Grindhouse - Planet Terror (2007)
Interview with Robert Rodriguez
Robert Rodriguez
Rose McGowan and Robert Rodriguez attended the 60th Edition of the Locarno Filmfestival with their new movie Planet Terror. Their movie was programmed for the Piazza Grande and the two stars were two of the most famous people in the southern part of Switzerland during that time. OutNow.CH got the chance to interview them together with two other movie-websites from the French-speaking part of Switzerland in a round table interview in the garden of a five-star villa.
» Das Interview in deutscher Sprache
OutNow.CH (ON): How close did you and Quentin Tarantino work together for the Grindhouse movies?
"I'll kill'em all!"
Robert Rodriguez (RR): I came up with the idea to make a double feature eight month before I got the idea to do Sin City. I had it in my head for a while to do two short films, like, 60 minutes each, cut really tight and all the dumb stuff cut out, only the good stuff left. But I was in to direct both of them. And then I did Sin City instead. I had three short stories in it, so then I thought I kind of already did that. But I wanted to do a Double Feature. When I went to Quentin's house he had a poster of a Double Feature and I told him that I had an idea for that, but he should do one and I'll do the other. And he said: "We have to call it ‘Grindhouse', I love Double Features. Grindhouse like the movies in the 70ies, they are all scratched up." Then I got excited about that, because I shoot digital, which is very clean and I always wanted to show people, who think that it is too clean, how you can make it look like crap. (laughs) I remembered that I wrote a script ten years ago, Planet Terror, that I always liked, but I only wrote the first 30 pages of it. I knew zombie movies are going to come back in a big way, so I tried to write one fast, before all the other zombie movies come out. But I couldn't finish it. That was in 1997. I couldn't neither figure out why they are zombies nor find an end of the story. So I gave up and sure enough, like, four years later zombie movies started coming back. In this way I thought I can still do by a zombie movie and because of that I didn't do some other things I had in mind. Then we worked on the project and Quentin Tarantino told me his story. I said he had to call it Death Proof that says a lot about it. He came up with the fake trailers-idea. I had the story I've written for Danny Trejo back in 1993 called Machete, so I said, "That's my trailer!" Then we read each other's scripts and then he came to my set for some filming, because he was doing some camera work to practice for his, he was going to film Death Proof himself. In return he had me edit the last scene, which he had shot in Rodriguez style, where the girls beat up Kurt Russell. He just got a bunch of shots, really fast, because the sun was going down. Quentin said: "I give it over to Rodriguez to edit, that's the kind of stuff he does." So I finished Death Proof for him. I also did a little bit of music for him. Rather than that, we pretty much just made our own movies. We got so busy. There was even a point, where he came to the set, one night two o'clock in the morning. He wanted to know how I was doing. He looked over the actors and he asked, "Is that Bruce Willis?" and Bruce was in costume. And I said: "Yeah, I just hired him, he's the bad guy in my movie, didn't I tell you?" He was like: "No, you didn't! I haven't see Bruce since Pulp Fiction!" Then they started talking. He didn't even know who was in my movie, because we were doing things so separate. Even though we were in the same town, we didn't always know what the other person was doing. We were really involved at the beginning and then I didn't want to see anymore of his. I never wanted to visit his set, because I wanted to be surprised like the audience, later when he was done. I tried to stay away from his as long as I could.
ON: Where did you get that sadistic idea of Cherry's machine gun leg?
