Online Exclusive: Horror Film Directors Dish About 'Grindhouse' Trailers

Robert Rodriguez

When Robert Rodriguez called us, the day after he finished his work on Grindhouse, he was already looking ahead to his next movie, which will either be an original thriller or Sin City 2: he had already come up with a theme song and sung it into his answering machine. He directed (and wrote, and photographed, and edited, and wrote the music for) the first half of Grindhouse, a zombie film called Planet Terror, plus a fake trailer for Machete.

Why a double feature?
I came up with the idea to do a double feature about three years ago, before I did Sin City. And I got really excited because I was looking at my old script files and I thought, "I'm never gonna have a chance to do all these movies I've had ideas for. Maybe I should start doubling them up and do double features." So I started drawing posters for them and I just got so excited. But then I did Sin City. And right when I finished I was visiting Quentin to show him my edit of the scene he directed. I went into his house and he has all this junk on the floor, just like my house. And laying on the floor, just like the one laying on my floor, is the same double bill poster I was using as an inspiration, of Dragstrip Girl and Rock All Night. And I said, "I have this idea and I think this could be our next movie. I was gonna do a double feature but you should do one and I'll do the other." And right off the bat, he said "Oh, we gotta call it Grindhouse."

You started working on Planet Terror a while back?
I wrote the first 30 pages of it back in 1998. I was doing The Faculty and I told the actors, "Zombie films have been dead for a while, but they're going to come back. We've got to be the first." And then I never got around to it, and sure enough, zombie movies came back. But I thought I still had some ideas that hadn't been done yet.

How did Bruce Willis get on board?
I showed him an early test I did of a Machete trailer and a sample of what the opening titles would be and the aging on it. He said, "I'll come do anything on the movie. Whatever you got, I'll come do it." I said, "Want to play the bad guy? You get to kill bin Laden." And he said, [raspy Willis imitation] "Who better?"

How did the trailers happen?
Quentin came up separately with the idea of the trailers. I didn't even know about it until I read it in the trades. It said something like "Rodriguez and Tarantino doing a double feature and Tarantino says there's gonna be fake trailers." And I thought, "There are?"

You ended up doing one yourself, for Machete.
I wrote that back in '93. I was writing it as a full feature for Danny Trejo -- right around that time I had cast him in Desperado and I remember thinking, "Wow, this guy should have his own series of Mexican exploitation movies like Charles Bronson or like Jean Claude Van Damme." So I wrote him this idea of a federale from Mexico who gets hired to do hatchet jobs in the U.S. I had heard sometimes FBI or DEA have a really tough job that they don't want to get their own agents killed on, they'll hire an agent from Mexico to come do the job for $25,000. I thought, "That's Machete. He would come and do a really dangerous job for a lot of money to him but for everyone else over here it's peanuts." But I never got around to making it.

There's a lot of medical gore in Planet Terror -- is that something that scares you?
It terrifies me. That guy showing the gore? That's my real doctor. I was asking him some technical questions to find out things that could really happen so I could take them to the nth degree and make them turn people into zombies. And he's showing me these pictures while I'm trying to eat. I almost threw up.

You also have your son, Rebel, play a character who gets his head blown off.
I thought, "I'm making a horror film -- what horrifies me?" That's probably the worst thing I could think of. I didn't want to traumatize anybody else's kid -- if I'm going to traumatize a kid, it should probably be my own. But I did shoot an alternative version where he lives all the way to the end, and that's the only version he's seen.