TARANTINO'S CRASH COURSE.

Byline: - Bob Strauss

And then there was the day that Quentin Tarantino came to ``Sin City.'' A longtime friend and collaborator of director Robert Rodriguez - Tarantino wrote and co-starred in ``From Dusk Till Dawn'' and Rodriguez composed some music for ``Kill Bill - Vol. 2,'' among other shared services - the legendary ``Pulp Fiction''-maker was paid $1 to direct a one-day sequence of ``Sin's'' middle chapter, ``The Big Fat Kill.''

Rodriguez had long wanted his friend, a devotee of old-fashioned photochemical filmmaking, to experience the joys of high-definition digital. The scene involved Clive Owen and Benicio Del Toro's characters riding in a car on a rainy night, and although Rodriguez had been shooting such sequences with actors parked on boxes in front of green screens, Tarantino initially insisted on filming them in an actual car.

``After one shot, Quentin said, 'Get 'em out of the car,' '' Rodriguez reports. ``He just handed Clive a steering wheel and got into the whole green-screen filmmaking, which is very different for a guy who's used to real-for-real, shoot-on-film. Every time I'd tell him how we'd do something, he'd say, 'That's cheating!' But he quickly realized that if you really know how to do this digital filmmaking, it really is about getting the best performance, because you don't have to worry about all that other stuff you have to paint in later.''

For the actors, who had been trying to adjust to working with two helmers (comic book creator Frank Miller co-directed the rest of ``Sin City'' with Rodriguez), Quentin's day was even more surreal than usual.

``They're all three different energies,'' Del Toro onomatopoetically explains. ``Quentin is just like, dededededededede. Frank is more like, boom boom boom. And I would say Robert is like, ssshewww. It becomes a kind of orchestra there. If you try to fight it, you'll get brain bubbles. Just go with it, and don't forget what you're there to do, too. Because it was a show, just to watch them. They were just like the Three Stooges, in their way.''

CAPTION(S):

photo

Photo:

TARANTINO