Fans of the original grindhouse films are in love with this movie, but then there’s everybody else. Who is the audience for this film?
RR: Everybody who loves movies should love it. Because people who remember these double features are going to get a nostalgic trip off of it. And for those people who are too young to remember any of it, it just seems like a really new experience that we’ve conjured up.
QT: Yeah, if you need to know the whole history of grindhouse, then we didn’t really do our jobs. Part of our thing is, Robert’s movie has to work as a movie, and my movie has to work as a movie. But when you put them together it’s got to work as a whole experience. And that was what we were really going after and so, to us, with the fake trailers and this whole experience we’re trying to capture. Hopefully if it works correctly, it’s almost closer to a ride than it is going to see a movie just kind of play out.
How hard of a sell was it to the studio?
QT: I can honestly say it didn’t start dawning on anybody about how risky what it is we’re doing until these last few weeks. When we came to them with it they couldn’t have been happier. ‘Oh man, they’re two guys and not only do they come up with the movie right away for the Weinstein Company. They’re going to do it together. And it’ll be this cool thing.’ So they couldn’t sign us up quick enough.
What were the biggest moments for each of you while making the film?
RR: The nirvana moment for me had to have been a week ago when I saw his movie for the very first time.
QT: And I saw his for the first time.
RR: We’re sitting there and we’re going, ‘We can’t believe we got to this moment – finally going to see each other’s movies.’ And then his credits come up and I realised I hadn’t seen any of his footage. I’m like, ‘I get to watch a new Quentin Tarantino movie right now. I can’t believe it. Where did it come from?’
QT: He’s 100 per cent right. That was probably the giddiest moment.
So how much fun were these fake trailers to make?
RR: We had come up with several more that we were going to direct ourselves But we had to rely on our friends to bring us some trailers because we just ran completely out of time by working on our movie. So it was great to see theirs, just to get these almost as presents when they finally got them cut.
QT: You know, one of the things that was actually really cool about working with the guys, like Edgar Wright and Eli Roth, was just the fact that whenever we ever talked about this to anybody we had to always explain it. Well, with Edgar we didn’t have to explain it to, he got it. Eli we didn’t have to either. Even Edgar was like, ‘Okay, this is a British horror film from the 70s, but it’s the American trailer. So they don’t want you to know it’s a British horror film. That’s why nobody is speaking.’
RR: I know, I couldn’t wait to hear their experience making it, because I figured out when I did Machete it was the most fun you can have making a movie – it’s instant gratification. You only shoot for two days.You’re just only shooting the good parts, and then you’re done and then you got all this amazing footage. That was the difference with [other directors] calling, ‘This is the most fun I’ve ever had making a movie.’ Well of course it was, because you’re only shooting the best parts. You go home and you’re done after two days and it was so fun to do that.
QT: Yeah, Eli was like, ‘I don’t even know if I want to make movies anymore. I just want to make trailers.’
Why the decision to contemporise them and not do them strictly in period?
QT: We never really wanted it to just be this 70s artifact. The reason that a lot of those movies look that way was the print quality. Part of the fun of this, is we’re really doing a throw back to a Hollywood that doesn’t exist anymore. You know we’re in a different world now.
Now, you open a movie up in 1,500 theatres, 2,000 theatres, and you have 2,000 prints floating around out there. Back then an exploitation company might make five of the prints and open it in Chattanooga. And it’d play there and then they’d move it to Memphis. And for the entire year they would just schlep these same four or five prints all around the country. Now they’re actually playing in the worst theatres on the worst projectors available in America. Once it goes through the El Paso drive-in theatre meat grinder it will never be the same and so, depending on where you saw it in the run, they could very well look like this. So, we didn’t want to make it 70s. We actually thought, we wanted to pretend as if this type of filmmaking had never stopped, this type of exhibition had never stopped. So it made sense that they pull out cell phones and do text messaging, and they’re dealing with computers. It is contemporary. It just has that look and style of cinema, then with occasionally damaged film and the bit where it just says ‘missing reel’ on the screen for 10 seconds.
