By: Joseph McCabe
Everything about Robert Rodriguez is larger than life. From his ten, no, make that twenty gallon hat, to his outrageous, and outrageously successful, Spy Kids and Sin City, the long tall Texan overflows with the kind of super-sized charisma and energy only the craziest creative types do?or the most brilliant. In other words, Rodriguez is the ideal guy to introduce contemporary audiences to the wacko world of exploitation cinema, a fact he makes plain in Grindhouse, the double feature he?s concocted with his good buddy Quentin Tarantio.

?Quentin is the one who grew up going to these movies the most,? Rodriguez tells FEARnet at Grindhouse?s LA press junket, ?but since he?s a film collector?over the past twelve years he?s had his own theater in his house?he?s been showing me these double, triple features, either stuff that he grew up with or stuff that he?s discovered and wanted to turn me on to. I think that only about three years ago was when it finally dawned on me, ?Hmm, maybe I should do a double feature.? I got real excited, and when I took the idea to Quentin, after Sin City, I said, ?I thought about doing a double feature but you should do one and I should do the other.? He said, ?Oh, we gotta call it Grindhouse.? We gotta have fake trailers?? We realized that it would harken back to that time period. I said, ?You know what? I can actually make the movie?I?ll shoot digital, but I?ll actually make it look like one of your old prints,? because his prints are sometimes all screwed up, and it adds a really great texture to it and a vitality to it that when I go back and see the same movie on DVD and it?s all cleaned up?it?s lost half of its charm. So, I thought, ?Wow, it?d be really great to use the damage as a dramatic device and try to use that as another tool in the toolbox.??

We ask Rodriguez why he chose one of our favorite subjects?zombies?as the basis for Planet Terror, the opening feature he directed for Grindhouse?s double bill.

?First,? he says, ?we came up with the idea of the experience, providing audiences with this kind of heavy showmanship experience, the double feature with trailers in between, because that?s how he would show movies at his house?we would always have trailers in between, these little interstitials. I said, ?Well, what kind of movie should we do first? Action or comedy?? He goes, ?I think we should do the first one horror because that?s, like, the most popular genre of those.? Then I thought, ?Well, I have a zombie script I started ten years ago??

?Back before the zombie wave hit, I had it around the time of The Faculty. I was telling the actors of The Faculty, ?I?m writing a zombie script. You guys gotta be in it. There?s a bunch of characters.? I got all excited??Zombie movies are dead, but they?re gonna come back. I know they are. Everything always comes back. Believe it or not, zombie movies are gonna come back. We gotta be first.? I never finished the script and was, like, kicking myself when the zombie wave came back and went. But when he said, ?Let?s do the horror,? I thought, ?Well, I?ve always wanted to do some of these ideas that I didn?t see get done yet. It?s a good excuse, a good reason to do a zombie movie.? He came up with the slasher one, and that?s how we started going. We just got so excited about this idea that we knew it had to be our next movie.?

Rodriguez found inspiration for Planet Terror in the work of one of his favorite filmmakers, John Carpenter.

?I was going to go to him to do some music with me, actually,? confesses Rodriguez. ?That was the original idea. But then I had so much fun doing the music, I just kind of kept it all to myself. You know, I had to come up with a theme, and I really dug doing it. I thought it should be considered almost like the John Carpenter zombie movie he would?ve made between Escape from New York and The Thing. So I wanted it to feel like it was from that time period.?

Like The Thing, Planet Terror boats extreme levels of gore. Rodriguez explains how he handled such exploitation staples.

?You know, I just tried to make a cool zombie movie and some things you hadn?t quite seen before. I?ve seen zombie movies?you know that if you pull back and try to make it PG-13, you didn?t make a zombie movie. (Not that they?re zombies. We call them ?sickos,? because they?re just infected.) Yeah, I needed to have some sections that were like that. Then it kind of goes away after the hospital sequence?then it turns into a women-in-cages movie. That?s when you have that weird stuff with Quentin and the melting member. It gets a little?weirder. Anyways, the best thing about these exploitation movies is sometimes you?d be watching them and?you get this experience when you watch Quentin?s film festival?you?re sitting there, and at some point in one of these movies, you just can?t believe what you?re watching. You?re like, ?Is this happening? Am I?? Are we?? Yeah, I guess we?re all watching the same movie?? It almost feels like a dream. So you needed those kinds of moments in it. You want those sorts of surreal ideas. That?s what kind of marks a really good exploitation movie. So yeah, I had to think for a long time to come up with most of that.?

Since Rodriguez and Tarantino worked so closely together, we ask what they contributed to each other?s features.

?I gave him his title,? laughs Rodriguez. ?He was telling me his movie idea, and he goes, ??and the guy?s driving a car and it?s death proof?? I went, ?What?? ?It?s a death proof car?? I said, ?That?s a pretty good title.? ??and then this stuntwoman comes over and she?s, like, indestructible?she?s death proof!? I said, ?You?ve gotta call it Death Proof.? Then the next day he goes, ?I?m gonna call it Death Proof.?

?I contributed that. He contributed some dialogue to mine, a few lines here and there. I?d hoped he?d contribute more. I gave him the draft, and I was like, ?Alright, he?s gonna add all this dialogue!? Then he called me back and said, ?Man, I loved the script. I added a few lines.? I said, ?Oh cool, where are they?? There?s like two lines. I was like, ?That?s it?! C?mon write some more!??

In the end, Tarantino did contribute to Planet Terror?s script, albeit indirectly?when Rodriguez wrote one speech in his friend?s unique style, for a very special guest star.

?Some other big actor wanted to do the part of the rapist, but he got another job offer. I was like, ?Wow, I should think of someone bigger to play the bad guy. But let me give him a Quentin-type speech where he says something really cool that he did?? I figured, ?Man, I?ll try to get Bruce. I?ll call Bruce up!? I called Bruce [Willis] and said, ?Hey, I got this part, you get to play the bad guy.? I?d already shown him some early footage that I had done. He just thought it was cool. He said, ?Hey, anything you got. I?ll come for a day or two. Anything. I?d love to come work for you again.? So I said, ?I got a cool part?you?re the bad guy, but you get to kill bin Laden.??

Rodriguez smiles. ?He said, ?Who better???