El Roberto
RR: That was one of the ideas I had in my old script with the thirty pages. She wasn't a dancer then, so I came up with better ideas later. I just had a girl the guy meets in a diner, he gives her a ride, then right away they crash and she gets her leg taken. I wanted her still be alive. But I thought: a beautiful girl with her leg gone, what is he going to do? Maybe he puts a stick on her leg, so that she can walk. The machine gun idea came much later, after I met Rose McGowan, after I started writing the script again. Mainly it was because I needed something for the trailers and the posters, that'd be iconic. Because those movies of the 70ies always had a strong image and a good trailer to sell the movie. I was in traffic, trying to think. So I thought of the Machete Trailer and it got nothing but trailer moments! You can see him opening his coat with the knives, the girls, the jumping and all those other "sellable" moments, where people get the desire to see this movie, but I didn't know how the trailer for my movie, Planet Terror would be. People have seen zombies and tough guys as well, so that wasn't enough. I had to focus on Cherry's leg and show the piece of wood, which replaces it, but that didn't even make me feel sorry for her. And then I pictured her shooting with three guns at the same time, two guns in her hands and I got this idea with the machine gun leg as the third gun. And I thought none has ever seen that before. And she got a grenade launcher and she flies... all the ideas came very quickly. Then I suddenly knew how to finish the script. I said it's going to be about her, being very weak and a dancer, not knowing who she is supposed to be and learning that she is supposed to save mankind and lead them to the promise ground.
ON: How did you choose, which movie comes first for the double feature?
RR: We always thought, my would go first, just kind of alphabetical order. The movies are so different in tone, it might be good to start with something fast, and so the audience is ready to watch another one. So we went with mine first, that was always sort of the plan. We didn't talk about it that much.
ON: There's a big discussion about the separation of the two movies in Europe instead of showing the whole one like in the States. What do you think about it?
RR: Some people doubt it because it wasn't as successful in the States as people thought. There are a lot of movies in the States, which are just way to long. One movie is like almost three hours. And when people see the trailer, it says: "Two full feature films". They probably think it's about six hours long! But before we made the movies, we went to foreign distributors. And it seemed that a lot of them did not understand this American tradition of the 70ies, to project two movies together, which took place only in the major cities. They wanted the two movies separated. Okay, if you want to pay twice for the same movie, that's fine! (laughs) So we knew before, that all the not English-speaking countries don't want our films together. The advantage of it was that we could keep all our good stuff we had to cut out in the States.
ON: All the zombie movies are becoming more realistic; there are a lot of uses of a virus, like in your movie and in 28 Days Later ... Do you think that it was obvious to become like that or is it due to our time, which needs more scientific justification?
"What's up?"
RR: I think that there was a film of Romero called The Crazies and some older Italian zombie movies as well, which already used this subject. I remember this Italian film called City of the Dead which is very much the Planet Terror-type. The director of this movie used to say that they are infected people, not zombies. (laughs) So that was always a sub-genre of the zombie movies: There was another explanation for the zombies, they weren't just dead people returning to life. Technically they are not zombie movies, but you still call them so. Our name for them in my movie was "The Sickos" because they all are infected and sick by something they brought back from the Iraq war.
ON: Which reasons do you have to refer to old films?
RR: Those are the movies that inspired me when I was growing up and made me want to be a filmmaker. All the movies I saw in the late 70ies, early 80ies: Fantasy, Horror, and Science Fiction. I like making fantastic and fantasy movies. People are always wondering why I'm making such weird different stuff: Sin City for adults and Spy Kids for kids. But there are all fantasies, all from an unrealistic world, none of them are straight dramas. Because I live in my own dream world and I want to show it to other people. My only goal in that is - when I refer to older films - to pay homage to things that I really liked as a kid and thinking the audiences will find at new, because they never saw those movies. I thought that there were a lot of great ideas in these films that will make people look at movies in a different way.
ON: Can I do some pop-ups with you? I give you some words and you give me your first thought back.
RR: Ok.
ON: Salma Hayek
RR: The biggest Mexican movie actress of all time
ON: Machete
RR: It's Danny Trejo! When he calls me on my iphone, I see the poster of El Machete with his head. And I think: "Oh! Damn, Danny's calling me!" Danny and Machete is the same thing. In Spy Kids, his character was Machete.
ON: Tarantino
RR: Loyal
ON: Switzerland
RR: It's my first time here... so far it's awesome!
ON: Are you attending the movie on the Piazza Grande?
RR: Oh yeah, that's why I came, when they showed me the festival and a picture with all the little heads. I thought, "That thing is huge, I've got to see that!" I'm very excited.
ON: Thank you very much for your time!
RR: You're welcome.
