Planet Terror director Robert Rodriguez chats with Blockbuster.co.uk's Mal Simons about bringing back the dead and breathing new life into exploitation cinema.
Texan director Robert Rodriguez knows his way around a cult movie. From his micro-budgeted debut flick
El Mariachi, made for just $7000, to
Desperado,
The Faculty,
From Dusk Till Dawn and the splendid
Sin City, chapters two and three of which are currently in production, there's no director better versed in exploitation filmmaking, a serious asset when it came to making B-movie double feature, Grindhouse, with frequent collaborator and like-minded fanboy
Quentin Tarantino.
Conceived as a homage to the trashy drive-in movies of the Seventies and Eighties, complete with scratchy prints, trailers and missing reels, Grindhouse comprised two films for the price of one: Tarantino's
Death Proof and Rodriguez's Planet Terror. Released internationally in its own right, Planet Terror is an affectionate, action-packed and extremely gory tribute to the films of
John Carpenter, set in a small, isolated town where the residents are suddenly infected with a mysterious virus that turns them into ravenous zombies. Faced with such a terrible threat, the local sheriff has no choice but to trust mysterious loner El Wray (Freddy Rodriguez), whose gutsy girlfriend Cherry Darling (Rose MacGowan) joins him in the fight back after losing her leg to the carnivorous creatures.
Delighted and proud to chat about Planet Terror, available now to add to your list, Rodriguez revealed the origins of this characteristically full-blooded project. "It was about ten years ago," he remembers, "something like 1997 or 1998. I was talking to the cast of The Faculty, and said, 'I'm writing a zombie movie.' They went, 'Oh wow!' 'Cos I knew zombie movies were gonna come back in a big way - there hadn't been one in about 15 years or more, and slasher films had run their course, so I figured Hollywood would be looking for something new. I said, 'Betcha it's gonna be zombies. Not for a few years at least, but we should do it now. Let's do the first one.' They were like, 'Zombie movies!!!' Everyone was so excited about doing one.
"So I wrote the first 30 pages and I loved it. Loved it. 'Cos it was all the tease, leading up to the zombies - there's something wrong in this city, people are dying but nobody knows why. People are showing up with weird bites, and then a girl loses her leg. But once the characters got to the hospital I didn't know what to do next! I was like, 'Now I've got to start explaining why there are zombies.' I always hated that part of the movie and I always blew it, 'cos there was never a good explanation as to why people would suddenly come back from the dead and start eating people. So I put it away and got into other things, like
Spy Kids and other stuff, instead. And then, sure enough, about four or five years later, zombie movies came back in a big way so the idea was pretty much dead."
Appropriately enough for a zombie film, it was a project that came back to life. "What happened was," continues Rodriguez, "I'd gotten this idea, just before Sin City, to do two short features, like, 60 minutes in length, as a double feature, which I was gonna direct myself. I said to Quentin, 'You should direct one, I'll direct the other,' and he said, 'Oh, let's call it Grindhouse and make them like those old movies from the '70s and early '80s. But if we do it, we could do kung fu or action, but I think horror would be the best way to go.' So I thought, 'Well, hey, the best thing I've got is this zombie movie script, if you wanna just get started right away you can finish writing it, I never finished it.' And Quentin goes, 'Oh, I love zombie movies - yeah, yeah, send it to me, I'll read it.' But before I could even give it to him, the next day he already had Death Proof in mind. So I went back to the zombie script, and as I wrote it, I started getting back into it.
"It helped a lot that we came up with Grindhouse and the idea to make a film based on these exploitation movies, because a lot of what they would do was take something topical and exploit it. So if
Roger Corman had been making movies when the Iraq war was on, he'd be using that in a second. Like, 'Oh, some biochemical weapon has been brought back to the States.' So then they turn into zombies, or these infected people with multiple viral infections, all happening very quickly, that turn into these lesions that are just protruding off their bodies. I tried to find real medical reasons for everything and authenticate it. That's how I was going to explain it.
"Beyond explaining where the zombies came from, what I really needed was to figure out what my central marketing was. Because these movies all had great posters and great trailers. I'd just written the Machete trailer, which was great: I had Danny Trejo opening his jacket, full of machetes, and with a machine gun on his motorcycle, jumping, then in some water with two girls. Every shot was a money shot and possible poster image. I thought, 'What would my poster for Planet Terror be? It can't just be zombies - everybody's seen that. We have some cool tough guys in the movie but everyone's seen that too.'
"I thought, 'The only person I really have that I can capitalise on Cherry, the girl with the stump.' I think at that time I had a scene where El Wray puts a stick in her leg, and I thought, 'Man, that's gonna just look pathetic on a poster.' So I kept thinking, 'There's gotta be something, I need something. I've gotta start thinking less about the movie and more about the trailer, and then I'll be able to finish the movie.' I was stuck in traffic and then it popped into my head: 'My God, she has a machine gun for a leg!!!' Awesome! She'd be like, Brrrrr!!! Brrrr!!! Brrrr!!! Roundhouse! One gun pointed at one guy, another gun pointed at another guy, and her leg twisted back, pointed at another guy's face. She could be the most badass person. And because it's Grindhouse, it's gonna be even weirder, because it'll be a real high-tech process - we'll have to remove Rose's leg and add it with a computer - but it'll look very, very low-tech, like it was done back in the day.
"I designed Cherry's costume to be a go-go dancer's so you could see everything: flesh and a bandage and a gun. It looks so low budget it's even more disturbing to see it on a beautiful girl. It's so inelegant, like it was fitted right there, on the spot. So that made me suddenly know that the main character - 'cos I had a lot of characters - was gonna be her. I made her a go-go dancer, figuring that it'd be more tragic if she lost her leg. But then all those moves, her physicality, those things she thought were just useless talents, suddenly make sense.
"The useless talent idea I got from Rose. Ever since I met her she's always been talking about things she can do, like, 'Useless talent number 31.' I thought that was fascinating. I said, 'I'm gonna put that idea in the script, but I'm gonna make sure Cherry's talents aren't useless; it's just that she hasn't figured out how to use them yet. She hasn't got to that point yet where you connect the dots and suddenly all those stupid things you learned actually turn out to be for a purpose. There is a plan - a grand plan. A destiny and a fate."
In preparing the movie, Rodriguez says be barely had to do any research at all, to properly capture the Grindhouse spirit. "I didn't really put in direct references," he reveals. "I think in the new version you see
Freddy Rodriguez step out of a car with handcuffs on his wrists and feet. It was very much like Snake Plissken in
Escape From New York. It's a hint that they know he's a badass. That's about it. I didn't have to really go look at
Dawn of the Dead or any of the Carpenter movies, 'cos I'd seen them so many times, I knew them like the back of my hand. But I was going for that sort of vibe.
"I really thought that this was the kind of movie John Carpenter would have made if he did a zombie movie. If he was a good friend of
George Romero and they'd teamed up, or something. In that year between Escape From New York and
The Thing - y'know, that year he had off - what if he did this movie? Planet Terror would be that movie. It has a lot of staples of his movies. It's all set at night; it's got very brooding music and really cool, soft-spoken, hard-ass characters. A lot of diverse characters."
As for the Machete movie, a project spoken about often and with great enthusiasm by actor
Danny Trejo, Rodriguez confirms it's definitely going to happen. "Danny calls me up every day and says, 'I'm the best shape I've ever been in my life. People keep saying, 'Where is the movie?' They want it. They want it, bro!' So we're doing it. We have a script. It's not gonna be hard to make. There are so many scenes I can't wait to direct. It'll be a hoot!"