Will we ever see the missing film reels?
QT: Hopes are high that we find them, all right. There’s a detective working on looking for mine. He said that there’s a possibility that maybe my missing reel might be in a basement in Holland. So when I get through with all this big press junket stuff, I intend to go down there and see if I can find my missing reel. There’s talk about Acuna, Mexico. There might be Robert’s missing reel. But the English language soundtrack is completely gone, so we don’t know.
Not to be cynical, but I suspect we may eventually see them on the DVD.
RR: Oh yeah, and exploitation filmmakers of that era never tried to do anything like that. The last thing they’d want to do is resell you the same movie twice!
That’s how we kind of convinced the studio that this was worth taking up, cause their whole thing was, I mean, they sold you one movie for the price for two with Kill Bill. And when they said, ‘You’re going to make two full features. Why don’t you just split them up? Economically it’s better.’ We said, ‘Well no, we’re selling the whole experience and there are ways to make back some of that money by doing some things internationally separate, or by selling the DVD more than once because it has different aspects to it.’ So that’s kind of how we were able to put on this whole circus.
I kept catching out of the corner of my eye little nods to each other’s films. Like I saw Kill Bill at the bottom of a list.
RR: Oh yeah, that was Marley’s duty list for the night. When she’s actually putting her needles away, you know, ‘cause her husband’s name is William Block. So it says, pick up pets, do this or that, kill Bill.
What else should people look out for?
RR: Red Apple cigarettes.
QT: That’s not even a reference anymore. That’s just part of the Universe.
RR: But no, we didn’t really go out of our way. Just like if you needed a pack of cigarettes and there it is. When I had to draw the list, I just thought it would be funny.
QT: Well, you know the Mustang that you drive has a similar colour scheme of Uma’s outfit and, you know, that yellow and black colour scheme that was in Kill Bill. And actually one of the scenes that’s gone, but it will be in the full complete version of Death Proof when it’s by itself is actually Rosario’s phone is whistling the Bernard Herrman whistling theme from Kill Bill. But the thing about it is, yeah, it’s totally self-referential. Having said that, though, that actually is a very popular ring tone because of Kill Bill in Europe, in particularly Eastern Europe. It’s actually one of the most used ring tones that there is.
Have you started working on a sequel?
RR: We came up with the name Grindhouse, it just seemed like it just explained a lot of things that we could do in our future, ideas we’d want to explore and other filmmakers bringing us things, or even doing a movie of some of the fake trailers. You could do a Machete.
Well, it seems that Eli Roth and Rob Zombie would be perfect choices.
QT: Oh, you better believe it. And I think Rob shot so much on the Werewolf Women trailer, like with Machete he’d only have to work six more days and he would have a movie finished. You know one of the things that was actually really funny was when we came up with it, it was like there’s many, many different subgenres that would play at the grindhouses, that’s what kind of makes them grindhouses. There’s all these possibilities. What could we do? What will we do? Will we do a Blaxploitation movie? Will we do a Spaghetti Western? And we immediately thought, ‘Well, I think the way to start it off, we should make them horror. That would be a really good. . . You don’t have to explain that much to anybody if you do that.’ But I have always wanted to do a Spaghetti Western. I’ve always wanted to do a Blaxploitation movie, or even women in prison. It could just be what it is. I don’t have to reinvent cinema in order to do it.
And Quentin, Inglorious Bastards?
QT: That will probably be the next thing I do, actually. I’m expecting to take this on the road, planet Earth-wise probably for, like, the next six months. I’m actually looking forward to doing that and I’m going to be writing on the road. I haven’t done that for awhile. And actually, I wrote Pulp Fiction on the road while going to the festival circuits with Reservoir Dogs. So that’s what I intend to be doing.
The films have been split in two for screening in the UAE. Death Proof is out on 14 June while Planet Terror is out on 26 June.
