For years, one of the biggest gets in Hollywood was the movie rights to the graphic novel series Sin City. Penned from 1991 to 2000 by Frank Miller, whose The Dark Knight Returns resurrected the Batman franchise, Sin City was emblematic of a new generation of comics that replaced the candy-colored superhero with an angst-ridden antihero. Sin City’s hardnosed dialog, cinematic compositions, and kinetic violence evoked classic Warner Bros. crime films more than Marvel’s men in tights. Handsome movie offers followed, but Miller didn’t bite. He’d been burned by the studio system before: In 1990, he lost control of his script for RoboCop 2 and was less than pleased with the onscreen result. He told friends that it just wasn’t possible to make a live-action version of Sin City.
That all changed in January of last year, when Miller got a call from Robert Rodriguez. A young director known for innovative, inexpensive genre pictures like Desperado and highly technical box office darlings like Spy Kids, Rodriguez made Miller a simple offer: Come to Texas and shoot with me for a day. If you like what you see, we’ll make a deal. If not, the short film is yours to keep. Miller accepted and flew to Rodriguez’s digital back lot outside of Austin. Inside a massive soundstage outfitted with a 30-foot-tall green screen and the latest Sony hi-def cameras, Miller watched as actors Josh Hartnett and Marley Shelton performed a scene lifted straight from "The Customer Is Always Right," a decade-old short story in the Sin City series. After the shoot, Rodriguez cut the footage in his editing bay, laid down a few special effects, and added music - all that same day. Miller was floored. "A test? Come on! You don’t put Josh Hartnett in a test," he says. "I just dove in." They sealed the deal, with Miller named as codirector. That three-minute short became the opening scene of the movie Sin City, set to hit theaters April 1.
Of course, that’s not how the standard Hollywood pitch goes down. Then again, nothing about Rodriguez, 36, is conventional. To finance his first feature, El Mariachi, the director took a gig as a human lab rat. For more than a month, a local research hospital paid him to ingest an experimental cholesterol drug. With the proceeds, he produced the film, which he wrote, directed, edited, photographed, and scored for a mere $7,000. Originally intended for the Spanish straight-to-video market, the movie was picked up for distribution by Columbia Pictures in 1992 and went on to win the Audience Award at the 1993 Sundance Film Festival; at the time, it was the lowest-budget film ever released by a major studio. Even after Rodriguez got backing from Columbia for his next projects, he didn’t go by the book. When studio execs wanted to bring in an outside editor to work on Desperado, his follow-up to Mariachi starring Antonio Banderas, Rodriguez demanded to do it himself - and won. While making From Dusk Till Dawn, he insisted on using a nonunion crew. Naturally, he christened one of his sons Rebel and named his studio Troublemaker.
Rodriguez couldn’t be a troublemaker, let alone a rebel, if he weren’t equipped with an arsenal of digital filmmaking tools and the know-how to use them. With his own Sony HD cameras, a Discreet visual effects system, four Avid digital editing machines, and XSI animation modeling software, Rodriguez can make truly independent films - and for less money than traditional Hollywood directors. "It’s like going back to the old video days," Rodriguez says, "when you could run around in your backyard and shoot a movie." His stubborn independence and technical savvy call to mind a young George Lucas, who left Hollywood for Northern California 25 years ago after a squabble over the opening credits in The Empire Strikes Back. In fact, Rodriguez is the first filmmaker since Lucas who’s had the confidence and skills to work outside the studio system yet still produce big-budget, effects-laden pictures.
That kind of freedom doesn’t come without consequences. A week before Sin City began shooting, the Directors Guild of America called to inform Rodriguez that he and Miller couldn’t be listed as codirectors in the movie’s credits. It would be a violation of DGA rules. (This reg doesn’t apply to the Wachowski or Hughes brothers, who are granted DGA waivers for being "bona fide teams.") Rodriguez was stunned when the DGA threatened to shut down production. Rather than dump Miller, Rodriguez resigned from the guild. "Down here in Texas, it’s like those rules don’t apply," he says. "So if I leave, I can do anything I want and don’t have to worry about someone coming up behind me who’s still in the dinosaur age, saying, Hey, you can’t do that; you can’t make movies like that."
