Robert Rodriguez: Rides into Sin City

He's got the cowboy hat and the western shirt. We've never seen him on a horse but independent filmmaker Robert Rodriguez dresses the part of his Tex-Mex heritage.. complete with Lone Star on the front of his hat!

When we chatted with the prolific young writer/director/film editor/composer, etc. recently in Beverly Hills, we got the low-down on his new risqué and innovative film Sin City, taken frame for frame from the popular Frank Miller graphic novels (some still call 'um comics) of the same name. The film is another of the CGI-created universes that place actors in a big green screen room with a few props and imagination and turn out a visually awesome world that even the actors in the movie never imagined! Such was Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow but even that film borrowed from the work that Rodriquez pioneered with his Spy Kids movies.

Tune in as this talented Latino cowboy gives us the latest from Sin City and his studio in Austin where he's turning out his next blockbuster.

TeenHollywood: Robert, you have three major stories in the film. How did you lace that together?

Robert: Very carefully. It's probably the hardest I've worked on a movie. I thought it was going to be easy - hey, just copy what's out of the book, and there you go. It is a lot of work. I think somewhere near the end I realized it's sort of a trilogy that all relates to the same day, so it was kind of like doing three movies at once.

TeenHollywood: There will be reaction to the violence in this film. I understand that it's in the books. What will you say to the people who will criticize you for the over-the-top violence?

Robert: That is it so over-the-top and stylized is in the book. That's what helped temper it. It was so black and white, so abstract, so representative that it's easier to watch than if it were realistically rendered. I think the tone of it has really changed it. I never got any flack for Desperado at a time when people would criticize guys like Quentin for cutting an ear off off camera. I was mowing down people in my movies and nobody said anything about the violence because of the tone. And I think that's the same thing for this.

TeenHollywood: So it's comic book violence.

Robert: Yeah. As violent as it is, it's like in the comic. It felt tempered by the stylization. That's why we didn't have any trouble with the MPAA or anything. They just said, 'this is R material. You don't have to cut it.

TeenHollywood: What about young people seeing the film?

Robert: Young people shouldn't see the film. It's an R-rated movie. I'm not making it for that audience. I make those kinds of movies, PG movies. Studios go and make PG-13 movies that are really R's. They just do that to get more audience in. I made this an R. I didn't try to trick people, It's a restricted movie. Now I can make the movie I want and not have to worry about it. If parents let their kids in, that's their decision. But that doesn't mean I'm gonna change how we make the movie. It's not about appealing to the mass audience. It's really about just making the movie we want to make and telling the story we want to do.

TeenHollywood: How do you choose what you want to direct?

Robert: It just depends on how it grabs you. It's got to be something that excites you. It's why I pursued Frank Miller just like a wild dog, trying to find him to do this movie, because once I got it into my head that it was possible, and I did a test and I saw what it was looking like, I knew I wouldn't get this excited about another project for a long time. I had to hunt him down and find him and convince him somehow that we're going to do this movie, because I could already see it. I just felt right. It feels that way for everything I do; the Spy Kids movies as well. I just felt it was a way to do something about my family in a way that was entertaining, by just making them spies. This is my family as spies, basically.

TeenHollywood: And your newest movie was inspired by your son?

Robert: Yeah, my seven-year-old. The Adventures of Shark Boy and Lavagirl. We were playing in the swimming pool and I'm playing shark, and he said, 'You're shark dad and I'm shark boy. Hey, let's make a movie about shark boy and I'll be the shark boy,' and I was like, 'Yeah, yeah, whatever.' So we were drawing it out and it became this movie, and I got real excited about that, again to work with my family on a movie for other families. So it's really the ideas. The ones that you don't get excited about fall away, and the ones that come forward, are the ones that get your blood pumping. Those are the ones that keep me up all night, and keep me working.

TeenHollywood: People talked about Sky Captain being innovative but weren't you shooting like that long before they were?

Robert: [smiling] They were kind of built at the same time. I had just done a bunch of movies on green screen. I'd done the Spy Kids movies, in fact even the props weren't there, because it was all simulated from the game, even though they said Spy Captain was the first movie done on green screen, I'd actually already had been doing that. When I did Sin City, I hadn't seen any materials on Sky Captain. I didn't really know they were doing a green screen movie with HD, I'd already been doing that for a while.

TeenHollywood: Can you talk about casting choices for Sin City? Wasn't Johnny Depp going to be in it for a while?

Robert: You never look back once you cast the person you end up with, because they just become that character, then you can never imagine your first ideas in the casting, for whatever reason they end up not doing the movie or decide it's not for them. You find the right person and they come walking in the room and you go 'oh god, I'm glad we held out for this person'. I'd just worked with Johnny Depp and thought of him for the part that Benicio played, and he was really into it, but this movie he was doing in Europe kept getting pushed and pushed, and it wasn't that critical. It wasn't one of the bigger roles and it wasn't being shot for a while, and I told him if he couldn't do it that was fine, but then I saw Benicio at the Academy Awards with his long Wolf Man hair, wearing his tuxedo, and I went, 'Oh my god, that is Jackie Boy right there.'

TeenHollywood: When did you decide on Mickey Rourke as the Marv character?

Robert: Him and Bruce Willis, these were people that I first thought of for the parts because I'd worked for them before and known them. Mickey I'd worked with on Once Upon A Time In Mexico and when I look at the book again, I told Frank, there's only one guy I know who could be Marv, and you're not going to get it from any of his other work. It's only cause I know him and what a tortured soul he is that I knew. He's fantastic in it.

TeenHollywood: Mickey wears some really heavy kinda scary make-up.

Robert: That's such an iconic look for that character. We tried to recreate the angles that Frank Miller would draw on an actual human and they first did Mickey, and it didn't quite look right, so I said, 'Hey, he's got a lot more character in his face than that.' He's supposed to be this monstrosity that couldn't even buy a woman to be with him. That's sort of the tragedy of the character. He's just always had a face like that so people assume he's a criminal, so he became a criminal.

TeenHollywood: And Clive Owen as Dwight?

Robert: I went and I looked at Clive's BMW commercials again, because that's the only things I know him from, but have always wanted to work with him from those. He just had a presence, a very mysterious presence. And he was terrific.

TeenHollywood: What about Frank Miller's future plans for the book series?

Robert: He has tons of stuff in mind. That was the great thing about having him there on the set is that he could tell us what the future adventures of Nancy were going to be, that she's studying criminology, that she's going to be a detective, that sort of thing. That's really great for the actors to know, because they don't just go off with the books, they see where these experiences of the characters are going to lead them. And they can help build a really well rounded character. Frank can't wait to go back. That's the main reason I didn't want to screw up the movie, because if you do a bad movie, you kill the comic as well, and he wouldn't be able to return to Sin City either. I didn't want to do that to him.

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Lynn Barker is a Hollywood-based entertainment journalist and produced screenwriter.