Texas-born Robert Rodriguez
made his name as a low-budget wonder boy with his breakout movie EL MARIACHI,
the violent tale of a wandering musician/assassin that was made for $7,000,
funded by selling his body for medical experiments and which took the 1992
Sundance Film Festival by storm. In the 15 years since, Rodriguez has worked across
a variety of genres, inventing the Mex-Western with the loose EL MARIACHI
remake DESPARADO (1995), fusing horror, teen comedy and sci-fi in THE FACULTY (1998)
and creating a lucrative franchise with the SPY KIDS trilogy, in which two
suburban kids find out that their parents are actually internationally
respected secret agents.
During promotional duties for
EL MARIACHI, Rodriguez encountered a fellow filmmaker named Quentin Tarantino,
whose acclaimed debut RESEVOIR DOGS was touring the festival circuit at the
same time. The two struck up a friendship that has resulted in several
big-screen collaborations, including the four-tales-in-one portmanteau movie FOUR
ROOMS (1994), the vampire-gangster thriller FROM DUSK TILL DAWN (1996), which propelled
co-star George Clooney into the limelight, and more recently the US-only release
B-movie double bill GRINDHOUSE. Conceived as a homage to the trashy drive-in movies
of the 1970s and early 1980s – complete with scratchy prints, trailers and missing
reels – GRINDHOUSE comprised two films for the price of one: Quentin
Tarantino’s DEATH PROOF and ROBERT RODRIGUEZ’ Planet Terror. In PLANET TERROR,
released internationally in its own right, is an affectionate, action-packed
and very gory tribute to the films of John Carpenter, taking place in a small,
isolated town where the residents are suddenly infected with a mysterious virus
that turns them into ravenous zombies. Faced with such a terrible threat, the
local sheriff has no choice but to trust the mysterious loner El Wray (Freddy
Rodriguez), who’s gutsy girlfriend Cherry Darling (Rose MacGowan) joins him in
the fight back after losing her leg to the carnivorous creatures.
Q: When did you first get the idea for PLANET TERROR?
It was ten years ago, it was,
like, 1997 or 1998. I was talking to the cast of THE FACULTY. I said, ‘I’m
writing a zombie movie.’ They went, ‘Oh wow!’ Cos I knew zombie movies were
gonna come back in a big way – there hadn’t been one in about 15 years or more,
and slasher films had run their course, so I figured Hollywood would be looking
for something new. I said, ‘Betcha it’s gonna be zombies. Not for a few years
at least, but we should do it now. Let’s do the first one.’ They were like,
‘Zombie movies!!!’ Everyone was so excited about doing a zombie movie.
So what happened?
I wrote the first 30 pages and
I loved it. Loved it. Cos it was all the tease, leading up to the zombies –
there’s something wrong in this city, people are dying but nobody knows what it
is. People are showing up with weird bites, and then a girl loses her leg… But once
the characters got to the hospital I didn’t know what to do next! I was like,
‘Now
I’ve got to start explaining
why there are zombies…’ I always hated that part of the movie and I always blew
it, cos there was never a good explanation as to why people would suddenly come
back from the dead and start eating people. So I put it away and got into other
things, like SPY KIDS and other stuff, instead. And then, sure enough, about four
or five years later, zombie movies came back in a big way, there were a bunch
of those, so the idea was pretty dead.
Why did you revive it?
I’d gotten this idea, just before
SIN CITY, to do two short features, like, 60 minutes in length, as a double
feature, which I was gonna direct myself. I said to Quentin, ‘You should direct
one, I’ll direct the other,’ and he said, ‘Oh, let’s call it Grindhouse and make
them like those old movies from the 70s and early 80s. But if we do it, we
could do kung fu or action, but I think horror would be the best way to go.’ So
I thought, ‘Well, hey, the best thing I’ve got is this zombie movie script, if
you wanna just get started right away you can finish writing it, I never
finished it.’ And Quentin goes, ‘Oh, I love zombie movies – yeah, yeah, send it
to me, I’ll read it.’ But before I could even give it to him, the next day he
already had DEATH PROOF in mind. So I went back to the zombie script, and as I
wrote it, I started really getting back into it.
So GRINDHOUSE was the motivation you needed?
It helped a lot that we came up
with GRINDHOUSE and the idea to make a film based on these exploitation movies.
