can have the stories separated out in their full cuts, so that you can see it the way you would read it in the books. Just watch ‘That Yellow Bastard,’ and we see his full cut, or see ‘The Big Fat Kill.’ That’s the way you’re supposed to read the books, you know. Not read three in a row really quick [laughs], so that’s gonna be cool. So I thought about that, so we shot the full books–and all the voiceover–knowing that we could put it together as single episodes. And if eventually we did part two and part three, we’d end up having a disc that had all the stories separated. You can put them in any order you want, watch them any way you want.”
What other kinds of bells and whistles will the upcoming DVD offer?
Robert Rodriguez: “We had everything, we had all kinds of stuff: it’ll have a ’20-minute Film School,’ new ‘Cooking School, where you learn to make fish tacos. It’ll have my favorite feature: when people watch DVDs, they say “Oh, the only thing about home entertainment is just that you lose that audience experience.’ Well, the best audience is in Austin–especially for a movie that was made there–because we showed the premieres with the actors there in a 1,500 seat theatre. The audience would go crazy, and Sin City got a big reaction. I recorded the audience in [Dolby] 5.1, so watch the DVD: you want to see it with an Austin audience on premiere night, they’re all there going, ‘Ugh!’ ‘Ah!’ So it’s really cool. Then Quentin [Tarantino]–when he directed his sequence, we sort of just let the tape roll when we were shooting, and so there’s some like 20-minute uninterrupted takes, where we see him going in front of the camera, and talking about the actors, directing, and you hear the whole sounds of the set. It’s like you’re sitting right there on the set, seeing a movie being shot from the point of view of the camera that’s shooting the movie, uninterrupted. And it’s really cool–you feel like you’re right there, and you get to see what it’s like to work with Quentin and the actors, and how we actually get it made.”
Is Quentin going to do a commentary for the upcoming version?
Rodriguez: “He’ll do the commentary for his section, yeah.”
Sin City did enormously well commercially and creatively. Do you think the film, being taken from a comic book, benefited from the current boom of comic book-inspired films?
Rodriguez: “I don’t know. I don’t know if it would even be discovered the first time around. I thought it might just be something that was discovered later on DVD. You don’t know how people will react to black and white, or anything. I just knew it was gonna be something really different. People might not notice it right away, but later they might find it pretty cool. So it was surprising people found it right off. I don’t know why they did.”
The film features a terrific blending of actors’ performances and the stunning visual look Frank Miller’s artwork inspired. Was it difficult to achieve that balance, when the actors are primarily looking at green screens?
Rodriguez: “You pretty much set the stage. It’s all new for a lot of people who came in not knowing what the exact film is. It’s just like theatre: ‘You’re gonna be on a very blank stage, there’s props, and the rest is imagined.’ So they’re like, ‘Oh, OK–I can relate to that.’ So it became easier, you know, for us to get the performances, because that’s all you were concentrating on. The visuals I had already done tests for, and I already knew we could make that look good, so doing the effects and the photography–I’ll take care of that. So they don’t have to worry about that. We’re just getting the performance. And all that other stuff, I do later. And I’ve already done enough tests to know that it was gonna work fine… I mean, if people think ‘How did they do a scene like when there’s no car and they’ve just got a steering wheel? Isn’t that weird?’ Well, they’ve all driven a car before, and even when you’re shooting a regular movie, they’re not driving there either. The car’s always towed, and there’s lights all around, and it’s a partial car. So they always have to act that stuff, this is just taking another step. They get into it right away. They’re actors, so they can pretend.”
Were any of the actors surprised with the final on-screen results?
Rodriguez: “Oh, they all were! When they all saw it, they were like “Wow, when did all that happen? When were we there?’ We shot it so fast, they could hardly even remember doing it. Benicio [Del Toro] was there for four days, Brittany [Murphy] was there one day. Jamie King was there a day and a half. Bruce [Willis] was there ten days. It was very quick.”
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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.”
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Franchise Fun
When are you going to get around to doing a proper special edition for Spy Kids?
Rodriguez: “Oh, we’re doing that right now. I think that comes out at Christmas. Yeah. I did a commentary for it, and shot a whole bunch of new interviews with the kids and stuff, the actors. I got all the deleted scenes that never made it in the special edition.”
Have we seen the end of that franchise?
Rodriguez: “We might do an animated straight-to-DVD thing. But that would be it. Couldn’t do the live action thing: the kids are too big.”
Any plans for another film in the El Mariachi/Desperado/Once Upon a Time in Mexico series?
Rodriguez: “No. I might, if they come in and say ‘Hey, we want another one! Man with No Eyes!’ I thought about doing a PSP game, to follow that character. That would be cool: ‘Once Upon a Time in Mexico: The Video Game,’ where kids can be the Man with No Eyes, you know? Blind fighter.”
You’ve got so many plates spinning. What drives you to work so hard?
Rodriguez: “I know, I’m on vacation, and we’re here writing [laughs]. And it was like, ‘I think I skipped the vacation part.’ I kept talking about, ‘Oh, when all these movies are done, I’m gonna have the whole summer off.’ Somehow we’re still working. We didn’t really go anywhere for vacation. It’s like making films doesn’t feel like work, really. It’s very life-giving to me, to be creative all the time. And when you have that many projects, you’re forced to be creative, you’re forced to stay alive, so in a way it’s a downer when it all goes away, because you’re just like, ‘Now what do I do? Watch TV? I’ve gotta get another project going [laughs]! My life support’s going out.'”
