Sinner Take All
Robert Rodriguez, comics icon Frank Miller, and the year's coolest cast team up for the gritty, ultraviolent Sin City
By Tom Russo
Trying to locate a city’s seamy underbelly? Consider Frank Miller your MapQuest. A comic-book artist and writer long recognized as one of the boldest stylists and most distinctive voices in the business, Miller has made his name largely by taking readers into all the dark places inhabited by established characters like Batman and Daredevil. Miller’s seminal series Batman: The Dark Knight Returns informed the more anarchic elements of Tim Burton’s Gotham, and 2003’s Daredevil movie was even more directly influenced by his work.
And then there’s Sin City, Miller’s over-the-top, wickedly depraved, yet often dead-on contemporary homage to Hammett, Chandler, Cain, Spillane, and the other greats of hard-boiled crime fiction. First published in 1991, the black-and-white comic quickly became a fan favorite. Now, fittingly, the film noir–channeling series has been adapted to film, with Robert Rodriguez and Miller codirecting.
The $40 million movie incorporates three Sin City stories, anthology-style. “The Hard Goodbye” casts Mickey Rourke as the franchise’s signature character, Marv, a hulkingly grotesque, pill-popping wild man out to avenge a dead prostitute he worshiped. (You might have caught Marv in miniature at your local comic or collectibles shop—he’s the “action figure” in the electric chair who calls you a pansy when you turn on the battery-powered juice. Really.) In “The Big Fat Kill,” Clive Owen is Dwight McCarthy, a marginally better-adjusted but equally lethal nighthawk caught in the bloody fallout from a dirty cop’s slaying by the hookers who rule Sin City. “He’s this twisted Marlowe,” says Owen. “Same noir rhythm, but [operating] in this crazy place.” And finally, in “That Yellow Bastard,” Bruce Willis stars as grizzled, ailing cop John Hartigan, a rare clear-cut good guy in this universe, who pays the price for emphatically incapacitating a corrupt politico’s pedophile son (Nick Stahl).
On the page, these stories spill over with highly stylized visual flourishes. Mood-setting seas of black ink will sometimes be parted, arrestingly, by a character’s image in white silhouette. The requisite noirish rain looks mesmerizingly like a downpour of skewers, stabbing characters as much as drenching them. Embracing the challenge of rendering this world on film, Rodriguez (Once Upon a Time in Mexico, the Spy Kids trilogy) shot the action against green screen and, from his Austin, Texas, mini-studio, worked with effects teams to create backdrops and insert “props” digitally. Not only did the Sin City milieu need to look cool, it needed to work in black and white. And it needed to appeal to an audience that responded with a yawn to a similar exercise in digital creation, last fall’s highly touted Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. “Going in, I knew that even if we shot the books straight we’d have a great movie because of Frank’s characters and original, unpredictable story line,” says Rodriguez. “But that would rob an audience of the experience you get from the books, where the imagery is as heightened as the story. My idea was that it should translate directly to the screen because both mediums are about visual storytelling. But you must have both going on. It can’t just be about the visuals.”
With all that on his plate, Rodriguez knew it would be smart to have help when the film’s sprawling ensemble—which also includes Jessica Alba, Benicio Del Toro, Carla Gugino, Alexis Bledel, Michael Clarke Duncan, Rosario Dawson, Michael Madsen, Elijah Wood, and Brittany Murphy—started asking actor-y questions about motivation and such. He deemed Miller’s participation in the project so essential that when the Directors Guild said it only recognizes “bona fide teams” as codirectors (e.g., the Wachowski brothers), he resigned his membership from the guild. “The actors loved hearing Frank filling in between the panels, telling why he came up with this or that, and things he has planned for books he hasn’t even written yet,” Rodriguez says. “That was stuff I never could have answered. So it was a great complement having him there.”
“I had read those books voraciously, and now here Frank Miller was, essentially adding shots,” says Wood, who was such a fan that he jumped at playing serial sicko Kevin, a role with no dialogue. “It was too much, man. My little geek mind could not contain it.”
Many of Sin City's shots match the comic panels as closely as possible. here, Bruce Willis plays cop John Hartigan.
