March 21, 2005
Rodriguez Defends Sin City
SOURCE: www.scifi.com
Robert Rodriguez, who co-directed the upcoming comic-inspired Sin City, defended the film's violence in comments to reporters over the weekend. "It is so over the top and stylized, like in the book, that's what helped temper it," Rodriguez said in a news conference. "It was so black and white, so abstract, so representative, that it's ... easier to watch, I think, than if ... it was realistically rendered. It's the tone of it, I think, that really changes it."
Sin City is based on the series of noirish graphic novels by Frank Miller, who co-directed the movie with Rodriguez (Desperado, Spy Kids). The film faithfully depicts several scenes of violence, including shootings, dismemberments, decapitations and beatings. But like the comic, the violence is rendered in stark black and white and often in silhouette.
Rodriguez said that the violence is stylized in the manner of his earlier films, including Desperado. "I never got any flak for Desperado . ... At a time when people would criticize guys like Quentin [Tarantino] for violence in films for cutting an ear off, off camera, I was mowing down people in my movies and no one ever said anything because of the tone," he said. "And I think that's the same thing for this, that as violent as it is, like in the comic, it felt tempered by the stylization. And that's why we didn't have any trouble with the MPAA [which gave the movie an R rating] or anything, because it was so stylized that they just went, 'This is all right. ... You don't have to cut a frame of it.'"
But Rodriguez agreed that Sin City isn't for children. "Young people shouldn't see it," he said. "It's a rated R movie. ... I'm not making it for that [family] audience. ... I made this an R. I didn't try and trick people into making it a PG-13. ... If parents let their kids in, that's their decision. But that doesn't mean that I'm going to change how we're going to make the movie. Frank made his thing in a vacuum, ... and I wanted to do the exact same thing for cinema and suffer the consequences. If people don't go see it because it's R, that's fine. It's not appealing to the mass audience. It's really just about making the movie we want to make and telling the story that we want to do. " Sin City opens April 1.
Posted by MK Magazine at March 21, 2005 11:30 AM