It's no secret that Frank Miller is extremely protective of his Sin City graphic novels. He says he had been saying no to Hollywood for years, almost since his first book appeared in 1991, and as he points out he has continued to say no to Hollywood. "I just said yes to Austin," he explains.
He is referring to the fact that it was Robert Rodriguez's vision and a showreel of the opening scene, shot by Rodriguez against green screen at his Troublemaker Studios in Texas, that convinced Miller to allow his creation to come to the big screen. The scene starring, Josh Hartnett and Marley Shelton, is the one which plays just before the credits of the finished film.
"It became irresistible," says Miller, "Robert had a whole different approach on how he wanted to make the movie and a vision for how he wanted to produce it. And then of course he introduced me to actors and I came to work with actors and I was smitten."
Those actors Miller refers to are some of the brightest young stars and hottest movie talent working at the moment. A large ensemble cast which brings to life three of Miller's stories as an interweaving trilogy piece, with certain similarities to Pulp Fiction. The presence of Bruce Willis and the plot device of using flashback to tell his particular story heighten the comparisons with that particular film.
Willis was also persuaded to do the film after seeing Rodriguez's opening scene. He joins Mickey Rourke, who gives an outstanding performance as the lumbering lovesick Marv, and Clive Owen as Dwight, the ladies' man who has tried to leave his old life behind but finds himself pulled back into Sin City's dark and violent underworld.
Owen says: "Robert sent me a bunch of Frank's graphic novels and said he had shot around five minutes and convinced Frank how faithful he would be to the material. He told me he was currently shooting with Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke, Benicio Del Toro was going to be in it, Quentin Tarantino was going to pop in for a couple of days so...I thought about it for a about half a second and jumped at it of course."
These actors play knights in tarnished armour who give the film a moral, if skewed, core. They will do anything to protect the damsels who find themselves in serious distress at the hands of some of the darkest villains on screen. Law enforcement and political and religious leaders are entirely corrupt and evil in Sin City. The heroes come exclusively from the underworld, who are forced to take up the fight against such human detritus as Nick Stahl's nasty paedophile Roark Jr, or Elijah Woods disturbing cannibalistic murderer, Kevin. (Miller says of that particular casting decision: "I wanted to see Frodo eat people.")
Up against such heavyweight male leads, the female stars - Rosario Dawson as Dwight's true love, his "valkyrie", Gail; Devon Aoki as lethal little Miho; Brittany Murphy as Shellie, the tough-talking waitress with a strong survival instinct; Jaime King as Marv's doomed true love, Goldie; and Jessica Alba, as Nancy, the girl whose sweet heart and nature is completely at odds with her surroundings - all more than hold their own in such heavyweight company.
To attract such a stellar cast it helped that shooting could be turned around in a matter of days and that some of the actors didn't even need to be in the studio at the same time.
Miller's heroines are all curvy sensuality in spiky high-heels, fishnets and bondage straps and Nina Procter obviously had free rein when it came to costume design, though her job was made more difficult because the clothes had to look good in black and white. She says she had to look at every costume through a black and white viewfinder. "We also did a lot of things to heighten the style," she says, "like silver studs on black leather".
Miller's heroes, however, are scarred and damaged even though they look like they're carved out of granite. Miller says he was stunned at how completely his drawing became reality when Greg Nicotero applied Rourke's prosthetics.
The film won the technical grand prize at the Cannes Film Festival this year for Rodirguez's visual shaping and there is no doubt the film is visually stunning. Film noir, as Miller explains, is usually simply someone "lighting a film dark", but noir is more about the characters' inner darkness.
Having said that the film is mostly monochrome, set in a place where daylight never permeates and splashes of colour are used to make witty or intense statements. Whether it be innocent blue eyes hiding a dark secret; Goldie's long tresses wound around her beautiful lifeless face; or the bilious figure of Stahl's "That Yellow Bastard" after his transformation, any colour used in the film is there to make integral plot points.
Blood is mostly a glowing silver, like that of the mythical unicorn, the ultra-violent parts of the film are turned on their head by being shown as white-on-black negatives, and the characters even think in black and white terms - two-dimensional heroes who deal with a world which is purely good versus bad.
To bring these stories to the screen Rodriguez chose to leave the American Directors' Guild when he was told that he could not share directing credits with Miller. He felt it was more important that the impetus of the film not be slowed by red tape.
"I didn't realise it was against the rules to have two directors credited on a movie," says Rodriguez. "Their argument was that I was established and Frank wasn't but I told them that he directs better than a lot of those in Hollywood, you only have to look at his books. I wanted to show that visual storytelling was the same on the page as on the screen. It was just easier to leave than to try to get them to change their rules." He likened the preparations to a runaway train, saying they were "hurtling down the tracks and we heard a crunch and we just couldn't stop at that point".
In the end three directors were involved in the film. Rodriguez and Miller were joined by Tarantino, who directed a particularly interesting sequence in a moving car as Dwight is lectured from beyond the grave by Del Toro's Jackie Boy. Rodriguez's longtime friend took only $1 to direct the sequence as he was keen to find out the pros and cons of shooting digitally.
Rodriguez said he ribbed Tarantino mercilessly about the amount of time he spent shooting Kill Bill - which Rodriguez wrote the soundtrack for charging just a dollar - saying if he had shot on digital the film(s) would have taken months not years.
"We shot the scene where Clive and Benicio are in the rain, on a road in a car and there was no rain, no road and no car," says Rodriguez. "So he got to see how when all that stuff went away he could just concentrate on getting a great performance. He said to me you're right, we would have spent all day rigging the car dragging it down the road and ruining the sound with water. Instead, the process is reversed and it's more about the performance and not about the technicalities, the opposite of what you would think a green screen movie would be."
As for shooting against green screen, which was famously criticised by Ewan McGregor while he shot the latest Star Wars trilogy, the actors in this film seemed to embrace the concept.
Brittany Murphy says she doesn't really feel like a queen of green screen, even though one of her scenes set in the bar - acting against Willis, Del Toro, even Stahl's yellow bastard - was shot with her on set alone and someone dressed in a green costume to give her an eyeline. In fact, the bar was the only set physically built for the film.
To say this is groundbreaking cinema sounds like hyperbole, because that term is used a lot around technology and computer graphics, but in this case you know you are watching something very original and distinctive.
It already has detractors, film lovers point to the CGI and say the movement is stilted or at the two-dimensional characters and say they are not fully developed. The one thing the filmmakers can hold onto is the original graphic novel and how well they have replicated it.
Rourke puts it well, in his own distinctive style: "These young guys are fearless. Robert swims in water nobody else has swam in, and I respect that...and plus I like his cowboy hat."
This being Rodriguez and Miller, the film is clever, but not clever-clever, and self-referential, but not full of annoying "in jokes". Again Rourke as Marv puts it beautifully when wakes up next to his dead love and comments, "Someone paid a lot of money for this frame." In fact, the film cost $40m according to Dimension and it's all up there on screen.
Joyce Dundas
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