'Sin City' Not A Hollywood Film

The film "Sin City" opened at No. 1 in the box office and has grossed more than $50 million in less than two weeks.

It's directed by Robert Rodriguez, and stars Bruce Willis, who has received critical acclaim for his role as the downtrodden police detective John Hartigan.

When you see how the movie was made, you'll be even more amazed at the job Willis does. As reports, "Sin City" is a new kind of film, different from any that's been made before.

Are these heroes different from Superman, Batman or Spider-Man? "Well, it's different that 'Sin City' is part of a newer breed of comic books that's come along,that's not tied down by the old rules," says Miller.

"His comics always stood out for me, from other comics in a comic store," says Rodriguez, who wrote his own comic strip as a teenager, and was a fan of "Sin City" from the moment he read it.

"[It was] very dark, just black and white. Hard men, beautiful women, vintage cars. I've been collecting them for about 12 years. It was much bolder than anything we were doing in cinema. I thought, 'I want to see this on a movie screen.'"

The film version of "Sin City" is true to its graphic novel origin: seedy, dark and violent. It's a world of criminals, prostitutes and corruption, alongside the most unlikely of heroes. Police Det. John Hartigan, played by Willis, willingly goes to jail for a crime he didn't commit to save a young girl's life.

Rodriguez approached Miller a little more than a year ago, looking to make his books into a film. "I told him it would be a shame to take this and squeeze this into a movie," says Rodriguez. "We should take cinema and all the tricks of cinema to turn movies into your book. And make a living graphic novel."

But Miller says he had heard this many times before: "I was not an easy catch."

"He sounded so weary when I called him," says Rodriguez. "The, you know, ah, but we're gonna have to write a script. Then we're gonna send that to the studio. And then they're gonna say it's too violent or it's too … I said, 'Frank, there ain't no script. We're gonna shoot right out of the book.'" Rodriguez is the rare filmmaker who can keep a promise like that. He's a one-man studio, working on film's digital frontier. "Sin City" was shot in front of an empty green screen with almost no sets at all. The digital background and special effects were created later and super-imposed in editing. Rodriguez went so far as to make Miller co-director on the film — in order to faithfully recreate the look of "Sin City."

This unconventional plan was nothing new to Rodriguez. He began making movies before he was a teenager, casting his nine brothers and sisters at their home in Austin, Texas.

In film school, at the University of Texas in Austin, he created his first 16-millimeter short, titled "Bedhead."

In 1991, at the age of 23, Rodriguez financed his next project with fees he earned as a human guinea pig in a clinical study for a pharmaceutical company. He raised $7,000 and made "El Mariachi." After a screening at the Sundance Film Festival, it was bought by Columbia Pictures, and became the lowest budget movie ever released by a major studio.

Rodriguez had made it in Hollywood. But instead of moving to California, he brought Hollywood to him. He created his "Troublemaker Studios" in Austin, right on the property where he lives with his wife and four children.

Now, at 36, he's made a name for himself by getting big results out of small budgets. He has written, directed and edited such movies as "Desperado," "Once Upon a Time in Mexico" and the "Spy Kids" series. Rodriguez also launched the movie career of George Clooney, casting and directing him in the vampire thriller "From Dusk Til Dawn."

Rodriguez brought his same eye for casting to the "Sin City" project. Willis was the No. 1 target when it came to Hartigan's character. "You have to find almost a very iconic actor to play such an iconic character in the books," says Rodriguez of Willis. "You could just see him doing it."

Rodriguez assembled a short test clip of how he envisioned the movie would look to lure Willis in. "I got a call from my office, saying Robert Rodriguez wanted to come out and talk to me about a film he was doing," says Willis. "He had a DVD he wanted to show me."

"I expected him to come on board because I know Bruce loves film noir," says Rodriguez. "He watches the opening scene and sees the black and white, sees the voice-over, sees the film noir."

"About a minute in, I said, 'Hang on a second.' I hit pause, and said, 'Whatever else I see on this on this, I want you to know I'm in...I want to do this,'" says Willis.

Miller, working as a first-time director, says he was intimidated when Willis came on board: "The day he was coming in, I had real butterflies. Bruce was our generation's Humphrey Bogart. And naturally, I thought he was gonna wipe the floor with me."

Adds Miller, "I see him as carrying the same kind of weight [as Humphrey Bogart], and being able to assume the heroic role - and as the tough guy - with all its texture."

Rather asked Willis about the lofty comparison. "One of my heroes. One of my heroes for sure," says Willis. "I think that one of the things I try to bring to all my films is the idea that I don't want the audience to see me acting. Don't want the audience to see the cracks. I want to be the guy. I want to live the guy. And I think Bogart always was that."

With its violence and interwoven story lines, "Sin City" has been compared with another Willis hit from the '90s, "Pulp Fiction." Willis believes that movies like "Sin City" might never have been made, without that movie's success. "It spawned a whole generation of other films that allowed independent filmmakers to be treated with integrity, with respect," says Willis. Rodriguez and Miller assembled an all-star cast around Willis, including Benicio del Toro, Clive Owen, Mickey Rourke and Jessica Alba.

The actors' biggest challenge was working on Rodriguez's green-screen set. "We shot it in one room, one green-walled room," says Rodriguez. "Just the way you would shoot a weatherman in front of the weather chart and put in the map later. That's how we shot the whole movie."

The green-screen scenes were brought back to Rodriguez's edit house, where he added the backgrounds and effects by computer. He shows Rather an example of how this works. "That's pretty amazing," says Rather.

Not only is it amazing, it's efficient. Since few sets were physically constructed, and so much of the detail work was done in post-production, the actors finished in just days, instead of weeks, as is in a typical Hollywood film.

"We can shoot very fast. I mean, I think Jessica Alba was on the set seven days," says Rodriguez. "Bruce was there 10, Benicio was there four. I mean, you're shooting at an ungodly speed."

Not only did the actors spend very few days on the set, thanks to the computer imagery, they didn't even have to be there at the same time. One fight between Mickey Rourke and Elijah Wood was completely fake: the two never even met until they were introduced at the movie's premiere.

"How difficult is this for the actors?" asks Rather. "They're just in a room. They're not out in the snow?"

"That's the thing, they're terrific actors," says Rodriguez.

"A number of the actors told me they felt more comfortable in their roles," says Miller. "Didn't go back to trailers for five hours. The make-believe was working better for them."

"Everything else is just stripped away, because the actors are just dealing with each other, which is really great for performance," adds Rodriguez. "It's very much like theater. And they got into it that way."

Rodriguez says Willis adapted particularly well: "I could tell he was giving a performance that he hadn't given before. And he just loved the material that much that he really wanted not even to do it justice, but to take it to the next level, which is really fantastic."

True to his formula, Rodriguez made "Sin City" on a tight budget: just over $40 million. In less than two weeks, it's already made more than it cost to shoot. By contrast, last week's release, "Sahara," cost an estimated $130 million to create and grossed $18 million its first weekend.

Rodriguez and Miller are already talking about a "Sin City" sequel and they aren't planning to change a thing.

"This is just the new model of how to make a movie," says Rodriguez. "You're in my garage. This is where I made my whole movie."

"So for real, this is not a Hollywood film?" asks Rather.

"Not at all," says Rodriguez. "This couldn't be made in Hollywood, and they all know that. I had a studio chief from a big studio come up to me and say, 'I've seen the materials. I've seen the trailer. The earthquake is coming. We can feel change is on the horizon.'"