OTHER TECH

You've made three El Mariachi and three Spy Kids films, and now I hear you're making Sin City 2 and Sin City 3. What is it about trilogies that you find so attractive? I was glad when I did Once Upon a Time in Mexico because it made El Mariachi and Desperado feel more complete to me. On their own, they're just two strange movies floating around, but when you add a third one, then it's three strange movies [laughs]. Same with Spy Kids. With Sin City, I wasn't sure it would do well since it was going to be so experimental, so I did a trilogy all at once by putting three stories into the one movie. That way I wouldn't have to do a second and a third film. But since it did well, we'll probably do at least one more, maybe two.

Since he directed part of Sin City, will Quentin Tarantino be involved in the sequel? I'm not sure yet. I'm actually doing a double feature with him right now called Grind House. It'll be like the old theaters that showed a couple of exploitation movies together - all lurid stuff. I'm directing one and he's directing the other. And we'll have fake trailers in between for movies that don't exist yet that we've always wanted to do, and it'll be like a night at the movies.

What genres will they be? Horror/thriller. They might even be genre-bending.

Is there a director's cut of Sin City coming in December? Yes, it will be a special edition with all the extras on it. I shot all three stories from the graphic novels knowing that when I put them together into one movie I'd have to cut some things out just to keep it flowing better. But what's great about DVD is that we knew we could include a second disc where the stories are separated into longer, complete versions.

And the director's cut? Well, those are pretty much the director's cut. The other one on Disc 1 will just be a finished, polished version of the movie with all the extra little fixes I still need to do.

How much longer do the segments run than the theatrical version? I don't know. There are a lot of extra sequences, though. Mickey Rourke probably has the most because his character was in one of the longer books and yet that book ended up being one of the shorter sections in the theatrical cut. So it has a lot of great stuff with him.

What will the extras be? There will be a commentary by me and [graphic-novel writer/artist] Frank Miller, and then a more technical commentary by me, joined by Quentin for his section. Usually on DVDs I do a 10-minute film school, but this one will be more like a 20-minute one because of all the ground I have to cover on how all the stuff was done. There'll be a cooking school - Sin City Breakfast Tacos - because that's all I ate making the movie.

Then there's my two favorite extras. Because high-def video is so inexpensive, you can just keep rolling the cameras, so when Quentin was directing I kept shooting. In between takes, you see him walk into the shot and talk with the actors - Benicio [Del Toro] and Clive [Owen]. You see them throwing ideas back and forth, and it's like you're sitting in front of the camera for that whole 18 minute take watching these guys work together. It's really cool; it's a great film school in itself.

The other extra addresses the complaint that the only thing about watching movies at home is that you miss the audience. Austin, Texas has the best audience in the world - especially for our premiere because we made the movie there, the actors were there, and we held it in a 1,500-seat theater. So I recorded the audience in 5.1 so you can watch the movie as if you were there with everybody reacting to it for the first time. That's really fun.

I've heard that you sometimes edit your movies at home. Oh, I edit everything at home.