Nailing a serial thriller

WALK down the right back alley in “Sin City,” as a poster for the movie that came out Friday grandly proclaims, and you can find anything. Well, maybe not anything.

To be specific, graphic novelist Frank Miller’s hard-boiled wonderland is a place of vice, corruption and brutal street justice. To wit: For “Sin City’s” big-screen adaptation, Clive Owen’s character, Dwight, fronts a gaggle of gun-toting prostitutes, a battle-scarred Bruce Willis (as Det. John Hartigan) gets pistol-whipped and hanged, Jessica Alba pole dances in a rhinestone bikini and cowgirl chaps, and Benicio Del Toro, in a signature screw-loose role, has his head unceremoniously dunked in a toilet. A menagerie of other rough-trade characters played by Mickey Rourke, Elijah Wood and Alexis Bledel don’t get off so easy.

Starkly rendered in black and white (with select flourishes of color) and shot on high-definition digital video, “Sin City” may be the most faithful comic book adaptation ever made. Panel by panel, down to the last diagonal sheet of rain and stinking garbage heap, three volumes of the popular series were painstakingly “translated” to film. That’s in part because Miller was permitted to adapt his own material, teaming with Robert Rodriguez (of “Once Upon a Time in Mexico” and “Spy Kids” fame) for his directorial debut. But if not for the confluence of a lot of cutting-edge technology and un-Hollywood ego suppression, some pretty persuasion by Rodriguez and the wide studio latitude Miramax granted the filmmakers, Miller’s creation would probably remain the exclusive province of his devoted fans.

“I decided years ago that there would never be a ‘Sin City’ movie because it would never be done faithfully,” Miller explained by phone from New York. “ ‘Sin City’ was my baby. If it came out and was some crappy thing that winked at itself, I wouldn’t have been able to look at myself in the mirror.” Rangy Texan Rodriguez, on a hot streak after the $100-million-plus successes of his “Spy Kids” trilogy and “Mexico,” had other ideas. “I didn’t want to take ‘Sin City’ and make it into a movie,” Rodriguez said. “I didn’t want to adapt it or squeeze it down. I wanted to take cinema and make it a moving graphic novel.”

After tracking Miller down through his lawyer and comic book editor, Rodriguez made his pitch. “His book was bolder and more visionary than anything anyone was trying to do in cinema,” he remembered. “I said, ‘We could reinvent cinema just by reshooting what you did page for page.’ ” The result is a $45-million art-house movie on steroids -- an experimental marriage of green-screen special effects and film noir shot cheap and fast on Rodriguez’s Austin soundstage with big-name stars.

For Miller, 48, the Stanley Kubrick of the comic book world, “Sin City” represents the culmination of a tortured relationship with Hollywood. After several bruising experiences working for the film industry -- notably, writing the story and original script for 1990’s disappointing “RoboCop 2” -- he vowed never to eat lunch in this town again.

“For me, it’s been a real joy and an unexpected one,” Miller said. “There’s always wasted opportunities, squandered moments. And there’s ones like this where this crazy Texan showed up and suddenly ‘Sin City’ is a movie.” Echoing a famous line from his graphic novel, he added: “I turned a certain corner and I was in a whole different world.”

Stumbling blocks

In 1991, Miller wrote and drew “Sin City” with the intention of self-publishing a quick-hit, 48-page serial. Arranged around the exploits of a barely sane, tough-as-bricks hit man named Marv, out to avenge the murder of a prostitute, the first installment, “The Hard Goodbye,” ran nearly 200 pages. It eventually spawned seven volumes that feature recurring characters, baroque violence and interlocking themes.

There were never any plans to make it into a film.

Enter Robert Rodriguez. In 2003, the director, intent on adapting “Sin City,” met the reluctant writer-artist at his favorite Hell’s Kitchen watering hole to show him a homemade digital mock-up of the film on his laptop computer. Although visually impressive, the answer from Miller -- who had never heard of Rodriguez as a director -- was still a firm “No.”

“Even after seeing the wonderful stuff he showed me, I still turned him down,” said Miller. “I thought all moviemaking was Hollywood. I was that paranoid about it.” Undaunted, Rodriguez invited the comics auteur to come to his home studio in Texas to observe what he referred to as a “test with a couple of friends” -- actors Josh Hartnett and Marley Shelton.

“Usually, an artist has to assume all the risk,” Rodriguez said, recalling the elaborate courtship. “He has to sign away everything and hope you don’t screw up the movie. I knew I had to reverse that to where I would take the risk, pay for the shoot, shoot the material, cut it together and do the score. Only if he really loved it would we make a deal. And if not, he could keep it as a short film to show his friends.”