Miller was hardly this enthusiastic to start. Yes, his comics reputation has prompted Hollywood to call a number of times over the years. He wrote the sequels to RoboCop; took unrealized cracks at adapting his trippy, postapocalyptic samurai saga Ronin and Batman: Year One, both with Requiem for a Dream’s Darren Aronofsky; and stands to have a producing credit on an adaptation of his acclaimed ancient Sparta epic 300, currently being developed by director Zack Snyder (Dawn of the Dead). But Miller felt more protective toward Sin City. As the property’s creator and copyright holder, he controlled its fate. He did briefly float a “Hard Goodbye” script in the mid-’90s, but he shelved it after deciding that “I didn’t want my baby being led out to pasture. It took Robert and his team to convince me that they really wanted to do this [my way], that Marv wouldn’t suddenly get better, that Hartigan wouldn’t suddenly get better, that it wouldn’t be one happy ending after another.”
Rodriguez, 36, nudged open the door with persistence and an irresistibly novel, thoroughly committed pitch. It was in the very same bar in which Miller is now seated, in fact, that Rodriguez first flipped open his laptop and showed Miller a few sample shots he’d put together using some friends—just a quick demo of his vision for translating Sin City panel for panel, word for word, to film.
“Frank was jumping-out-of-his-skin excited,” says Hartnett, who’d been friends with Rodriguez since 1998’s The Faculty, and figured he owed him a favor. “By the time I left, I knew they were going to make the movie.”
Of the seemingly endless procession of hot talent that would follow, many say they were lured by the chance to work with Rodriguez, and to experience firsthand his inventiveness and feel-good on-set vibe. “Robert’s the king of Texas, boy, that’s for sure,” says Madsen, who plays Hartigan’s partner. “He’s got it all figured out.” Rodriguez can even make green-screen work sound dramatically palatable: “Rather than the actors getting lost in the technical exercise, it actually reverses that completely,” he says. Without a physical set to complicate matters, he adds, “all you concentrate on is performance.”
While shooting, Rodriguez had a bank of five video playback monitors on hand to ensure that Miller’s layouts were duplicated exactly. “It was surreal as an actor to be in a scene where we’re matching which arm goes on top of which knee in the comic,” says Spy Kids vet Gugino, whose character, Lucille, appears in two segments, one as—Lord help her—Marv’s parole officer.
To hear cast members talk, though, they really got into the odd specificity of the task. Stahl, whose maimed pedophiliac is transformed by an experimental genetic “cure” into a perverse, Day-Glo-yellow–skinned mix of Jimmy Durante and the Buddha, is one of several actors who spent quality time in the makeup chair in pursuit of the Miller aesthetic. “When you have the makeup on, you take a look in the mirror and completely fall into character,” says Stahl, who supplies one of the calculatedly isolated bursts of color in Sin City. (Well, he had to use his imagination just a little: For technical reasons, he was actually outfitted with blue prosthetics that were color-corrected in postproduction. “I looked like a giant Smurf at first. But once it’s turned to yellow, it changes everything.”)
But that’s gravy. The meat of Sin City is the gleefully ultraviolent stuff. Take the range of indignities suffered by Del Toro’s luckless Jackie Boy, who in the course of one very bad night gets his head dunked in a piss-filled toilet, has his hand sliced off by one of Miho’s swastika-shaped throwing stars, slips on his own blood and winds up sitting on the throwing star . . . and that’s just the beginning. Unless, perhaps, something was cut? “No,” says Del Toro, “I think we shot the whole catastrophe.”
Much like Willis’s little visit to the Gimp’s dungeon in Pulp Fiction, this could well be the Sin City bit that audiences just can’t get out of their heads. Funny thing is, as creatively invested as Miller has been all along, the sequence wouldn’t have been in the Marv-centered movie he once envisioned, before meeting Rodriguez. “The breakthrough notion of making this an anthology—that was Robert, it wasn’t me,” Miller says. “It’s a much better way to approach it, because you feel like you’ve entered a world.” He pauses a beat, then adds, “I’m not saying it’s a pleasant place. But you’ve entered it.”
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