Opening this weekend is a film to drop a third nut if you’re a guy or grow a third tit if you’re a girl. It’s called Grindhouse and it could cause permanent brain damage from laughing too hard or screaming too loud while you’re watching it.

The film has it all – fake trailers, tons of exploitation, and two separate movies for one low price.

The first film is directed by Robert Rodriguez and its called Planet Terror, the second by Quentin Tarantino and its called Death Proof. One is about Zombie’s and one about killing with your car.

While most studios try and bore you with the same story told over and over with different actors playing the same type of role…I promise you’ve never seen what this film is offering.

So to help promote the movie a number of the people in the film did a press day and I’m posting a lot of the interviews.

Each one is solid. They all talk about the making of the film and their motivation for being apart of this crazy movie.

All of them were done in roundtable form – meaning a bunch of us were in a room taking turns asking questions. That’s why some of the questions come out of left field and others are the kind of things you’d want to know.

If you’d like to download the MP3 of the interview click here, otherwise you can read it below.

Grindhouse opens this Friday and it’s definitely worth your hard earned dollar.

Spoilers are discussed in the Grindhouse interviews – you are warned

Question: What was it about the grindhouse that made you want to make a movie out of it?

Robert:  Well Quentin is the one who grew up going to these movies the most, but since he’s a film collector for the past 12 years -- he’s had his own theater in his house -- he’s been showing me these double, triple features, either stuff that he grew up with or stuff that he’s discovered and wanted to turn me on to. It only took that long, I think only about three years ago is when it finally dawned on me like ‘hmm, maybe I should do a double feature.’ I got real excited about doing a double feature, and when I took the idea to Quentin after Sin City, I said ‘I thought about doing a double feature, but you should do one and I should do the other.’ And he said, ‘oh, we gotta call it Grindhouse, have fake trailers,’ and we realized it would harken back to that time period. I said, ‘you know what, I can actually make the movie. I’ll shoot digitally, but actually make it look like one of your old prints,’ because his prints are sometimes all screwed up, and it adds a really great texture to it and a vitality to it that when I go back and see the same movie on DVD and it’s all cleaned up, it’s lost half of its charm, so I thought it’d be really great to use the damage as a dramatic device and try to use that as another tool in your toolbox.

Are you saying that the DVD is going to look the same way or are we going to have two versions of it?

We’ll probably have a couple versions of it. I think there might be a version down the line, a triple dip version that says ‘newly restored, digitally restored footage, newly discovered negative, fully cleaned and pristine’ [laughter]

Why do a horror film?  Why a zombie film?

Well first we came up with the idea of the experience, providing the audiences with this kind of heavy showmanship experience of a double feature with trailers in between, because that’s how he would show movies at his house. We always had trailers in between and these little interstitials. And then I said, ‘well, what kind of movie should we do first? Action or comedy double feature?’ And he goes, ‘I think we should do the first one horror because that’s like the most popular genre in movies. And I said, ‘Well I have a zombie script I started 10 years ago.’ Back before the zombie wave hit, I had it around the time of The Faculty. I was telling the actors on The Faculty, ‘you’re in the zombie script. You guys got to be in it. There’s a bunch of characters.’ I got all excited, ‘zombie movies are dead, but they’re gonna come back. I know they are. Everything always comes back and believe it or not, zombie movies are gonna come back. We gotta be first.’ And so we were on the train, you know, several years before the zombie movies did come back. I never finished the script and was like kicking myself when the zombie wave came back and went. But when he said ‘let’s do horror,’ I thought well I’d always wanted to do some of these ideas that I didn’t see get done yet, so it’s a good excuse and a good reason to do a zombie movie. He came up with the slasher one and that’s how we just started going. We just got so excited about this idea that we knew it had to be our next movie.

Can you talk about what was cut out for the double feature that will be back in the international version?

I just had to keep tightening it down. I wanted to get mine down to 80-85 minutes for the theatrical version so you wouldn’t be just exhausted and ready to go home after mine was over, so that you would stick around for a second movie. So I think my first cut was probably just under 100 minutes and just other scenes, a lot of the sheriff and JT and other stuff with Cherry and the doctor. There’s just other scenes to fill it out. And Quentin’s is the same. He’s probably got about 30 minutes more. So that would be in the international versions and in the future DVD version.

You’ve got ‘60s and ‘70s sensibilities in this whole thing in clothes…

…and 80’s.

but you also have text messaging.

It’s a modern movie.

So you did want to pull that in for a modern movie?

