Casting “Sin City: “I remember originally, I had just worked with Johnny Depp so I thought about him for the part that Benicio [Del Toro] played. And he was really into it but this movie he was doing in Europe just 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 so I had time to find somebody. I told him if he couldn’t do it, that was fine. Then I saw Benicio at the Academy Awards with his long wolfman hair and wearing his tuxedo and I went, ‘Oh my God, that is Jackie Boy right there.’ So Johnny couldn’t do it and I told Benicio, ‘Hey, Johnny might not be able to do it because of his schedule. Would you be interested in doing it?’ And now when you look back, it’s like he was right. Things like that just happen. So you never think, ‘Oh, I wish I could have had this person or that person.’”
Benicio Del Toro as Jackie Boy: “It was interesting to watch his process. He worked on it with just the book. He got the makeup. He showed up on the set. We had three jacket choices for him because I knew that that was part of the skin of the character, is just putting on the costume. He wanted to look as much like the character as possible – everybody did because then they were playing a character and they could really cut loose. We did one test of him. We put on his jacket, the one that he liked, put him in front of the camera. This is a test on the green and right away, I got the footage and I’m going to put it on the DVD because he just goes, he walks out, he turns around and he was already in the character. I’m like, ‘Oh my God, that’s him!’ His eyes were doing this really spooky thing. Frank was getting creeped out. We hired Benicio but somehow we got Jackie Boy. I don’t know what happened. It’s the best thing in the world to see an actor transform within a day, because we shoot very fast.”
Mickey Rourke as Marv: “Oh, he was the first… Him and Bruce Willis, those were people – and Brittany – those are people I first thought of for the characters because I had worked with them before or known them. Mickey, I had worked with him in ‘Once Upon a Time in Mexico’ and when I looked at the book again I told Frank, ‘“There’s only one guy I know of who can be Marv and you’re not going to get it from any of his other work.’ I told him Mickey Rourke and he goes, ‘The guy from 9 ½ Weeks?’ ‘Sit down and meet this guy because you’re not going to get it from any of his work.’ It’s only because I know him and what a tortured soul he is that he was as close as we could get to Marv without hurting ourselves. He’s fantastic in it.”
Physically Transforming Mickey Rourke: “That’s such an iconic look for that character, is the angles Frank would draw. And we tried to recreate that on an actual human. I remember when they first did Mickey and it didn’t look quite right so I said, ‘Hey, it’s got a lot more character in his face than that. Look at my friend Danny Trejo’s face and model the creases after that.’ He’s actually got Danny Trejo’s lifelines all over his face, but with the angularity that Marv has. Part of it is that look. He’s supposed to be this monstrosity that couldn’t even buy a woman to be with him. That was the sort of tragedy of the character is that he just always had a face like that so people assume he’s a criminal, so he became a criminal.”
Clive Owen as Dwight: “Clive…I’m trying to remember who we thought to go to originally. It was really tough because Frank draws the character of Dwight with so much character in his face and you couldn’t go to like a really young actor that has that kind of weight and presence. And I remember that [he] had some vitality in him, I guess. I went and I looked at the BMW commercials again because that’s the only place I’d known him from. I’d always wanted to work with him from those. It just seemed…he just had a presence, a very mysterious presence. I showed Frank. I said, ‘I know it’s not a whole lot to show you but look at this. You can get a glimpse from this little tiny screen on my computer. This is the guy I think who should be Dwight,’ which is one of his main characters. He shows up in almost all of his books. And by that point, we’d already brought on so many of the actors that were just so right, that he just trusted me to say, ‘Hey, if you think that’s the guy, let’s bring him in.’ And he was terrific.”
PAGE 4: Robert Rodriguez on Bruce Willis as Hartigan and Special Guest Director Quentin Tarantino
