Are we going to see Rob’s [Zombie] or are we going to see Edgar’s?

Possibly. I mean we gotta listen to what fans say when they see the movie. That’s kind of the testing ground. But early on I’d been writing the Machete thing for Danny [Trejo] since ’94, so when Quentin first mentioned ‘hey, let’s do some fake trailers,’ [I said] ‘well I know which trailer I’m gonna do. I’m gonna do Machete’ because I’ve been gonna do that with him forever. I always thought he should be the star of his own Mexploitation series, and so I did that one right away as a camera test.

When are you going to research it?

Soon, because it needs to come out when Grindhouse comes out on DVD. So it comes out at the same time. [Using announcer’s voice] ‘Grindhouse presents ‘Machete’ plus 3 Kicks in the Head, Part III.’

What about the movie’s gore? How far were you able to push the envelope?

I just tried to make a cool zombie movie and some things that you hadn’t quite seen before. And I’ve seen zombie movies, and you know that if you pull back and try to make it PG-13, you didn’t make a zombie movie so…not that they’re zombies, we call them ‘sickos’ because they’re just infected, but yeah, you needed to have some sections that were like… and then it kind of goes away after the hospital sequence and turns into a ‘women in cages’ movie. That’s when you have that weird stuff with Quentin and the melting member and it gets a little weird there. But mainly it was just to… the best thing about these exploitation movies is sometimes you’d be watching them, and you get this experience when you watch Quentin’s film festival, you’re sitting there and at some point in one of these movies, you just can’t believe what you’re watching. It’s like, ‘is this happening? Am I? Are we…? Yeah, I guess we’re all watching the same movie.’ It almost feels like a dream so you needed those kinds of moments and you want those sort of surreal ideas, and that’s what kind of marks a really good exploitation movie. So yeah, I had to think for a long time to come up with most of that.

Is your son ever creeped out by the zombies or anything?

You know, I take him into the dining area and I say, ‘okay, now you’re going to come see some zombies.’ We’ve been making jokes and stuff. We talked about doing a kid’s movie about zombies and we could talk about them for a while. [Laughs]  And I said, ‘hey look, here’s the [zombies]’ and he freaked out when he first saw them, and I said, ‘no, no, c’mere, c’mere. Touch their faces,’ and he saw that they were rubber. ‘That’s J.J. You know J.J. You know him from Spy Kids.’ And  I say, ‘what do you think?’ and he goes, ‘hey, that’s pretty low budget.’ [Laughs] That was our joke – it was low budget. I said, ‘I’m open to that. Well it’s not that bad.’ But he doesn’t know what happened to him because I shot a whole version where he lives ‘cause I wasn’t sure which way to go. He remembers making it all the way to the beach. He’s lying on the beach with his little animals, so as far as he knows in his mind, he survived. He has no idea, he has no idea. [Laughs]

I was disappointed you weren’t in Quentin’s movie. You didn’t want to? Why didn’t you do it? Cmon, everybody’s waiting for that.

Think about it. I never have any time. I’m operating the camera, I’m doing Steadycam, editing on set, doing the catering. After a while... I don’t really have much interest in that. I like being the crazy puppeteer rather than the puppet. [Laughs]

Can you talk about why it is that you feel comfortable in pretty much all your DVDs to be able to fully explain in detail how you did things when most filmmakers keep the process within. You give everything which is really cool.

It helps you to also just clear out your ideas. I talk about exactly how I did Sin City and then somebody can go and make 300. [Laughs] And then it helps you kind of clean out the system so you gotta come up with something new for the next one. By the time you’re giving that information out, it’s a couple years later from when you first thought about how to do it. So you’re kind of onto a new idea anyway. So you might as well…  it’s better to just give away... You know, the best magicians give away their magic tricks because it forces them to think of new tricks.

Will Frank Miller direct Sin City with you?

Uh huh. It wouldn’t be at the same time, no.

What did you guys contribute to each other’s movies in Grindhouse?

I gave him his title. He was telling me his movie idea [imitates Quentin’s voice] ‘the guy’s driving a car and it’s death proof and all’ and I’m like, ‘what?’ ‘It’s a death proof car.’ And I said, ‘that’s a pretty good title.’ And then he’s going through and he says, ‘and then the stunt woman comes over. She’s like indestructible’ and ‘she’s death proof,’ I say. [Laughs] ‘You gotta call it Death Proof’ and the next day he goes, ‘I’m gonna call it Death Proof.’ [Laughs] I contributed that. He contributed some dialogue to mine, a few lines here and there. That was mainly… I hoped he would contribute more. I gave him the draft and I was like, ‘Alright, he’s gonna have all this dialogue’ and then he called me back and says, ‘man, I loved this script. I edited a few lines.’ I said, ‘oh, cool. Where were they?’ It was like two lines and I was like, ‘That’s it?! C’mon! Write some more!’

Marley and her thing with the needles, doesn’t that seem kind of Quentinesque?

Yeah, really? Probably I started imitating him probably a little but no, that’s fine.

Will the Ten Minute Cooking School on the DVD include JT’s barbecue sauce?

Yes, absolutely. That’s going to be the big one there, Texas Barbecue. I’m going to start with his quote saying [imitates JT] ‘No Texan ever gives away his barbecue recipe. He takes that to the grave.’ [deep voice] ‘Ten Minute Cooking School: Texas Barbecue From The Grave.’

Freddy has already mentioned that he was not the obvious person to play that kind of role. What was it about him that you thought he could be El Rey?

It’s kind of strange. I only wrote the script part way before I was just getting lost with some of the characters, and I thought I’m just going to start casting right now, and then finish the script based on the actors I find so I can visualize them better. So, a lot of the script was written for Rose, with Rose’s characteristics in there, a lot of her personality. She’s always talking about her useless talents, her bad luck, and people always telling her she should be a stand-up comedian. A lot of her is in there. Freddy came in and read. The only scene I had for Freddy was the opening scene when he’s talking to her in the diner, and he came in with this cool jacket and he played it really cool, and I thought ‘wow, this guy’s really great. He’s kind of small, so I’m going to make him a badass hero.’ I made that whole part based on how he came in and read. So when he read the finally finished script, he was like, ‘you saw me as this?,’ and I said, ‘Actually yeah. I thought it would be very unassuming of you to come in at that level. I’m going to shoot you kind of short too, so don’t get freaked out when you see the camera way up here, when you step our of your truck for the first time and you’re like this small. But as the movie goes on, I’m going to start lowering the camera and you’re gonna get taller and taller, so by the time you’re flipping the guns, the camera’s on the floor and you’re just like ‘ahhhhhhh.’ El Rey!

Was it because he was little that you put him on this tiny little bike?

Yeah, I put him on it, but that was already a joke in there. But yeah, he still looked big on the little bike. I saw those little bikes and I thought it was the coolest idea.

Can you tell us about Sin City 2?

Sin City 2? If I start shooting it right away, it’d be seen as soon as June, but I’ll know more in a week.

Can you actually talk about your schedule for the next year and what you’re working on?

Oh man, I have no idea. Usually when I finish a movie, right when I’m done at the premiere and all that, I take like a week off and then I get antsy and I already know what I’m gonna do next, but I haven’t got to that point yet.