Rodriguez's half of the film is called Planet Terror and is a straight-up gory zombie movie. Tarantino's is called Death Proof and is an homage to car-chase films such as Vanishing Point and Dirty Mary Crazy Larry. Rodriguez and Tarantino enlisted their filmmaker friends Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead), Rob Zombie (House of 1,000 Corpses) and Eli Roth (Hostel) to come up with the fake trailers, for such films as Zombie's Werewolf Women of the S.S.

The cast is stellar: Planet Terror features Bruce Willis, Freddy Rodriguez (no relation), Rose McGowan, Marley Shelton, James Brolin, Naveen Andrews, Michael Parks, Jeff Fahey and Michael Biehn. Death Proof features Kurt Russell, Sydney Tamiia Poitier (Sidney's daughter), Vanessa Ferlito, Rosario Dawson, Zoe Bell and Mary Elizabeth Winstead.

They all took a moment to speak with SCI FI Weekly last month about the movie, which opens April 6.Robert Rodriguez, what was it about the whole grindhouse theme that made you want to make a movie out of it?

Rodriguez: Well, Quentin is the one who grew up going to these movies the most, but since he's a film collector, for the past 12 years he's had his own theater in his house; he's been showing me these double, triple features, either stuff he's grown up with or stuff that he's discovered and he wanted to turn me on to. ... Only about three years ago is when it finally dawned on me, "Hmm, maybe I should do a double feature." I got really excited about doing a double feature, and when I took the idea to Quentin after Sin City, I said, "I thought about doing a double feature, but you should do one and I should do the other." He said, "Oh, we've got to call it Grindhouse. We've got to have fake trailers." And we realized it would hearken back to that time period. I said, "You know what? I can actually make the movie. I'll shoot digital, but we'll actually make it look like one of your old prints." Because his prints are sometimes all screwed up. And it adds a really great texture to it and a vitality to it that when I go back and see the same movie on DVD, and it's all cleaned up, it's lost half of its charm. So I thought it'd be really great to use the damage as a dramatic device, and try to use that as another tool in the toolbox.Why a zombie movie?

Rodriguez: Well, first we came up with the idea of the experience, providing audiences with this kind of heavy showmanship of a double feature with trailers in between, because that's how he would show movies at his house. We always had trailers in between, and those little interstitials, and then ... I said, "What kind of movie should we do first? Action or comedy double feature?" And he said, "I think we should do the first one horror, because that's the most popular genre of those [movies]." And I thought, "Well, I have a zombie script I started 10 years ago, back before the zombie wave hit." ...

I never finished the script and was kicking myself when the zombie wave came back and went. But when he said, "Let's do horror," I thought, "Well, I always wanted to do some of these ideas I didn't see get done yet." So it's a good excuse and a good reason for a zombie movie. And he came up with the slasher one, and ... we just started going. We got so excited about this idea that we knew it had to be our next movie. Can you talk about what was cut out of the double feature that will be back in the international version?

Rodriguez: I just had to keep tightening it down. I wanted to get mine to about 80, 85 minutes for the theatrical version, so you wouldn't be just exhausted and ready to go home after mine was over. So you could stick around for a second movie. So I think that my first cut was probably just under 100 minutes. And just a lot of other scenes with the sheriff and J.T. and other stuff with ... the doctor. Just other scenes that just fill it out. And Quentin's the same. He's probably got about 30 minutes more. And so that would be in the international versions and the future DVD version. [For the international release, the two films will be released separately.]Planet Terror is pretty gory. How far were you able to push the envelope?

Rodriguez: I just tried to make a zombie movie and [do] some things you haven't seen before. And you've seen zombie movies. ... [If] you pull back and try to make it PG-13, you didn't make a zombie movie. Not that they're zombies. We call them "sickos," because they're just infected. Yeah, I needed to have some sections that were like that, and then it kind of goes away after the hospital sequence and turns into a "women in cages" movie. That's when you have that weird stuff with Quentin and the melting member, and it gets a little weird there. But his main thing was, the best thing about these exploitation movies is that sometimes you'd be watching them—and you get this experience when you watch Quentin's film festival—sitting there, and at some point in one of these movies, you just can't believe what you're watching. Like, "Is this happening? Are we ... ? Yeah, I guess we're all watching the same movie." Almost feels like a dream. So I guess you needed these moments, and you want these sort of surreal ideas, and that's what kind of marks a really good exploitation movie. So, yeah, I had to think for a long time to come up with most of that.What did you guys contribute to each other's movies in Grindhouse?

Rodriguez: I gave him his title. He's telling me his movie idea, and he goes, "And the guy's driving a car, and it's deathproof." And I go, "What?" "It's a deathproof car." He says, "That's a pretty good title." And he's going through, and then he says, "This stunt woman comes over, and she's indestructible." "She's deathproof," I said. "You've got to call it Death Proof." And the next day he goes, "I'm going to call it Death Proof." I contributed that.

