Tarantino and Rodriguez: Who's the Man?

March 30, 2007— -- They are no longer the enfants terrible of the film world, but they are still taking wild risks. Fifteen years after bursting onto the movie scene with their popular independent films "Reservoir Dogs" and "El Mariachi," film auteurs Quentin Tarantino, 44, and Robert Rodriguez, 38, have teamed up for their sixth and most ambitious collaboration, "Grindhouse," a gory, cheeky, campy double-feature that seeks to re-create a night at a cheesy movie theater circa the 1970s.

The experience comes complete with previews for non-existent films ("Thanksgiving" by Eli Roth, director of "Hostel," for instance), aged film, and missing reels. (ABC News has learned that one of those "missing" reels was actually filmed, so fans should be on the lookout for it, perhaps in the DVD release of the film. We're holding our tongues as to which scene, so as not to be spoilers.)

"Planet Terror," Rodriguez's contribution, features Freddie Rodriguez as brooding anti-hero Wray and Rose McGowan as go-go dancer Cherry, battling zombies in a small Texas town. McGowan's right leg is eventually replaced by a machine gun. Tarantino contributes "Death Proof," starring Kurt Russell as "Stuntman Mike," a maniac who stalks scantily-clad young women with his stunt car. The film has raised eyebrows in Hollywood with its extremely violent content and three-hours-plus length, but Tarantino and Rodriguez are unapologetic and excited about their latest experiment. The following is a transcript of our interview.

JAKE TAPPER:
People probably know what a "Grindhouse" movie is, but they might not know they know what it is. So explain -- what is it?

QUENTIN TARANTINO:
A Grindhouse movie is a movie that basically they would play at these old cavernous, dilapidated theaters in urban areas of America, whether it be Kansas City, or Detroit, or Chicago, or New York. And, basically, they were movies that were just built on sensationalistic content, whether it be sex or action or scantily clad women or monsters or gore or any kind of dozens of genres that could be playing at these theaters.

Now you release a movie, maybe there are 3,000 prints going out in the course of a weekend. But, then, in grindhouse days, they might make four or five prints, and that's it. And they would take them to Chattanooga, and it would play there, those four prints. And then they would take it to Memphis, and it plays there.

And they would play it for the course of a year. But in each theater, it is getting more jacked up, because they have the worst theaters and the worst projection booths. So by the end of the -- like the year, it's a year run -- it is actually disintegrating in the projector where you paid to see it. And, kind of, that was the whole history of Grindhouse movies.

TAPPER:
Why is it called Grindhouse?

TARANTINO:
I think it is a "Variety" term. But it just kind of fits as a metaphor of, these things are ground out. And there's kind of even a striptease, bump-and-grind aspect to the entire setting.

TAPPER:
And you both grew up watching these types of movies?

ROBERT RODRIGUEZ:
Quentin even more than me. And he collects film prints. So, over the past 12 years, he has a theater in his house. He's just been showing me double, triple features of movies that either he grew up watching or that he's discovered over the years. So I've gotten the full Grindhouse education.

And it was about three years ago that I thought about doing a double feature, because I had a lot of leftover film ideas for stories that I thought, "I'm never going to get around to making all these movies. Maybe I should start doubling them up or something and make an experience." I had just done a 3-D movie. So I thought something else that would be a great theatrical experience for an audience to do a double feature.

But, then, I went and did "Sin City." And, after "Sin City," I brought the idea to Quentin, because I saw a double-feature poster laying on the floor that was just like the one I had at home that I was using as inspiration. It was a double-feature poster for "Rock All Night" and "Dragster Girl," an AIP double-feature poster. I said, "I had an idea for a double feature…" He goes, "Oh, I love double features."

I said, "But I was going to direct them both, but you should do one and I'll do the other…" And he just got ecstatic. He said, "We got to call it 'Grindhouse' Let's call it 'Grindhouse. We've got to put fake trailers in between.' And within five minutes, we came up with the idea for this whole movie.

TAPPER:
With the concept of "ruining" the prints on purpose as part of that from the beginning?

TARANTINO:
Yes, that was the biggest choice on our part. Because, you know, it really looks pretty good now, the way they do all these general negatives and everything. You know, you almost can't make a movie look bad in today's Hollywood. And we just realized that it would just feel antiseptic, like we were trying too hard. If it had this nice clean look, it just wouldn't be right.