It is a modern movie. It’s just deteriorated as if it’s a movie from… It’s supposed to have a timeless quality. They do drive old cars, but it’s not supposed to be a period set.

But it was important to you that you brought in the modern stuff as well?

It just was supposed to be set today. I mean that’s why the Iraq War is going on. It’s supposed to be set today. It’s just looks like a film that’s just been … like they only made one film print of mine because they didn’t have much confidence in it.

What about the Afro on Rosario?

She was dressed like that in Sin City, and I said let’s bring her back like that. And she came back with a different hair style and I said, ‘wow, I liked the way you looked in Sin City’ and it was a modern cut for her.

Your movie is very influenced by John Carpenter.

And George Romero. Yeah.

Do you ever think about approaching them to do a trailer?

I was going to go to him to do some music with me actually. I mean that was the original idea, but then I had so much fun doing the music that I kind of just kept it all to myself. I came up with the theme and I really dug doing it. But no, I thought it should be considered almost like the John Carpenter zombie movie he would have made between Escape From New York and The Thing. So I wanted it to feel like it was from that time period.

How do you feel about having your hand in the resurgence of Frank Miller and doing Sin City and now in the success of 300 and stuff?

It’s just such great work, 300 and Sin City. I had those books and I just collected Sin City for so long that I just felt like I had to make a movie about this, and now I know how to do it with the effects. I know… I got my own green screen. Let me go shoot it. I don’t know if people are ready for it. It’s going to be kind of weird, but I want to see this on the screen and I just always loved that imagery ever since I first got turned onto it. And so, I’m very proud of that and the fact that 300 can go out and create the imagery of his book, and it’s great for Frank too. It’s good that Frank is able to get that.

When Grindhouse first was announced, they said you were going to shoot Quentin’s movie, but now he shot it.

I was going to DP his movie originally. Somewhere he started operating second camera on mine to get practice for his, and he’d been talking about doing his own DPing for awhile, and I told him the best way was to go and do it and then I would train him a little bit on Grindhouse. As I shot his movie, I would start training him, but I actually started doing that already on my movie because he was operating the second camera. The thing I worried about most about doing that was that I kind of tend to put the camera in places that I like to put them, and I was afraid that it would start looking less like his movie and more like my movie just ‘cause a lot of DP’s… I mean you look at the guy who shot Kill Bill. It looks like a Rob Richardson movie. When he shoots, he lights it all the same which is like a Natural Born Killers or one of those things.  So I thought that was the movie he should go off and shoot on his own. But I couldn’t just give him the digital camera. He wouldn’t know what to do with those. He was used to shooting on film, so I said, ‘You just go ahead and shoot yours on film since you already know how that works and it’ll be more your movie, and then if you screw up, it’s like it’ll be more grindhouse that way. [Laughs] And he shot it and he did a great job and I was really proud of him. He learned so much by doing it. That’s how I learned. I learned on the job. I said, ‘man, just kick him out there and let him learn on the job.’

This next part is a big spoiler….highlight to read

Bruce Willis kills Osama bin Laden?

Yeah!!

Did you have Bruce Willis cast already when you wrote that there?

I’d written… No, no. Some other big actor was gonna go do [it]… wanted to do the part of the rapist, but he got another job offer, and I was like, ‘wow, I should think of someone bigger to play the bad guy. Let me make his part, but let me give him a Quentin-type speech,’ you know, where he says something really cool that he did – like in Jaws. And so I figured, ‘oh man, he should… I’ll try to get Bruce. I’ll call Bruce up and I called Bruce and said, ‘hey, I got this part. You get to play the bad guy.’ You see, I’d already shot him some early footage I had done with the aging on it, and he just thought it was cool and said, ‘hey, anything you got, I’ll come do it for a day or two. Anything. I’d love to come work with you again.’ And so I said, ‘I got a cool part. You’re the bad guy, but you get to kill bin Laden, and he said, ‘Who better?!!’  [laughter]

Did you get crew members who had worked on these grindhouse movies or the guy doing the trailers? Was that a real voiceover guy from back in the day?

No, we got him to sound like them though. We got this guy…it’s the funniest thing. I’ve got him… I wish I had my computer here. I’d play it on my iTunes. It’s him doing [deep voice] ‘a Troublemaker Studios Production’ and then he says [normal, slightly effeminate voice] ‘okay guys, so that sounds great. Thanks…’ His real voice is so light and effeminate, you would never know that it’s the guy [deep voice again] ‘in this very voice…’  He had such a blast doing it. I think the voice in the Thanksgiving trailer is actually Eli Roth’s processed voice {imitates Roth] ‘there will be no leftovers.’

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