Staying faithful to ‘Sin’

A splash of color
Though the film — made at Rodriguez’s Austin, Texas-based Troublemaker Studios— is almost entirely composed of deep blacks and bright whites, the filmmakers shot the movie in color, later transferring it. That made it possible to keep some of the colors as brilliant exceptions to the overall palate.

In the opening scene, a woman stands on a high-rise balcony. Only her slinky dress is in color — a deep red. This and other color highlights throughout the film stand out in a manner similar to the little girl’s red coat in Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List.”

One of the movie’s chief (and most terrifying) villains, Yellow Bastard, was also kept in color. Nick Stahl (“Carnivale,” “In the Bedroom”) couldn’t look less like the character — but he certainly did after five hours of makeup and the addition of prosthetics.

Shooting without film made for a very different experience for Stahl.

“They didn’t cut ever, which was weird,” Stahl says. “In one sense it was great because it does kind of free you up. You don’t have to think, ‘Do I have time for this or that?’ You just have to do it. For that reason, you had to come very prepared. It was a little exhausting.”

Rodriguez reports that even his buddy Quentin Tarantino — long a film traditionalist — was impressed after he came to “guest direct” a scene. (He was paid $1, the same amount Rodriguez got for scoring “Kill Bill Vol. 2.”)

For Rodriguez, “Sin City” would have been just a regular movie if not shot digitally.

“What I love about new technology is that it really pushes the art. It really pushes it in a way that you can’t imagine until you come up with the idea,” he says. “It’s idea-based. You can do anything.”

For his part, Miller thinks “Sin City” is not only a benchmark in the history of cinematic technological advances, but a redefining of Hollywood’s growing relationship with graphic novels.

“This is the first time in the courtship between comics and movies that the two are really joined in intent,” Miller says. “It’s paced like a comic book; it feels like a comic book. Not the ‘Biff!’ ‘Bam!’ ‘Pow!’ kind of comics that a lot of people still believe defines the form, but the new era of the graphic novel.”

So does Miller have a newfound faith in Hollywood?

“What I’d say is: we’ll see about Hollywood, but I know I can work in Austin.”

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