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Two for one

Hollywood's bad-boy directors Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez get retro on their latest collaboration, "Grindhouse," a gritty '70s exploitation-inspired double bill.

By Jeffrey Ressner

To die-hard movie fans, Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez need no introduction. The Gen-X film geeks behind the "Kill Bill" films and "Sin City," respectively, return this week with "Grindhouse," a double feature that pays tribute to B-movies of the 1970s that reveled in sex and gore. Tarantino's "Death Proof" stars Kurt Russell as a homicidal stunt car driver. Rodriguez's horror show, "Planet Terror," features Rose McGowan as a go-go dancer battling the undead with a machine-gun prosthesis. Needless to say, when we got together with the two pop auteurs, all that was missing to make the conversation complete was a bag of popcorn.

"Grindhouse" seems like a rebellion against the nicey-nice movies at the multiplex. Has Hollywood gotten too soft?

Tarantino: Well, [our movie] is just the stuff we're interested in. To pick a random thing, there's that movie Because I Said So that came out with Diane Keaton as the mom and Mandy Moore as her daughter. Now, look, I'll watch that on an airplane, and I might even cry at the end. [Laughs.] But it doesn't make me excited about cinema.
Rodriguez: I think if someone is at least trying something new, they should get an 'A' for effort. That's what we keep going for; we're trying to get people into theaters to see something they haven't experienced before.
Tarantino: It bodes well for our industry that we don't have an immediate answer. If you had asked us that in the 1980s, then, yes. "The Police Academy" movies -- especially No. 5 -- was the worst. As soon as they lost Bobcat Goldthwait, the series went to hell.

How did you two meet?
Rodriguez: On the film festival circuit. "Reservoir Dogs" and "El Mariachi" came out around the same time, and they were both about guys in black suits with guns.
Tarantino: We were like rock stars on tour then. All right, maybe not stars, but the guys in the band. We were literally traveling around the world for a year from one festival to the next.
Rodriguez: We ended up on a lot of panel discussions called 'Movie Violence in the 1990s,' even though it was only 1992. [Laughs.]

Fast-forward 15 years. You're collaborating on "Grindhouse," which recalls low-budget double features of the 1970s. But a lot of young moviegoers were born in the '80s and '90s. Will they get the joke?
Tarantino: That's part of the fun. Look, we're assuming people already like the movies Robert and I make. Having said that, no matter how young you are, you've heard about these old theaters that showed these wild movies before. But the experience is mythological, because kids have grown up watching these movies on TV or video. This is their chance to see it in a theater for the first time, the way Robert and I did. It's like a ride: You're going in for the "Grindhouse" experience.

How can you spoof movies that were already goofy to begin with?
Rodriguez: I've read some things that call "Grindhouse" 'Quentin and Robert's campy sendup of movies ... 'No, it's not that. It's really its own thing.
Tarantino: I've never looked at those movies as camp. Every movie I've loved that falls into this genre, I can defend. Say you're watching a crazy movie like "Dixie Dynamite" about two chicks and a moonshiner down South. The two actresses aren't very good, but if you don't laugh at how cheap the movie is and just watch it for a while, the next thing you know, you give a damn whether they lose the still or not. And you want the bad guys to lose. You care about this silly little movie. How did that happen?

"Grindhouse" has faux trailers and washed-out scenes, as well as pops, clicks and missing scenes meant to recall the scratchy celluloid and film reels that often were misplaced when these kinds of features originally were shown in sleazy theaters. Will the missing stuff show up on the DVDs?
Tarantino: I wrote my script, and said, OK, 15 minutes is coming out of it, and that's the missing reel. I shot it all, so at some point we'll look really hard for that missing reel. Maybe we'll find it and it will find its way into another version of the movie. Sometime. But it's a guess.
Rodriguez: You might find it in Mexico, where it's already been dubbed into Spanish.
Tarantino: I'll take it any way I can get it. Dubbed, subtitled, hard-core inserts, I don't care.
Rodriguez: In my film, you'll be really curious to know what goes on in that missing reel. It cuts off, and when you come back, characters are dead, people you thought were good guys are now bad -- all those late second-act shenanigans and reversals. It's like you left the theater for a long bathroom break.

Seems like you guys always are making or watching movies. Do you ever do anything else?
Rodriguez: It seems that way, I guess. I also have a band and I have five kids, so I keep pretty busy.
Tarantino: Actually, just before starting this movie, I got back from a horseback-riding safari in Africa.
Rodriguez: I went diving for white sharks in a cage with no bars, 20 feet below a boat. We go on these adventures so when we come back to making movies, we have something to talk about.
Tarantino: Exactly.

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Beloved B-movies

Few people know more about cheesy 1970s movies than Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, so USA WEEKEND asked the pair to name their top three guilty pleasures of all time. Tarantino seemed hard-pressed to pick just three, but he ultimately settled on the kung-fu epic "Five Fingers of Death," the blaxploitation classic "Coffy" and a British sex romp called "The Girl from Starship Venus."

'I remember going to the Carson Twin Cinema in Southern California,' Tarantino recalls. ' A few times every year they would show a double feature of "Enter the Dragon" and "Five Fingers of Death" because it always did well. All the Crips and low-riders would fill the place up, and it was great.'

For Rodriguez, who grew up in a large middle-class family in Texas, his earliest double-feature memories revolve around spending entire days with his siblings at a movie theater, where his mom would sneak in hot dogs and other rations. Among his favorite '70s flicks: Burt Reynolds' good-ol'-boy B-movie "White Lightning," the original zombies-in-a-mall creepfest "Dawn of the Dead" and the Vietnam vet thriller "Rolling Thunder."

About the latter, Rodriguez enthuses, 'I just love that one.' In "Rolling Thunder," the main character loses his hand in a garbage disposal and gets a hook. In my new movie, "Planet Terror," a character loses a leg and winds up with a machine-gun prosthesis. Obviously, I took a lot of ideas from that film.'