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From the Star:
Sin City, a new shade of noir
Stunning adaptation transfers images to screen
Uses splashes of colour with black and white to capture spirit of graphic novel
GEOFF PEVERE
MOVIE CRITIC
Beverly Hills, Calif.—Robert Rodriguez had been looking closely at Frank Miller's Sin City graphic novel series for years before he really saw it.
"It took me years to figure it out," the Austin, Tex.-based director of From Dusk `til Dawn, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, the Spy Kids movies and this summer's 3-D kids' flick Shark Boy and Lava Girl, (scheduled for release June 10) tells a hotel ballroom full of journalists in Los Angeles.
A former cartoonist, Rodriguez, 35, had always wanted to make a comic movie, but not just another flying-guy-in-tights comic movie.
"And I've always wanted to do a film noir. But I never put two and two together.
"That this (Sin City) should be the thing.
"The time was right to make it and look like the book."
By "look like the book" Rodriguez doesn't mean "resemble the book." Nor does he mean "inspired by the book" or "fashioned after the book." He means look-exactly-like-the-book. And he means sound-exactly-like-the-book. He means shoot-the-book.
"The more I looked at the books to adapt," Rodriguez says from beneath the brim of a Texas-sized cowboy hat, "I realized they didn't need adapting. It's visual storytelling and it works so well on the page I felt it just work exactly the same way on the screen."
It might have been right back to square one all over again, but it was a liberating return to square one. Rodriguez realized he didn't need a script, a storyboard or anything but what Frank Miller had already created. The book in his hands was its own movie.
"Let's not change anything," he remembers concluding. "Let's not even develop it. Let's just start shooting out of the books."
He also realized he needed Frank Miller. Not just as a writer or a creative consultant, but as a full-fledged collaborator. A co-director. After all, the movie's full title is the same as the comic's: Frank Miller's Sin City. A film by Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez, with one scene "guest directed" by someone named Quentin Tarantino.
Created in 1991, Sin City is a series of black-and-white comic stories that take place in an urban world so stylized, violent and ultra hard-boiled, Philip Marlowe wouldn't even take a leak there.
Typical heroes include Marv (played in the movie by a barely recognizable Mickey Rourke in a career-revitalizing performance), a hulking, scarred beast of a man who goes on a vengeful rampage when the only woman he's loved (a hooker) is murdered.
Then there's Hartigan (Bruce Willis), Sin City's last honest cop, and what's that get him? Eight years in prison on phony charges and the malodorous animosity of "The Yellow Bastard" (Nick Stahl), the spoiled-brat psychotic son of Sin City's most powerful — which is to say most corrupt — politician. The city of angels this ain't.
Sin City was created by Frank Miller as a form of creative recovery. The man who had almost single-handedly revived the moribund superhero genre with his 1986 Batman series The Dark Knight Returns (another urban comic noir), Miller, now 47, had gone to Hollywood only to see his dreams of making movies his way manhandled as badly as one of Marv's would-be opponents.
In retreat, he created Sin City on his terms only. No compromises, no concessions to commercial interests, and no self-censorship.
Sin City is Miller's muse distilled to 100 proof and poured straight from the bottle.
"That's what makes the movie so unique," says Rodriguez of the result. "I didn't want to make a movie out of Sin City. I wanted to make movies into the comics. I wanted to turn cinema into the comics."
Rodriguez, whose far-from-Hollywood studio operation in Austin is another oasis of carefully fortified independence, not only understood and respected Miller's drive for absolute control, he saw it as the key to what made Sin City special.
"When Frank wrote this book," says Rodriguez, who could not be joined by Miller in L.A. because the flu-stricken artist was too ill to travel, "he purposely went and made something he wanted to see himself. He had been through the Hollywood process and had got screwed around and never got to make a movie, went back and said, I'm gonna do what I do best. I'm gonna draw. In fact I'm gonna draw something probably nobody's going to want to see.
"That's the purest way to make something. He never foresaw it being a movie. Never foresaw it being mass-produced. It was very unselfconscious. That's why I wanted to do it and stay true to the book and not even re-think it."
To convince the artist it was possible, Rodriguez prepared a five-minute, two-character segment. Shot with actors Josh Hartnett and Marley Shelton, the sequence — which would eventually frame the finished film — was designed to convince Miller of three things: that his comic vision could be brought to the screen intact thanks to the use of computer-based green-screen technology (which Rodriguez had generously used in his Spy Kids movies), that it wouldn't look like any other comic book movie, and that Frank Miller should come aboard as a co-director.
"I used to be a cartoonist," says Rodriguez. "I told Frank, `It's not really very different from drawing, directing. It's really more like what you're used to doing as a cartoonist.'"
Miller agreed, but the American Directors' Guild did not. The Guild told Rodriguez it was against its regulations for an inexperienced cartoonist to be signed on as a full co-director, so Rodriguez quit the Guild. If Sin City couldn't be made with Guild approval with Miller as co-director, it wouldn't be made with Guild approval. But it would be made with Frank Miller.
Sin City was shot at Rodriguez's Troublemaker production facilities in Austin. Rodriguez took charge primarily of the technology while Miller focused on directing the actors. And they loved him. No one knew more than Miller about the characters' past, present and futures, and he developed an intimate rapport with all the actors chosen for Sin City's cast of losers, killers, hookers, thugs and whisky-scented martyrs.
He even got over his initial misgivings about casting Mickey Rourke as the tragic and battered man-mountain Marv. The problem was, Miller hadn't seen Rourke since 9 1/2 Weeks.
Rodriguez, on the other hand, had worked with the notoriously "difficult" actor as recently as Once Upon a Time in Mexico. "I know (Mickey) and what a tortured soul he is," says Rodriguez.
He remembers telling Miller: "There's only one guy I know who can be Marv, and you're not going to get it from any of his other work." Still, Miller wasn't sure. To him, Mickey Rourke was the guy pouring milk into Kim Basinger's mouth. Finally, Rodriguez sold him. "Look, Mickey is as close as we can get to Marv without being hurt," he told the artist.
It was one of the few moments where Rodriguez felt comfortable pushing against Miller's instincts. Otherwise, he operated on the principle that he was there as a facilitator, not even as an interpreter, of Miller's dark vision. It was, after all, Frank Miller's Sin City.
"That was the main reason I didn't want to screw up the movie," Rodriguez laughs. "Because if you do a bad movie then you kill the comic as well. And then Frank wouldn't be able to return to Sin City either."
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