Sin City: A Dame To Kill For Press Conference

sin_city_2_main_frank_miller_jessica_alba

I had the pleasure to attend the press conference for Sin City: A Dame to Kill For with Directors Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez, and also part of the cast (Eva Green, Jessica Alba, Josh Brolin, Joseph Gordon-Levitt). The films looks fantastic, and it seemed to be a project everyone involved was excited to be a part of. Here is what they had to say about the latest entry in the film series inspired by Frank Miller’s graphic novels.

Where does Sin City fits in among the rest of your creations?

Frank Miller: “When I first decided I wanted to do comic books I was six years old, and I decided I wanted to do this for the rest of my life. What happened was I grew up on Superboy comics, and then Spiderman and that sort of thing, and after a while they started to seem kind of juvenile for me. But I kept drawing and that emerged into doing crime comics. Years passed, and after doing comic books and movies, I decided I wanted to do one comic book that could not possible be made into a movie, and ended up being Sin City. Then this guy shows up (pointing at director Robert Rodriguez)” (laughs).

The story finds Nancy in very new places this time around:

Jessica Alba: “Yes in the first film she starts as a little girl, and she is a victim, she is kidnapped, and later she was tortured and she gets saved by Bruce Willis’ character Hardigan. But this one starts after he kills himself , the love of her life is gone and she is devastated, she is an alcoholic, she is still dancing (and isn’t happy about it). But it was cool to be able to take someone from this sweet, innocent naive victim to this very powerful warrior who takes her life on her own hands and gets revenge.”

Miller: “ I already have her next chapter planned so please show up for the next movie” (laughs)

sin_city_2_josh_brolin_jessica_alba_frank_miller

Josh for you to step foot into this city Frank has created, with unnaturalistic dialogue, can you talk about the challenge and the opportunity to do that?

Josh Brolin: “As an actor for over 30 years, in every movie you try to figure out how to make it more naturalistic, more organic. (This movie) It’s art!, you have to find the cadence, the cadence can’t come to you. It’s the kind of movie that you have to dive into, you can’t really manipulate the movie or Frank Miller’s mind, it’s impossible!”

Miller: “Many have tried!” (laughs)

sin_city_2_joseph_gordon_levitt_eva_green

Coming in was there a scene that you read and went “I can’t wait to do that” or “that’s going to be tricky”?

Eva Green: “I was very nervous for the scene after she (Ava) tries to shoot Dwight and she is talking to the cops and she is lying. I’ve got the challenge on this film to be believable and had to lie all the time, to play all this different women, it’s a challenge. And she is so bad! (laughs) so that was very fun. She knows no conscience, no sense of right or wrong, she is pretty evil.”

Your character has such a great rival, what was it on the page that you liked the most about your character?

Joseph Gordon-Levitt: The thing I liked on the page the most about my character was on the very cover of the script where it said: “Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez” (laughs). I remember when the first one came out, and going to the movie theater saying to myself “I’ve never seen anything like this, it’s somewhere in between a cartoon and a live action movie”. A lot of actors grew up watching cartoons, and as a kid you want to be a cartoon. Then you settle just to be a live action actor. But in this case you become a cartoon in a way, I love that. Actually I really loved acting in just the green environment, just fully embracing an abandonment of realism, like “we are going into a movie now, we are going to Sin City, into a graphic novel”. The sky is not fully detailed is just black, and the snow is pure white, we are not in the real world, and isn’t that what we are looking for when we go to see movies?. Escaping the real world into something simpler than that, more beautiful, even darker. And this movie delivers that.”

sin_city_2_frank_miller_robert_rodriguez

If there’s a third one, do we have to wait another nine years?

Miller: “No, it will be out on Tuesday” (laughs).

Robert Rodriguez:No we want to to go right away, but this one has to be supported, that would get us to do another one. It was a lot of fun doing this, I think the technology has gotten to a place that I think everyone (actors) understand the green screen. That was one of the phenomenons I saw on the first one. (About Sin City) No one was shooting with green screen back then, digital was brand new, I had just done the first digital 3D movie which was Spy Kids 3D, and it was mostly done on a green screen. And I thought “I think I can do a whole movie on a green screen with this digital cameras, I think I can do Sin City”. So the actors showed up and they were going: “What is this green screen? How is this going to work?” That was just ten years ago, and that shows how much things have changed. And everyone did fantastic, but I really noticed it this time around. Everyone showed up just at another level, because they had done green screen by then, and they knew how it was going to translate into Sin City, how it would feel like, and so the performances were just so much better and I was blown away by that.”

Sin City: A Dame To Kill For Opens in theaters August 22, 2014

 

I originally wrote this article for ScreenInvasion.com. You can find it here: http://screeninvasion.com/2014/08/sin-city-a-dame-to-kill-for-press-conference/