>>PREVIEW
GRINDHOUSE
STARRING: Rose McGowan, Freddy Rodriguez, Josh Brolin, Danny Trejo, Kurt Russell and Rosario Dawson
DIRECTED BY Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino
Opens Friday, April 6
Check listings
Horror fans unite! For years, we’ve had to endure the bland remakes, tepid, CGI and PG-13 nonsense, scouring bargain bins and websites for cult classics, waiting to see what’s new this month from Blue Underground and the back pages of Fangoria.
So, will Grindhouse, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s double feature, three-hour blood and guts extravaganza win any converts to the dark side? Fans of Rodriguez’s eccentric, stylized action and Tarantino’s dialogue will check it out, and for horror fans – well, we’ve been waiting for more than a year now.
Rodriguez contributes two segments – one of the trailers, Machete, and Planet Terror, with Rose McGowan and her machine-gun leg taking on a legion of zombies. Tarantino’s Death Proof finds Kurt Russell chasing down women with his hot rod. Add to that three extra trailers (Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving, Edgar Wright’s Don’t Scream and Rob Zombie’s Werewolf Women of the S.S. – with Nicholas Cage as Fu Manchu!) and you have an epic of gory, B-movie mayhem.
Set decorator Janette Scott has worked on seven movies with Robert Rodriguez, including Sin City. Fast Forward recently talked with Scott about zombies, car chases and barbeque.
Fast Forward: Are you a fan of horror films and what aspects of grindhouse cinema inspired the film?
Janette Scott: I’ve been a horror fan going back to the early Frankenstein movies. I remember seeing Mondo Cane (note: the infamous shockumentary, full of various fake and real obscenities, was actually nominated for an Oscar) and other movies – overdone, sensational, not very good prints. Robert and Quentin wanted to capture the down-and-dirty exploitation sensationalism of the drive-in. There were a lot of treatments done on the film, like scratching it to make it look like old film stock.
We also watched lots of zombie movies – Quentin had a whole list of movies, like Ride in a Pink Car, that he screened. There’s a couple of other obscure ones that he references as well.
What was your favourite creation in Grindhouse?
In Planet Terror, I created the barbeque place, The Bone Shack. The way Robert works – he hadn’t finished the script, just a general outline, when we started production. We just plowed forward. We started looking for a location, one of the requirements being it had to be next to a river. So I thought, ‘Why don’t we change it to a fish shack?’ I did all this research, came to him with it and he laughed and said, ‘It’s definitely a meat place.’
Texas is proud of its barbeque. I spent about a week going around and photographing things. The exterior is an old, abandoned mill outside Austin, and we built the interior on a set. I love details. A lot are lost when filming, but lovingly executed details linger somewhere in there. What you hope you’ve done is create a character for the movie – every detail matters. Even Jeff Fahey (J.T., the Bone Shack proprietor in Planet Terror) told me when he came on set that he knew who his character was – the place looked like it had been around for 50 years.
Were you involved with any of the trailers?
Everything Robert shoots, he uses. I was only involved in one of them, the Machete trailer. It was an early outing, like the experiment in Sin City (the bookend sequence with Josh Hartnett) that he made to convince Frank Miller to let him make the movie. We shot the half that had Danny Trejo (Machete) in it, then after doing Planet Terror, went back later and did the other half.
Do you work in close collaboration with the effects artists?
Everyone works hand-in-hand – you can’t have someone appear with blood on their chest before they get shot. For instance, in Sin City, in the scene where Bruce Willis is hanging, his feet supporting him on a kidney-shaped coffee table – we built it, then worked with the effects people to make sure it was reinforced so he didn’t get hurt. For the barbeque place in Death Proof, we had to get guys in to put fire retardant on it – we built it without knowing that it would get blown-up!
What was it like working with two different directors, with two different visions?
Robert and Quentin are close friends, but have two very different styles. Robert’s movie was shot digitally, Quentin’s on film. Robert’s is a zombie movie, much in the same way that Kill Bill or Once Upon a Time in Mexico is – cartoon violence. Not like the ear-cutting scene in Reservoir Dogs – I find that hard to watch.
Quentin has been coming to Austin for a long time. He brings his film collections and holds a five-day festival each year showing them. He has his favourite places here and shot around those places in Austin. A lot of Death Proof takes place in cars – it’s less a traditional horror movie and more a car chase movie. In typical fashion, he loves dialogue, so it’s a weird combination – usually in this kind of film you don’t have a lot of character development, but in his, there’s a lot of people sitting around and talking – it goes from hilarious to terrifying. |
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