Because a lot of what they would do is take something very topical and exploit
it. So if Roger Corman had been making movies when the Iraqi war was on then,
he’d be using that in a second. Like, ‘Oh, some biochemical weapon has been
brought back to the States…’ So then they turn into zombies, or these infected people
with multiple viral infections, all happening very quickly, that turn into
these
colliform lesions that are just
protruding off their bodies. I tried to find real medical reasons for
everything and authenticate it. That’s how I was going to explain it.
Did that solve everything?
No, I still needed to figure
out what my central marketing was. Because these movies all had great posters
and great trailers. I’d just written the MACHETE trailer, which was great: I had
Danny Trejo opening his jacket, full of machetes, and with a machine gun on his
motorcycle, jumping, then in some water with two girls. Every shot was a money
shot and possible poster image. I thought, ‘What would my poster for PLANET
TERROR be? It can’t just be zombies, everybody’s seen that. We have some cool
tough guys in the movie but everyone’s seen that too…’
So what did you do?
I thought, ‘The only person I
really have that I can capitalise on Cherry, the girl with the stump.’ I think
at that time I had a scene where El Wray puts a stick in her leg, and I thought,
‘Man, that’s gonna just look pathetic on a poster.’ So I kept thinking,
‘There’s gotta be something, I need something. I’ve gotta start thinking less
about the movie and more about the trailer, and then I’ll be able to finish the
movie.’ I was stuck in traffic and then it popped into my head: ‘My God, she
has a machine gun for a leg!!!’ Awesome!
She’d be like, Brrrrr!!!
Brrrr!!! Brrrr!!! Roundhouse! One gun pointed at one guy, another gun pointed
at another guy, and her leg twisted back, pointed at another guy’s face. She
could be the most badass person. And because it’s Grindhouse, it’s gonna be even
weirder, because it’ll be a real high-tech process – we’ll have to remove Rose’s
leg and add it with a computer – but it’ll look very, very low-tech, like it
was done back in the day.
Were you ever worried that someone might steal the idea?
No. I thought that even if
somebody did hear about the idea and made their own machinegun-leg movie, it
would be more sleek. Ours was gonna be really raw. That’s why I designed
Cherry’s costume to be a go-go dancer’s. You can see flesh and a bandage and a gun.
It looks so low budget it’s even more disturbing to see it on a beautiful girl.
It’s so inelegant, like it was fitted right there, on the spot. So that made me
suddenly know that the main character – cos I had a lot of characters – was
gonna be her. I made her a go-go dancer, figuring that it’d be more tragic if
she lost her leg. But then all those moves, her physicality, those things she
thought were just useless talents, suddenly make sense.
Planet Terror features characters with apparently useless talents that they
can put to good use in times of crisis…
Right. Y’know, there was a
movie that we were inspired by, that we kept referencing. I don’t think that
was the connection at all, but the movie we liked, which Dick Miller is in and
Roger Corman directed, is called ROCK ALL NIGHT. It’s hard to find. It’s about
65 minutes. I thought, ‘That’s the model – we should make our movies that
short.’ It feels like you saw a full feature, it’s tight. I thought we could do
a double feature like that easy, but our scripts got in the way. But in ROCK
ALL NIGHT Dick Miller plays a real asshole. He’s a total jerk, always getting
picked on, kicks back at people, insulting them.
Everybody’s like, ‘God, this
guy’s got a chip on his shoulder.’ Until there’s a hostage situation. Some
robbers come in, and suddenly him being an asshole is the only thing that saves
the day! Because he unnerves these guys so much, he’s the guy they need at the time
like that! That’s the one time you’d need somebody like that, this little,
bullying, smart mouth dickhead, is in that situation!
So was that the inspiration?
Not really. I got the useless
talent idea from Rose. Ever since I met her she’s always been talking about
things she can do, like, ‘Useless talent number 31…’ I thought that was fascinating.
I said, ‘I’m gonna put that idea in the script, but I’m gonna make sure
Cherry’s talents aren’t useless;
it’s just that she hasn’t figured out how to use them yet.’
She hasn’t got to that point
yet where you connect the dots and suddenly all those stupid things you learned
actually turn out to be for a purpose. There is a plan – a grand plan. A destiny
and a fate.
Did you go back and re-watch a lot of old movies to get into the
grindhouse spirit?
Nah, I didn’t really put in
direct references. I think in the new version you do see Freddy
Rodriguez step out of a car
with handcuffs on his wrists and feet. It was very much like
Snake Plissken in ESCAPE FROM
NEW
YORK. It’s a hint that they know he’s a badass. That’s
about it. I didn’t have to really go look at DAWN OF THE DEAD or any of the Carpenter
movies, cos I’d seen them so many times, I knew them like the back of my hand.
