Take two maverick filmmakers, the desire to pay homage to old grindhouse movies, and add dozens of actors who would almost pay to be a part of something daring and you've got Grindhouse, the brainchild of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez.
How did you two decide to work together on Grindhouse? How did you become friends?
Quentin Tarantino: “Well, it’s actually funny. Somebody was asking us, ‘Why are you guys such good friends? Is it because you’re both filmmakers? Is it because you both came up at the same time together?’ And well, yeah, naturally. However, having said that, if we had never made a movie in our lives and we just met each we would be these friends. If I worked at Video Archives and Robert was a customer we’d be great buddies. If we had met each other in elementary school – I wish I knew a guy like Robert in elementary school - we’d be buddies too, so the fact that we’re both artists and we both respect each other’s art form, that’s amazing. I’ve always dreamed about the community of artists kind of thing and it’s actually just that we like each other.”
When you have story meetings, who gets to talk first?
Robert Rodriguez: “Well, whoever has the ideas, usually. And if he was talking, I was typing because I didn’t want to lose a moment of it because I know that those ideas come and they go very quickly.”
Robert, how did you get into the grindhouse stuff?
Robert Rodriguez: “Well, he’s been collecting prints forever and he’s been educating me in grindhouse cinema over the past 12 years by showing me all these double features and triple features over at his house, either stuff that he’s already seen back in the theatre when he was growing up or stuff that he’s discovered and turned me onto. I didn’t think about doing anything with it because I’m kind of slow (laughing). The only reason like three years ago I started thinking, ‘Wow, it would be cool to do a double feature,’ because I just finished a 3D feature and I was trying to think of something else to bring people to theatres for a theatrical experience. I went crazy for that idea for a few months but then got sidetracked and did Sin City.
When I went to show him my cut of Sin City, I went to his house and laying on the floor with a bunch of other junk was a double bill poster for Rock All Night and Drag Strip Girl which was the same one I had at my house also on the floor. I was using that as inspiration for my double feature – just the layout of it. I said, ‘I got that same poster and it’s on my floor.’ This underlined how similar we were, but then I thought, ‘You know what? I had this crazy idea. I was going to do two short features but you do one and I’ll do one.’ He said, ‘I love double features! I love double features! We gotta call it Grindhouse.’ And I was like, ‘All right.’ (Laughing) And then later he came up with the idea of the fake trailers. That’s what he does at his screenings. When he shows a movie at his house there are trailers in between, so it wouldn’t be a complete experience without trailers.”
Quentin Tarantino: “And I choose them and I’m like a mix master. I decide the order that they go in. Either they’re related to the genres of the two double features I’m showing or the people in it, or maybe somebody in the audience or an homage to hammer horror.”
Why did you decide to show the Machete trailer in front of the movie and not with all the others in the middle?
Robert Rodriguez: “I'd always done it that way since that was my trailer. I wanted to start the movie experience with a trailer because, and you didn't get to see it this way, if you're watching it in a regular theater, you're going to see all the sanitized MPAA regular trailers, and suddenly our movie will start. There's only one chance you have to pull that gag where suddenly the Machete trailer will come on and there's nudity and there's extreme violence. You're like, 'Wait, what?' That's how trailers used to play. They used to play with all that stuff in them. The trailers in the '70s were like that. That immediately propels you into our world and then you go into the movie.”
Like the Autopsy trailer.
Quentin Tarantino: “Yeah, that trailer is… Can you believe that they could get away with stuff like that in trailers? I couldn't believe it. I'm friends with Rick Linklater - we both are - and when he was doing Bad News Bears, he goes, 'Hey, why don't you bring some movies over and we'll show it to the Bears? It'll be a really fun weekend.' So I brought some cool Jerry Lewis movies and I put together some trailers. I put on the trailer to the original Bad News Bears. There was stuff in that trailer that Rick couldn't put in his movie.”
Did the studio pressure you to split the movies up?
Quentin Tarantino: “There was talk.”
Robert Rodriguez: “There was talk about it when we were originally supposed to make a December date. Then we were like, 'There's no way in hell we're going to make December.' Then when they moved it to April, that talk kind of went away. We knew in some international territories they were like, 'We don't even know what a double feature is. We want the movies separate.' So we thought, ‘Well, let's keep it… It's an American experience to have a double feature. Let's keep it here in the English speaking foreign countries, and then in some countries where they just want it separate, we'll do that.’ But here it was important to keep it together.”
Page 2: Tarantino and Rodriguez on Strong Female Characters and the Possibility of More Grindhouse Movies
