The Man Who Shot Sin City explains how Robert Rodriguez earned Frank Miller’s trust:
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.
Rodriguez uses new technology to work outside the system — not unlike Lucas:
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.”
The directors’ guild wouldn’t let Rodriguez list Miller as his co-director:
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.”
I’ve been waiting to see Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars on the big screen for a long, long time:
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).
Filming a graphic novel can be a technical challenge:
“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.