In what was one of SXSW's most eagerly anticipated panels,
Grindhouse 101,
Robert Rodriguez and
Aint It Cool News' Harry Knowles delivered an array treats to a packed auditorium. After a candid conversation about the origins of the genre, they went on to screen a few trailers from old Grindhouse films, the finalists of SXSW's
Grindhouse trailer competition, a tauntingly brief and extremely gory clip from Rodriguez's upcoming
Planet Terror (his half of
Grindhouse), and a fake trailer by
Eli Roth created to run at the opening of the new film.
The winning grindhouse trailer was
Hobo With A Shotgun, and Josh Tyler of
Cinema Blend has them all up - along with the real trailers - in his incredibly detailed
review of the panel.
Ain't It Cool News has a
recap of the panel up as well, including a pretty spot-on review of the
Planet Terror clip:
"Rodriguez used Paul Verhoeven squibs, man. These bullet hits are so goddamn gory and bloody. Not since ROBOCOP have we seen squibs like this. The sequence took place at night as the survivors caravan down a road, people on motorcycles shooting as they ride and a couple big trucks filled with dozens of people. The majority of blood was in the hits... These big fucking trucks would smack into zombies and they'd just obliterate into red liquid."
Rodriguez and Knowles talked in detail about the technical aspects of what set the original films apart visually (the aging tendencies of the different film stocks, the green lines and shades of red and yellow that would appear) and audibly (the audio pops and drops that occurred as the films lost individual frames over time). Rodriguez termed all of these imperfections "fantastic accidents," and said that for him, "it was magic to see that: that film is organic and never stays the same."
Sometimes, entire missing or damaged reels would result in the plot progressing unnaturally fast. Rodriguez used this idea as well. As Josh Tyler notes:
[Planet Terror] has been written as if an entire reel is missing. One moment everyone hates each other, the next there’s a jump and everyone has become friends, losers are suddenly awesome heroes, and the attacking zombies are about to be very dead. As Robert says, the section of a movie where everyone gears up to start kicking ass is boring. So he’s giving you the setup and then going straight to the payoff, skipping all the boring junk in between.
The two offered a sense not just of the aesthetics of the genre, but also the culture that surrounded it, and the creative decisions made ultimately to attract audiences. As Harry Knowles said, the films themselves were simply based on "crazy ideas, lurid ideas to draw people into theaters" - sometimes even just a good poster. Rodriguez admitted that the
posters he created for
Grindhouse were put together even before shooting had begun, and that once he could visualize the image of a woman with a gun in place of her leg, he knew he had a story he wanted to tell.
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posted by Durier Ryan @ 3/13/2007 03:37:00 AM
Comments (1)
this movie looks like it kicks ass. i only hope the can of whoopass lasts. exhibit A:
http://www.stuffmagazine.com/articles/index.aspx?id=1746&src=jh3
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posted by Jazzy Jeff @ 3/13/2007 11:43 AM