Rodriguez felt the sting of that decision almost immediately. By turning his back on the establishment, he lost a lucrative deal. Paramount Pictures had slated Rodriguez to helm the $100 million sci-fi epic A Princess of Mars, the first book in a series by Edgar Rice Burroughs, which Tinseltown thinks could be the next megafranchise. But as a DGA signatory, Paramount can’t hire a nonunion director. Execs gave the film to guild director Kerry Conran (Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow). The whole drama played out in the pages of Variety. But by then, Rodriguez had already proved that he didn’t need studio muscle: By showing private screenings of his three-minute test, he assembled an A-list cast for Sin City - including Bruce Willis, Clive Owen, and Benicio Del Toro.
For Rodriguez, the breakout film was Spy Kids, a 2001 movie that grossed more than $110 million at the domestic box office and earned him the confidence and cash to set up shop in Texas. He rented two soundstages and converted his garage into a post-production suite with 10 monitors, editing equipment, and a storyboard machine. Spy Kids 2: Island of Lost Dreams was shot entirely with hi-def digital cameras and edited at Troublemaker. The title credits for Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over begin with this: "A Robert Rodriguez Digital File." The revolution was in full swing.
"Having finished the Spy Kids series," Rodriguez says, "I was looking for a good effects challenge." That’s what led him to Miller’s Sin City. The series takes readers on an eye-popping tour of an underworld packed with tough cops, femme fatales, and seedy lowlifes. "The stories were great," he says, "but what grabbed you was the look." Miller’s black-and-white chiaroscuro style reflects an artist raised on pulp fiction and old crime movies. Every scene takes place at night or in some back alley.
Frank Miller’s noir makes Raymond Chandler look almost Techni-color. There are absolutely no midtones in the graphic novels, a trait that makes them especially problematic to portray on celluloid. "This movie wouldn’t even be possible if I shot it on film," Rodriguez says, explaining how difficult it is to capture pure black and white on camera. His workaround: Shoot the actors against a green screen and add most of the backgrounds digitally in postproduction ("All of the guns and cars are real," Miller points out). Even small details like Sin City’s signature "white blood" proved to be an effects challenge. Regular movie blood didn’t cut it. Instead, the crew used fluorescent red liquid and hit it with a black light. This allowed Rodriguez to turn the blood "white" in postproduction. Likewise, the novel’s few splashes of color proved troublesome. Yellow and green react with green screens, causing color to spill into the background and making them impossible to separate. So during shooting Rodriguez painted the villain, Yellow Bastard, blue - and then colored him yellow in post.
As Rodriguez refines the tools of digital filmmaking - and the liberty that comes with them - others are slow to follow. Hollywood purists tend to dismiss the geeks in the business as more interested in technology than storytelling. To dispel that notion, Rodriguez persuaded his pal Quentin Tarantino to direct a scene in the movie. Tarantino is the poster boy for analog: He collects rare 35-mm prints and doesn’t even use monitors on set while directing. He had just come off shooting Kill Bill, where he did take after take, perfecting each scene, but ballooning the movie’s budget and production schedule in the process. For Sin City, Tarantino filmed a self-contained segment at Troublemaker and learned that high tech means low stress. Rodriguez explains: "Quentin did a scene where the actors are in a car and it’s raining. Instead of worrying about all that stuff, the car and the rain were added later, and he could just get the performance." Tarantino conceded, telling Rodriguez, "Mission accomplished. I’m glad you brought me down here." Tarantino now says he’ll shoot his own digital feature.
Alone in his Austin garage, Rodriguez puts the finishing touches on his next feature, The Adventures of Shark Boy and Lava Girl. Due out in June, it’s a 3-D live-action movie about a young outcast who makes fantastical stories come true. Sounds a lot like Rodriguez’s life.
Contributing editor Brian Ashcraft (brian_ashcraft@hotmail.com) wrote about humanoid robots in issue 12.07. 
credit Retna
Robert Rodriguez
credit Dimension Films
Sin City author Frank Miller makes a cameo as a man of the cloth.
credit Dimension Films
Assassin Miho (played by Devon Aoki) kills time in the final composited shot.
credit Dimension Films
Assassin Miho (played by Devon Aoki) gets into the swing in Millerés storyboard sketch.
credit Dimension Films
Bruce Willis and Jessica Alba
credit Dimension Films
Miller’s original sketch
credit Dimension Films
A frame from the graphic novel
