Nine years have passed betweenSin Cityfilms, giving most of us ample time for Nick Stahl’s fluorescent Yellow Bastard or Elijah Wood’s mute cannibal Kevin to exit our collective nightmares. It was a movie that broke a lot of expectations of just what an action movie could be – the saturated colours, the vivid, cartoonish violence, and crooked cops and cynical strippers vying for footholds in a city that is half New York, half Pandæmonium (with a touch of Transmetropolitan thrown in for Warren Ellis fans). Now, creators Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez bring usA Dame To Kill For.
When we think of hard-boiled detectives, Humphrey Bogart wearing a fedora and smoking a cigarette 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 not going down without a fight. Most of this has to do with a keen appreciation for the balance of style and substance.
“That started in the first film,” Rodriguez says. “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.”
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 turned out to be something close to second nature for the filmmakers.
“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,” Rodriguez 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. 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 [are] 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! That was the biggest thrill
Sin City: A Dame To Kill For (dir. Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller) is incinemas Thursday September 18.
