Sex, violence, murder, and intrigue: Prepare for maximum splatter in April when directors Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez release Grindhouse, their take on low-budget '70s exploitation films. The movie is actually two pulpy, hardcore features bolted together with a handful of fake trailers; it celebrates the golden age of B-minus movies — flicks like I Spit on Your Corpse!, The Last House on the Left, and Cannibal Holocaust — which usually played on a late-night double bill at the kind of theater Dad warned you to steer clear of.
The Rodriguez episode, Planet Terror, boasts a brain-melting virus and a hot chick with a machine gun leg. Tarantino offers up Death Proof, a slasher flick starring Kurt Russell as a muscle-car-driving murderer. Rodriguez, known for Sin City and the Spy Kids series, sat down with Wired at his production studio in Austin, Texas, to talk about bringing back grindhouse — and taking on Hollywood.
Wired: How did you and Tarantino dream up Grindhouse? Rodriguez: I would go to Quentin's house, and he'd screen several old trailers from the '70s, like Vanishing Point, Rolling Thunder, some sexploitation and zombie stuff. Then he'd play a feature — all scratched up with missing reels and things — then more trailers and then a second feature. It's a great experience to watch movies this way. I told Quentin, "We should do a double feature. I'll do one, and you do one." We came up with most of the movie right there.
Tarantino's film is about murders on a movie set — yours is a zombie flick? It's about a small town that gets taken over by a military chemical weapon. It started out as a zombie movie, but when I was reading the script to a doctor friend, he kept saying, "I know what that is. That's necrotizing fasciitis." So it's all based on realistic stuff. Different viral infections that make people psychotic. It feels very much like a John Carpenter movie.
How did you get the gritty, dirty grindhouse look shooting digital? We want the movie to look like it's been out on the circuit for a couple of years, all scratched and deteriorated, lots of wear and tear — basically, we're trying to fake a relic. We were able to do all of that digitally. It's almost a step backward, because we're using technology to emulate an old camera system. It's kind of like the early days of CDs, when everyone thought the sound was too clean — companies would add the effect of the record scratching, just to ease people in.
You tried to coax Tarantino, a film purist, into going digital. What was your argument? I told Quentin we could make a digital movie and have it look exactly like a film from the era. He said, "If you can do that, I'll be convinced." I took footage from Sin City and From Dusk Till Dawn, degraded it digitally, and mixed it with some music. I wanted it to look like a living graphic novel. I showed him the results, and he was blown away. He said, "All right. You win."
But he ultimately shot his movie analog. He has his own style. But he is adapting. He picked up on digital techniques right away. For instance, he knows he can ask the tech guys to previsualize car crashes, which means he can choose angles and things like that in advance. I think he's starting to see how valuable it is to have all this stuff at your disposal.
What about the rest of Hollywood? The people shooting digital aren't from Hollywood. People from my crew here in Austin go back to LA, and they're like, "Get me out of here." Everyone in Hollywood just wants to do their one little job. Here, everyone wants to discover how much creativity they really have. They want to juggle and handle more. They don't want to simply turn one light switch on and off.
Robert La Franco (robertlafranco@mac.com) wrote about the band Dir en grey in issue 14.08.
credit: Brent Humphreys