He contributed some dialogue to mine, a few lines here and there. ... I hoped he'd contribute more. I gave him the draft, I was like, "All right! He's going to have all this dialogue." He calls me back, he's like, "Man, I loved the script. I added a few lines." I said, "Oh, cool, where were they?" It's like two lines. I was like, "That's it?! Come on! Write some more!" Quentin Tarantino, why did you decide to mix contemporary elements, such as cell phones and text messaging, with the look and feel of a 1970s grindhouse movie?

Tarantino: Well, you know, we never really wanted it to be this '70s artifact. The reason a lot of those movies looked that way —the print quality—they looked that way then, in '74, because what would happen is ... an exploitation film, they might make five prints. And open it in Chattanooga. And it'd play there, and then move to Memphis. And for an entire year they would just schlep these same four, five, six prints all around the country. ... They're actually playing in the worst theaters in the worst projector available in America, and once it goes through the El Paso drive-in meat grinder, it will never be the same. And so, depending on where you saw it in the run, they could actually look like this. So we didn't want to make it '70s. We actually wanted to pretend as if this type of filmmaking had never stopped, this type of exhibition had never stopped. So it made sense that, you know, they pull out cell phones and do text messaging, and they're dealing with computers. It is contemporary, it just has that look and style of cinema then.Will we ever see the missing reels?

Tarantino: Well, hopes are high that we find them. ... I have a little detective working on finding mine. He says there's a possibility mine might be in a basement in Holland. So when I get through all this big press-junket stuff, I intend to go down there and see if I can find my missing reel. There's talk about Acuna, Mexico, there might be Robert's missing reel, but the English-language soundtrack is completely gone, so we don't know. [He's joking.]Fans of grindhouse films are in love with this movie. But then there's everybody else. In your personal opinion, who is the audience for this film?

Rodriguez: Everybody who loves movies should love it. Because people who remember these double features are going to get a nostalgia trip off it, and that's the reaction we've gotten so far. And for those people who are too young to remember any of this, it just seems like a really new experience that we've conjured up, and we seem really original.

Tarantino: Yeah, if you need to know the whole history of grindhouse, or that this comes from that, then we didn't really do our job. Part of our thing is, you know, Robert's movie has to work as a movie, and my movie has to work as a movie. And you yank them out and show them, it's got to work by itself. But when you put them together, it's got to work as a whole experience, and that was what we were really going after, and for us, with the trailers, and this whole experience we were trying to capture, ... hopefully, if it works correctly, it's almost closer to a ride than it is just going to see a movie play out.Have you started working on a sequel yet? Is this going to be a franchise?

Rodriguez: Yeah.

Tarantino: Oh, yeah.Kurt Russell, you play a stuntman serial murderer in Death Proof who drives a killer car. The character is very specific, the car, the clothes and his reactions. How much of that was the script, how much of it was you?

Russell: Well, you know, when you read a script, to me, it kind of becomes very clear. There's quite a bit of stuff that's not there. It's not in the movie. Quentin and I got together, and once again, it was like, "Yeah, the scar should be over the eye, right?" "Yeah." ... We did some wardrobe things, and he just said, you know, "A black T-shirt, just keep it simple. Black pants." "Cowboy boots?" "Yeah, boots." Stuntman. We got that jacket, and we started fooling with the jacket. "You know, that kind of looks a little like Burt Reynolds in Hooper. And that kind of looks a little like ... . We don't want that." "How about a flip [of the collar], do the old '50s [thing]?" "Yeah, that'll work. It kind of retros him out." "What about your hair?" I'm like, "Like that?" [He mimes a pompadour.] He's like, "Just right." It took about eight minutes: "There it is." ...

But ... playing the character was a little different, because there was a lot of different versions. And when we rehearsed, I said, "I've got to go through some crazy things here; [they] might sound really bad." He said, "No, absolutely, do them." And I did all of those for three or four days. And he was, "Great!" Never said a word, just let me do it. ... I was doing Marlon Brando at one point. I was doing it as John Wayne. I was just doing all over the map, just trying to find [the right one]. ... Doing it as a complete screaming queen at one point. Trying all these different things. Did a Snake Plissken version. And then, finally—he never said a word—the day before we started, I said, "Let's try that thing yesterday at the end of the day." ... It was kind of a loose, straight thing. He said, "Yeah, I think that's pretty much it, isn't it?" I said, "Yeah." So we started it out, and by the time we got to the end, I said, "You know, you did write one word here that I didn't really take to heart." I said, "I think it's the core of all these psycho killer characters, especially this one, who only kills women." He said what word is that? I said, "Coward." I said, "I really want to do that. I want to get there." And he said "OK." ...

I think a lot of times, these characters, ... they cover who they really are. So I thought that would be fun to do. ... At the end of the movie, ... he just completely falls apart. ...