And Robert just really kind of like led the way so much in the case of "Sin City" by picking an aesthetic and picking a look and just going all the way with it. And even the look that we're using in this, I experimented a little bit with one of the -- the Kung-Foo section of "Kill Bill." So we knew it would work. So we just decided to go all the way with it and just make it -- that's part of the experience.

RODRIGUEZ:
A lot of the prints he has collected, some of them are from different places. Some of them have played the Grindhouse circuit. So they are very ripped up. And that would add a texture to the movie that -- I would watch a movie and really enjoy it and go, "I think I actually have this movie on DVD. I'm going to go watch it at home and see if it is as good as this. I don't remember it being that good."

And you'd put it on, and it would be so clean it took away a lot of its character. So I knew that part of the character of this movie had to be that it felt like some movie that we made 10 years ago or 20 years ago that just go resurrected and just found, discovered, and have it be all ripped up like that.

TARANTINO:
I have been doing that for about 10 years now, taking double features and trailers and playing them in festivals and creating my own festival.

And the thing that's cool is there is this neat aspect that happens in the audience when they're watching these kind of prints. There's almost like an intrigue about, "Is it going to break? All right. Did I miss something?"

Even the fact that some of these prints are like Frankenstein monsters of -- or they're made up from different sources, so one reel is red and another reel is faded, then, all of a sudden, there's this Technicolor reel and it looks fantastic. You know, "Whoa." And that becomes part of the night watching that. That's a big part of the night when you screen these movies.

TAPPER:
Tell me about the missing reel.

RODRIGUEZ:
One of the festivals we had in Austin showing this film print, I was already trying to come up with as many ideas as I could for the movie. Thought about the aging. Thought about the fake trailers. And we started writing our scripts. And our scripts were getting kind of long -- "How are we going to make this for a double-feature length and they're both really long, full-feature movies?" And [Tarantino] started showing a film print of an Oliver Reed movie…

TARANTINO:
Yes, "Sellout…"

RODRIGUEZ:
And he said -- he was telling the audience beforehand, "Now, this movie has a missing reel. We lost one of the reels. So -- but it's kind of cool, because the movie goes on and then you don't know if the guy slept with her or -- back and forth. And it creates some extra kind of mystery to it."

And I thought, "Oh, my God. We should put in a missing reel, put in a card that actually says, "Missing Reel" -- you could cut out that whole late-second-act shenanigans that are kind of boring anyway and jump right into the third act and have the audience just fill in what happened."

And you can have a lot of fun with that, I think, because, right in the middle of a love scene, it can just go to a missing reel, come out and the mysterious hero that no one knew is past history. Suddenly, everyone knows it. The audience…

TARANTINO:
No information at all.

RODRIGUEZ:
No information. It was in the missing reel…

TARANTINO:
People who don't like each other, now, all of a sudden, like each other. People who weren't shot are shot.

RODRIGUEZ:
It was like taking a long bathroom break and cut 20 minutes out of the movie. And you can just keep the movie running at a full-speed-ahead, freight-train rate.

TAPPER:
This is a film clearly made by people who love movies and love different genres of movies. The American people obviously don't know as much about films as you guys. But do you think they're going to connect to this? I mean, obviously, you hope they do. But do you think that they have the kind of vocabulary in their brain?

TARANTINO:
Well, you know, if you have to be too schooled on any one thing, then it probably doesn't work. All right? It would be nice, you know -- we could just make it for film geeks, and that would be fine and whatever. But, then, you know, you could question about how successful it is. Because the idea is it's just going to be a really fun night at the movies. Do you need to have the background of having been to these things before, back in the day, or to be super knowledgeable about it? No. You should just be able to sit down and we take you into that experience. We don't have to teach it to you. You'll just experience it.

And part of the thing is for younger people that really have never had this experience at all before, if we did our jobs right, they should have the most fun of all, because it is really new to them. It's really for the first time, and they're getting it for the very first time. So it's like -- to them, it's even more original than it probably is.

RODRIGUEZ:
I think people who just love movies, this is such a celebration of cinema. And it's something that we just thought was lacking over the past two decades, just the showmanship that used to be involved in putting on a show for people in a theater, where you'd have two movies, you'd have trailers in between. It would be a night out.