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When Frank Miller first created the world of Sin City, it was made to be virtually unfilmable. Until director Robert Rodriguez was able to prove that the world of Sin City would translate to film in a very specific way. But how exactly was Robert Rodriguez able to take Frank Millers vision and adapt Sin City so flawlessly to the big screen?
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In 2005, the film industry was changing
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Computer-generated images and digital effects were evolving on almost a daily basis
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However, one film released that year offered a potential future filled with more than just CGI characters and an increased story scope
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This movie presented a case for a more avant-garde Hollywood, a paradise of auteurship, creative vision, and bold experiments
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Tragically, that future didn't exactly manifest in the way we all thought it could
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But the promise of Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez's Sin City still looms large, even today
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Take it off. What? If I didn't come like that, you're bleeding all over it
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Frank Miller is inarguably one of the greatest comic book writers and artists of all time
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However, in the late 80s, he left the industry for greener pastures, ones gilded with tinsel
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However, Miller became disillusioned with the film industry after repeated negative experiences
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Miller returned to comics in 1991. The project he chose to pursue was titled Sin City
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A black-and-white crime noir book, this project and its eventual sequels would detail hard-nosed
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criminals and morally gray antiheroes as they attempted to survive in a world as broken and
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complicated as they were. The true achievement of these books, though, was the way that Frank Miller reinvented his
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art style. Silhouettes, inverted black and white shapes, and focus on patterning and repetition would be what would set Sin City apart
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And more importantly for the context of this video, he created something that was purposefully unfilmable
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That is, at least until Robert Rodriguez got to town. There's really no need to let anybody have a baby
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And I held to that fine until this Rodriguez guy started hunting me down like a wild dog
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Rodriguez who was one of the darlings of the 90s indie film community and then effortlessly transitioned into an A director contacted Miller about turning the books into a film in the year 2002
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However, Rodriguez knew that Miller's previous history with Hollywood would make it a tough sell
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so he showed up to the meeting with some test footage that he'd shot, mimicking some of Miller's
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hallmark stylistic tics. Characters walking in hyper-stylized rain, hard contour lighting, and white silhouettes
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He whipped open his laptop, and he'd already You've done some test shots that really look damn good
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I don't want to make Robert Rodriguez's Sin City. I want to make Frank Miller's Sin City
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Miller was so blown away by the examples. He agreed to let Rodriguez run with the books
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but he would only sign on the dotted line if he could be intimately involved in the creative process
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He wanted to co-direct. Rodriguez didn't miss a beat. They were off to the races
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They were going to make a film out of Sin City featuring direct translations of the stories
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The Hard Goodbye, The Big Fat Kill, That Yellow , and the customer is always right
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And while it's easy to say, I think we can do this in regards to adapting Miller's style to the big screen
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the fact that they were actually able to accomplish this is nothing short of a miracle
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Hi, I'm Shelley's new boyfriend and I'm out of my mind. They achieved the look of the Sin City world by building almost no sets
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The majority of the film's locations were created entirely digitally. In 2005, this was almost completely unheard of
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The Star Wars prequel films and outliers like Sky Captain and The World of Tomorrow were
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experimenting with this technique, but most filmgoers were having negative reactions to
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the glossy, unreal aesthetic that was being presented to them. However, due to Sin City
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attempting to be more faithful to Miller's art than any real-world environment, it gave the
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project a true North Star, a design remit that freed them from the burden of photoreal replication
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and allowed them to present a more stylized world, which helped mask the shortcomings of 2005 digital environments In fact many of Miller actual comics panels and pages were literally used as the storyboards The artistic goal of the film isn so much to adapt the books
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it's to replicate the books as a moving image, which in most contexts seems like it would be a fool's errand
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However, the finished images are as striking as they are shockingly honorific of Miller's initial creative endeavor
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I'll never know what she was running from. I'll cash her check in the morning
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While a project like this presents massive creative hurdles to overcome, working on exclusively green screen sets actually helps the scheduling of actors
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If you're comping in environments, it doesn't matter when the physical elements you're cobbling together are shot
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Therefore, the actors could be shot individually and then comped into the shots together during the post-process
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Despite sharing scenes together, Jessica Alba and Mickey Rourke never met each other
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The same goes for Rourke and Elijah Wood, who plays the villainous Kevin
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They share an extended fight scene and yet were never actually on the set at the same time
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How was this accomplished? By shooting sequences with stand-ins and by comping in elements all shot on green screen
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sometimes months apart. As Rodriguez details in the 15-minute Flick School special feature on the Sin City DVD
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when Kevin kicks Marv in the face, Mickey Rourke was shot pulling his head back as if
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he was being kicked in the face. And then, months later, Wood was filmed kicking into frame
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But that's just a minor element. the late Brittany Murphy, who plays Shelley, is interspersed throughout the entire film
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But she shot all her scenes out in one day, without any of the actors she's sharing her scenes with
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Wish you'd dropped by earlier, Jackie boy. Then you could have met my boyfriend
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Could have seen what a real man looks like. The only sets that were created for the film
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were Hartigan's jail cell that housed Bruce Willis' brooding detective, Katie's bar, Shelley's apartment
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and the hospital scene at the end of the movie. However it not the fact that the film features digital environments that the most fascinating It how they accomplished Miller various trademark visual flourishes Arguably the most iconic is Marv damaged and bandaged face
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Miller has a stylistic trope of not allowing the bandages to be absorbed into the darkness
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when Marv is lit with hard monodirectional light. So how did they accomplish this effect for the
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film? Well, Rodriguez and crew developed a method where they would have orange tape that when hit
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with blue light would glow in the raw, unprocessed photography. Therefore, when pulled into black and white and color corrected to look like Miller's
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drawings, it could be isolated and made to pop out of the shadows. This method was also used when replicating the white blood that Miller is so fond of drawing
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Miller's iconic style and visual panache works so well on the printed page that they function
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as a template for one of the most visually exciting and technologically boundary-pushing
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films of the early 2000s. And it's definitely equally due to the fact that Rodriguez wanted to adapt the work faithfully
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and that Miller himself was involved in the process. I'll always love you, baby
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Always. Never. Upon release, the film pulled in a global haul of $159 million
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and is looked at today as a genre classic. It's seen multiple home video re-releases
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including one cut of the film that's just all the green screen footage. It even spawned a not-so-well-received sequel in 2015 and perennial talks of a soft-reboot TV show
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And yet, the bold experiment and promising future that the resounding win of Sin City offered has failed to materialize
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Now, the technology and post-production pipeline that the project used are now a near-industry-wide standard
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We have the capability to create sweeping vistas and bold new stylistic interpretations of the world around us
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But we rarely do. Here's hoping that as time progresses, we have creatives who use this technology
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to be as bold and original as Miller and Rodriguez did
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