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When director Robert Rodriguez got the idea to bring Frank Miller's seemingly unfilmable comic book series "Sin City" to the big screen, he didn't just try and buy the rights and start shooting. Instead, he shot a scene with his friend Josh Hartnett using cutting edge digital effects and bold, black-and-white color schemes, and hoped that Miller would not only like it, but would come aboard the project as a partner.
Miller did like it. He liked it a lot. Soon Rodriguez, Miller, "special guest director" Quentin Tarantino, and a vast ensemble cast (Bruce Willis, Clive Owen, Rosario Dawson, Elijah Wood, Jessica Alba, and on and on) were putting together what has become, in effect, the most faithful translation from comic-book page to film ever attempted. MTV News' Larry Carroll spoke with Rodriguez about staying faithful to Miller's vision, battling the Hollywood powers that be, and the appeal of creating something utterly new.
MTV: You see a film like "Sin City," and you realize that movies are never going to be the same after something like this. But then your second thought is, "Why hasn't a movie ever been made like this before?"
Robert Rodriguez: Well, I've been working with digital filmmaking for a while, and learning about and doing my own special effects and my own photography in order to really push the envelope, to get further into visual story telling. And I looked at this graphic novel that I had been collecting for twelve years, Frank Miller's "Sin City." Its visual storytelling techniques were so beyond anything that anyone was trying in cinema that I didn't really want to insult it by making it into a movie. I said, "Let me take cinema and turn it into this graphic novel, because it's doing things that they don't have the guts to do in cinema." You know, using white silhouettes, and all these different ways of visualizing a story. And I thought, "Let's make a moving graphic novel, like Frank Miller's." And that's what this is.
So that's why, when you see it, it feels very organic because the story is as twisted as the imagery, and it kind of all goes together. You need both. The stories are great, but if you just shot them like a normal movie, you'd rob the audience of this other experience of seeing it.
MTV: I would think you'd save some dough on story boards, too.
Rodriguez: Well, a normal story board just kind of shows where the frame is, and what sort of action happens. Frank's graphic novels had such emotion in the characters that the actors really could see the whole life of their characters within these drawings. They could actually use [the drawings themselves] as a character study. They're just amazing books. And the characters are all fantastic. Larger than life women, with a lot of strength — Alexis Bledel, Rosario Dawson, Jessica Alba. I mean, the women in this movie kick butt. That's what's really cool, too.
MTV: Why was it so important for you to make sure that Frank got credit [as a co-director of the movie]. I mean, you went through a few different things here. You got him the director's credit. You went and shot a test scene with Josh Hartnett. Now, that's the same scene that we're watching when we see the film?
Rodriguez: Oh, yeah, the same scene. We shot it as a test, to see if it worked. It would be the opening to the movie if [Frank] liked it, and then we would make a deal and keep making the movie. And I just felt he should be there as a co-director, because I think he is a director. I mean, looking at those graphic novels — as far as visualizing and getting performances out of his paper characters, that's better work than most directors are doing in Hollywood. He was just using a pen instead of a camera.
And, you know, I used to be a cartoonist, and I do a lot of different jobs. So I told him, "You're gonna find this is just like drawing. You don't have to show up on set with a headdress and rattles to be a director. It's not that big a deal. You're already doing it in the comic world and you're gonna be a natural." And he was. He was in there directing actors, and figured it out very quick.
MTV: And then the Directors Guild showed up? Tried to shut you down?
Rodriguez: A week before shooting, yeah. It turned out that that [not having more than one director credited on a film] was actually one of their rules. And there are many rules in their big volume of bylaws. But there's one that says you can't have two directors. I had no idea. So they were going to shut down the movie if we continued that way, unless I resigned. So it was much better just to resign, because I was already thinking of bringing Quentin [Tarantino] on as a special quest director, and I know they wouldn't have let that fly. So it was better that I just leave, and I said, "Let's just make this movie that's different and not by the book." I mean, there are so many rules that were broken to make this movie, and that's sort of what's gonna make it unique and cool.
MTV: Even seeing the ads that announce, "Special Guest Director." That just jumps out at you.
Rodriguez: Yeah. You're like, "What is this? This sounds like something new." And this is what people really want, something new — conceived differently, made differently. When you watch the rest of the movies that come out this year, they're going to feel very much like the same thing over and over once you see "Sin City." It's gonna change how you perceive what visual storytelling is in cinema.
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Photo: Dimension Films
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