Rodriguez and Tarantino Get Back to the 'Grind'
April 6, 2007 — -- "This thing's turned into a monster!" Robert Rodriguez remembered telling his friend and co-director Quentin Tarantino after the first screening of their new film "Grindhouse."
Rodriguez and Tarantino first met in Toronto in 1992 at the city's annual film festival. Tarantino was in town to present his strange and violent new film "Reservoir Dogs," while Rodriguez was trying to sell his first feature, "El Mariachi."
In an age when the smallest film can cost millions to make, Rodriguez made "El Mariachi" for $7,000. He worked as the movie's writer, director, editor and cinematographer. He even operated the dolly grip.
"There was no crew. I was just doing it sort of as an experiment," Rodriguez tells ABC's Joel Siegel, "and I did it in Spanish to sell it to the Mexican video market. I was like my own film school."
Rodriguez planned to make a few more cut-rate thrillers, but when "El Mariachi" got picked up by Columbia Pictures, the timeline got thrown forward.
For the next few months Tarantino and Rodriguez would work side by side but separately -- they both had offices on the Columbia Pictures lot -- each crafting the movies that would introduce their strange and exciting visions to cinephiles worldwide.
By the summer of 1995, "Desperado" was playing in theaters across the nation. Months earlier, in the fall of 1994, Tarantino released his masterpiece, regarded by some as the finest film of the decade -- the lovingly vicious "Pulp Fiction."
Now Rodriguez and Tarantino will release their most ambitious collaboration yet, a new-fashioned take on the cinematic antiquity of the double feature.
"It's like a rock concert," Rodriguez said. "People are just really enjoying it. They've never seen anything like it. It's almost like circus cinema. The trailers and the different directors coming on, so many stars in the movie, so much humor and action … a lot of surprises."
Rodriguez's contribution to "Grindhouse," titled "Planet Terror," is a zombie flick set in a desolate Texas town. Actors Freddie Rodriguez and Rose McGowan catch the thorny assignment of killing off the undead.
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