When we think of hard-boiled detectives, Humphrey Bogart smoking a cigarette in a fedora casts a long shadow. Though Bogie has no straight equivalent in the world of Sin City – the closest thing we have to heroism here is vigilantism and psychopathic ennui – the noir tradition is still not going down without a fight. Most of this has to do with a keen appreciation for the balance of style and substance; as Miller himself acknowledges, the visuals in Sin City are almost a character in themselves.
“That started in the first film,” Rodriguez recalls. “I remember we had a guide from Frank’s books of what should be in colour but then as I was editing I would be spot colouring some other pieces and I would send them to Frank to make sure he thought that was cool because I was starting to take some liberty, and he said, ‘You’re using colour as a weapon. I like that.’ So we kind of mapped out where it would be and I would show him ideas and he would be, ‘They’re a no, but that one’s good, let’s make Goldie [Jaime King] actually have colour.’”
“That was one of the most wonderful touches he made,” Miller agrees. “And it’s almost unnoticeable, but when she steps into the light it’s the climax of the Marv story. She enters with the white hair she has throughout the story and she emerges from the light with gold hair.”
“And he knows who it is,” Rodriquez finishes. “He thinks it’s somebody else but when she comes forward the colour helps him realise. Things that you can play with later. That was a huge thing, what was going to be in colour, it wasn’t in the book but it helped make it more cinematic.”
Many characters return for the sequel, including Jessica Alba’s Nancy (who graced more dormitory walls in the Noughties than anyone else on the planet), Powers Boothe’s gravel-voiced Senator Roark and Mickey Rourke’s homicidal hard-arse, Marv. We also find several new characters, thanks to the addition of entirely new storylines. After establishing so vibrant a world, devising fresh content turns out to be something close to second nature for the film-makers.
“Oh, it was like the firing of a lock really,” Miller says. “Sin City stories occur to me pretty naturally.”
“We were ready to do it I think in 2007,” Rodriquez recalls. “But really the timing worked out just perfect. I mean we wouldn’t have had this cast back then. Everything kind of fell into place, in terms of the extra stories. I mean Frank had to write new stories that we were happy with because we wanted it not all to be from the books, we wanted to surprise people, so two stories from the book, two stories are new. One time Frank started telling me, ‘I’ve got this character named Johnny and he’s just got this coin, and he’s going to get it all back’, and I was like, ‘Keep going…’ He talked a lot of it out there, and I played it to him later and he would embellish it. It was really fun to be in on the process and see how he creates. A lot of it had to be drawn on the set because there weren’t books to go off, so that was a thrill, asking Frank Miller for an original Frank Miller Sin City drawing out on the set. And he would just start sketching it out!”
Of the pair, Miller is far-and-away the most reticent (“I’m not going to tell anyone my story,” he says when discussion turns to talk of the cast). This isn’t entirely surprising, given that a writer’s lot is usually to hole away alone in a room conjuring a story, whereas Rodriguez is long accustomed to fronting up to the media; the man knows how to spin a sell.
“Well, we shot this one in 3D and some things were easier,” Rodriguez reflects. “This time we had the very latest cameras, they’re like Ferraris, you can shoot several cameras at once. They also didn’t get in the way so for some things, the technology made it easier. And all the actors just knew what they were doing. The first time, no one had done green screen really, this was only ten years ago but people were like, ‘What are we doing? Where are the props?’”
Sumptuous (and deliciously over-the-top) as the film may appear, visuals can only get you so far. In A Dame To Kill For, fresh content weaves in and out of story-lines that carry on from the original film, proving once again that the past can haunt you.
“Well when I originally put together the first film’s script to show Frank I chose the other stories, because ‘Dame’ was the longest of them and it would’ve had to have been truncated too much to fit into the first Sin City even though it was the second book, so we did the Marv one for the first. ‘Dame’, I thought, ‘Oh, that’s going to take up the rest of the movie, let me skip that.’ Frank and I had said from the beginning that it would be a sequel and that it would be a great sequel because it answers questions.”
BY ADAM NORRIS
