March 31, 2005 - Robert Rodriguez first took the industry by storm in the early '90s when he directed the acclaimed El Mariachi for an astounding 7,000 bucks. Since then, Rodriguez has maintained that "cheaper is better" philosophy with all of his subsequent films. He's probably just about the only director around Tinseltown who regularly delivers his films under his allotted budget. Execs actually have to encourage him to go back and spend more money.

Like George Lucas, Rodriguez has also become an innovator in the world of digital video. He knows this is the wave of the future and, like Lucas, has already left the days of filming on celluloid in the distant past. His latest endeavor is his most ambitious effort to date. Sin City takes the digital medium to a whole new height, using live actors in a setting that was almost entirely created in post-production. Based on the series of graphic novels by Frank Miller, Rodriguez has taken the adaptation process one step further by actually inviting Miller to co-direct the film right alongside him. What better way to do the original material justice? The DGA didn't quite see it that way, but Rodriguez has never been one to let too many obstacles stand in the way. He dropped his DGA membership like a bad habit and started preparing to make the film.

Sin City is a wildly stylish and highly original world steeped in the film noir fantasy world Miller created in the comics. The men are tough talking and hard living, the women are sexy and dangerous. Sin City features a massive ensemble cast that includes Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke, Clive Owen, Rosario Dawson, Josh Hartnett, Michael Madsen, Jaime King, Nick Stahl, Benicio Del Toro, Michael Clarke Duncan, Carla Gugino, Powers Boothe, Rutger Hauer Brittany Murphy, Jessica Alba and a host of others.

Rodriguez spoke to press recently about the ambitious film at the Four Seasons in Los Angeles and IGN FilmForce was there to suck out as much info as possible about Sin City.

Rodriguez says that the scope of this project was pretty overwhelming. "It's probably the hardest I've worked on a movie. I thought it was going to be easy. 'Hey, just copy what's out of the book, and there you go.' It is a lot of work. I think somewhere near the end I realized, it's funny because it's sort of a trilogy all released the same day, so it was kind of like doing three movies in one."

	-Dimension Films Rodriguez (left) on the set with Frank Miller (right)

Rodriguez loved the Sin City books and wanted to see the books translated to film as is. "I was a fan of this one. People thought such a great idea to make it into a movie. It took me years to figure it out. I've been buying it since '92, and I always wanted to do a film noir and never put two and two together that this should be the thing until just a couple of years ago… The time was right to make it look like the book, and the more I looked at the book to adapt it, I realize it didn't need adapting. It was visual storytelling and it worked so well on the page, I thought it would work exactly the same way on the screen..."

"Seriously, what would have happened is that if you liked the Sin City book, you take it to a studio, they'd buy it, they would give it to a writer who would then change it, because he would have to earn his pay on it. [He] wouldn't do what I did, which was put the book up and transcribe it directly word for word and then edit it down to pace. We'd just get further and further away from what you like to begin with. So I said, 'Let's not change anything. Let's not develop it. Let's start shooting right out of the book. There won't even be a screenplay, let's shoot right out of the book.' And Frank was like, 'What? What planet is this?' He was so thrilled and when it started working, he saw how the translation was working… I wanted to turn cinema into the comic. Not take it and suddenly turn it into a regular movie. It just wouldn't have been right."

One part of maintaining the loyalty of the books was to bring Miller in on the project from the get-go. Instead of simply using Miller as a writer and advisor, he figured the project would be better served by using Miller as the co-director. "It was very complementary. I wanted him to be a director rather that just there as a writer, a producer… If he was a director, everyone would have to listen to him. I didn't want it to be Robert Rodriguez's Sin City. I loved the book so much, I wanted it to be as close to something that he would do in the movie as possible.... I tried not to do any contradictory directing. If I told an actor one thing, he wouldn't tell them the exact opposite… He let me handle all the visual stuff. He was really there working with the actors, knowing the characters so well. He was able to tell them things. I didn't know anything about the characters cause it's not all in the book, a lot of it's in his head, and they loved to be able to know where the character was going in future volumes, or what he was thinking when he put it together, and how it should be performed. And I told him, because I used to be a cartoonist, 'It's not very different from drawing, directing…' He was floored that it was so similar and that he was able to jump right in and learn how to make, basically, a Star Wars movie first time out. And within a couple of weeks, he knew how to do it."