But I was going for that sort of vibe. I really thought that this was the kind
of movie John Carpenter would have made if he did a zombie movie. If he was a
good friend of George Romero and they’d teamed up, or something. In that year
between
ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK and The
Thing – y’know, that year he had off – what if he did this movie? Planet Terror
would be that movie. It has a lot of staples of his movies. It’s all set at night;
it’s got very brooding music and really cool, soft-spoken, hard-ass characters.
A lot of diverse characters…
Your score is very reminiscent of Carpenter’s…
I wrote the theme song before I
started writing the script, so it really didn’t sound at all like Carpenter.
That’s just the music that Cherry dances to, and it becomes her action theme by
the end. But I knew I wanted to have a Carpenter-type vibe, so I had to bridge the
gap. It ended up being a mix of things. There’s a real simplicity to
Carpenter’s music that makes it really effective. He doesn’t overwrite. He
keeps it very tonal, with very simple melodies that stick in your head. So I
used that approach, with similar sounds that he used, based on old analogue
equipment – except nowadays it’s on a computer programme. I went and looked up
all the equipment he used, I was gonna go and buy it all off E-Bay, and then I
found a computer programme that emulates completely all those sounds. So I
wrote the music on my laptop.
What’s the difference between the Grindhouse version of Planet Terror
and the standalone release?
Its small things. I had edited
the movie pretty tight because I knew I had to get it down to 84 minutes. I
needed to make mine even shorter than Quentin’s, no matter what. Its kinda why
my movie went first. I had so many characters, I could really chop the hell out
of it, so people didn’t feel so tired that they couldn’t wait for another
movie. I had to make it like an appetiser. So I cut it down as tight as I could
– and it was 98 minutes! I was like, ‘Fuck!!! Now what am I gonna cut – there’s
nothing left!!!’ So I did some gymnastics to get it to work, but I was amazed
that it did work and I really like the short version now because it just moves.
I love how fast it moves.
So there isn’t a reveal scene, where El Wray’s background is explained?
No, there never has been. I
didn’t know what his background was either, so I put that in the missing reel.
I thought, ‘I have to take real advantage of the missing reel’ because all the
questions that need answering get answered in that reel.’ So the movie doesn’t
have to make perfect sense. Exactly what is Bruce Willis’s character up to? I
don’t know, it was all explained in that reel. And it explained El Wray’s
background. But all you really need to know is that he must be someone really
badass, because he’s good at everything. Even the sheriff, who didn’t want him
to have a gun, says, ‘Give him that gun. Give him ALL the guns!’ (Laughs) Like
he’s Rambo times ten.
So the missing reel isn’t reinstated in the full PLANET TERROR?
No, I never shot it.
What are your thoughts on what happened with Grindhouse?
The Weinstein’s said, before
we’d even started shooting, ‘All our foreign distributors don’t want them
together. They want them separate. They don’t understand that whole American
grindhouse experience. A lot of Americans didn’t understand it either, as it turns
out! You almost had to educate them so much; it was almost like you had to go
to school before you could even go see the movie!
Why do you think they stayed away?
I think people just didn’t know
how long it was gonna be, because movies are just so long now. Like ZODIAC is
two hours 50, THE GOOD SHEPHERD’s two hours 50… All these things are just WAY
overlong. It’s like, God, give those guys some scissors! Save it for the DVD!
It makes audiences tired, so when they see a trailer that says, ‘TWO FULLLENGTH
FEATURE FILMS FOR THE PRICE OF ONE!!!’ people start thinking, ‘Man, how much of
my day is gonna go??? Have I got to sneak food in? I might be there for
six or seven hours! I mean, Quentin’s movies are always as fucking long as
shit! Jesus
Christ…’ They kinda did their
own math, I guess!
Will you making MACHETE into a movie? Danny Trejo can’t wait for you to
make it.
Oh, he says that all the time.
He calls me up every day and says, ‘I’m the best shape I’ve ever been in in my
life. People keep saying, “Where is the movie?” They want it. They want it,
bro!’
Are you actually going to do it?
Oh yeah. We have a script. It’s
not gonna be hard to make. There’s so many scenes that I wanna actually direct.
It’ll be a hoot…
PLANET TERROR is released on region two DVD on March 10th, 2008.