As Miller recalled, the gamble paid off: “In 10 hours, we shot this scene and I got to work with the two actors. Watching the whole green-screen approach and having Robert describe how the scene was going to work really put the hook in my mouth -- just the way he planned it!” The scene became the movie’s opening sequence. “Turned out there was no difference between that test and the first day of principle photography,” Miller said.

For Rodriguez, an exuberant, cowboy-hat-wearing 37-year-old -- moreover, a guy whose cellphone ring tone is the opening guitar riff from AC/DC’s “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap” -- the next logical step was to invite Miller to share directing credit.

“I wanted it to be ‘Frank Miller’s Sin City,’ ” explained Rodriguez at his suite at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills. “I really wanted him to be there as a director rather than as a writer or producer. Otherwise, they might just stick him in a corner and feed him a sandwich every once in a while. As a director, everyone would have to listen to him.” What they had not figured on, however, was violating the Directors Guild of America’s co-directing policy. “I didn’t know it was against the rules until a week before we were about to shoot,” said Rodriguez. But by that point, the choice was no choice.

“Nothing was gonna stop us,” Rodriguez said. “This movie just felt too new, too right and too experimental. You think, ‘Do I want to make movies or do I want to belong to a club?’ The rules -- which say the two co-directors have to have been a duo before the movie -- are behind the times.” The director resigned his DGA membership. “You think about the trade-off,” he continued. “This movie wouldn’t exist otherwise.” “I was moved,” said Miller, sounding both grateful and sardonic. “I kept on saying, ‘What a mensch!’ ”

Star bursts

The movie began to take shape quickly when word of the production spread. Actors were signed on to come and work in bursts. Jessica Alba agreed to film for seven days, Del Toro came in for four and Willis was contracted for 10 days’ work, during which they shot an average of 65 setups a day. “That’s like two months’ shooting in Rodriguez time,” the director said with a laugh.

Having two directors on the set proved a useful resource for members of the cast who wanted to understand more about their character’s back story or motivation in a particular scene.

“It was very self-indulgent because we got to talk each director’s ear off about our characters,” said Alba, Sin City’s token stripper with a heart of gold. “It was so narcissistic.”

“It was like having a historian there all the time,” added Brittany Murphy, playing a lovelorn waitress caught in a love triangle between Owen’s and Del Toro’s characters.

Miller’s most immediate on-set impact, however, was on storyboards. “He’d draw something out and then the next day, he’d be like, ‘This is actually a good shot,’ ” recalled Rosario Dawson, whose character, Gail, is something like the CEO of a platoon of tough-talking, pistol-packing prostitutes. “And then he’d just set it up.” Rodriguez’s running dispute with Quentin Tarantino about the future of cinema being digital led Rodriguez to invite Tarantino (with whom he had previously collaborated on “Four Rooms” and “From Dusk Till Dawn”) to sit in as a “Special Guest Director” for a scene in which Owen and Del Toro argue in a CGI car.

“He came in so prepared, he made Frank and I look like bums,” said Rodriguez. “He had every shot prepared, all this visionary stuff. Frank just said, ‘This is the most fun I’ve ever had in my life!’ ”

“[Tarantino] would come over and ask questions -- he was very solicitous,” Miller said. “Not arrogant at all. He brought his own ideas about how to treat the sequence -- good ideas.”

Shot against a green background screen, the movie’s various “sets” were almost entirely virtual, added in by computer later -- a technique Rodriguez had perfected while shooting his “Spy Kids” trilogy. The upshot was that many actors who share screen time never physically met.

“I did the shot with Mickey Rourke -- who had been in the shot three months earlier,” said Dawson. “I’m throwing handcuffs to him [in the scene] and I was never in the room with him.”

A Miramax miracle

WHILE Miller and Rodriguez have entered into a de facto mutual admiration society for all the obvious reasons, Rodriguez takes pains to point out the film could never have been made by any studio other than Miramax, headed by departing honchos Harvey and Bob Weinstein.

“They give me so much freedom,” he said. “With Bob, it’s like, ‘I’m here at the bar with somebody you gotta meet.’ He comes in on a Saturday, meets Frank Miller, looks at the tests and says, ‘You can make the movie.’ ”

“You don’t get that anywhere,” Rodriguez added. “That’s why wherever those guys go, I’ll follow them.”

But at the end of the day, all parties say Miller’s input proved to be the crucial X-factor. “I think having Frank there was absolutely essential,” said Owen, who had just seen a final cut of the film and admitted to feeling “blown away.” “He’s the guy that conjured up this crazy world. I have to say, I think the guy’s a genius.”

*

On the Web

To see scenes from “Sin City,” visit calendarlive.com/sincity.