Quentin had never come over to me during the entire shoot of the movie, ... and he's like, "Just, maybe, a little less?" And I came out of the car, I said, "I finally did it! I finally went too far!" Guess what?... I saw the movie the other day with him, and at the end of movie, when I was screaming, ... he said, "I used that take." So, in fact, I never did go too far for him. I never reached that level [laughs].Rose McGowan, you play Cherry Darling in Planet Terror, a go-go dancer who loses her leg and has it replaced with a table leg and then a machine gun. Can you talk about shooting all of that? How did they immobilize your leg, and what was that like?

McGowan: What was I really wearing? I was wearing a really heavy, gray cast, with LED lights [which would be the guide for computer imagery inserted in post-production], and it wasn't the most high-tech thing. ... It was quite uncomfortable. There was a little ball bearing on the heel, because if you were resting on the end of a machine gun leg or a hospital table leg, it would be very small and round and kind of tippy. And so my toes pointed in the air, my heel was on the ground, and my other [foot] had a 4-inch high-heel boot. ... You're going to save the world with a machine-gun leg, make sure you wear a high heel. At least on one foot. But ... it was cool because I'm not the complaining sort. I'm Irish. Just pull up your bootstraps, soldier on. ... I had to go as fast as everybody else, do everything as [fast] everybody else, and they got to basically wear boots and tennis shoes. ... So it wasn't like, "Wait for me!" I can't run up this hill with them. And I did run up the hill, I just fell back down. But then I would go back up.And jumping on that truck, that was really you?

McGowan: That was really me. The jumping on the truck. I worked with a fantastic stuntwoman for about six years now. ... She worked with me on Charmed, and it's very hard to find somebody with thin bones, because a lot of stuntwomen are pretty buff. And she's fantastic. She was doing it, and I was, like, "That's retarded. I'm standing here. Why am I not doing it?" ... At night I would take off all the body makeup, and it would look like someone took a baseball bat to me. Very sexy.And what about the scene where you're kind of flying through the air, hurtling over a huge wall? Did they strap you into something and catapult you?

McGowan: No, they didn't. That would be fun! A giant slingshot is what that was. Although that would be cool, too. No, actually a lot of people don't like wirework. I love it. I think it's the closest you come to flying, and that was a really tall wall. There was only one time it kind of missed, and the system didn't pull me up high enough, and I had the gray cast, and I just got it up in time, because it would have smashed everything on the wall. I wouldn't have cleared it. No, it was just kind of a pulley system, but I had to run. I had to run from behind that wall to get enough force to take off. So, running again. The ball bearing, 5-pound cast and a 4-inch heel. "All right, here we go!" But they greased me down [with fire retardant to protect her from the explosions going off behind her]. ... Just the back of my head, though. The front's OK to catch on fire. Don't want to ruin the back of her head to the back of her feet. So that was gelled up, and [I] still singed my eyebrows off in that. ... I land on the other side, and I'm sliding across asphalt, and, even though, yes, I lost skin in the process, I did have a huge smile on my face. I thought it was just hilarious.Rosario Dawson, in Death Proof, you're sitting in the back seat during the climactic high-speed car chase on dirt roads. How much of the time were you actually in the vehicle being chased around? It wasn't really as fast as it looks?

Dawson: Oh, yeah, it was. There was a running a joke all the time, because there actually wasn't a speedometer in the car that worked. There wasn't a lot in those cars that worked, to be honest. Tracie [Thoms, who drove, was with me] every single time. [She] was like, "That felt really fast." "Tracy, how fast were you going?" "35." It was like the biggest joke ever. There was point literally where the camera truck that was driving with the jib on it said ... they clocked it at 100 at some point. ... It was pretty ridiculous. As fast as it looks is actually as fast as it was. That's actually the best part about it is to know, when people watch it, if you're sitting at the edge of your seat, like really excited about it, and that really happened. ... Anything and everything you see in that movie is something that [the stunt people] physically did if we couldn't do it. No CGI or special effects were used. If we couldn't really do it, then Quentin didn't want it in the movie.Freddy Rodriguez, you play El Wray, a mysterious stranger who winds up being a kick-ass hero. How hard was it to pick up all the knife-fighting stuff?

Rodriguez: I didn't stab anybody. Yeah, it was hard. ... I've never played an action hero before in my life, so I've never dealt with guns or knives or have ever done a fight sequence before, so it was all new territory. So at first it was hard, but I think I'm a pretty quick learner. I learn pretty fast, and even as we were filming, I was still practicing, and I would always have the knives with me on set, just to get a feel for it. Or the guns, I was always twirling guns on set.How about that scene, where you came running through the hospital taking out all the zombies?

Rodriguez: Oh, yeah. Right, right. That scene was probably the most physically demanding scene in the film for me, yeah. And I believe, you know we shot the whole film at night, and I believe that scene, I remember it was like 4 in the morning, I was like nodding off in my trailer, and there's a knock on the door. "Come on, we're about to do that elaborate fight sequence." At like 4 in the morning, and I just remember being, like, tired. And when we were done with the scene the sun was up. Go back to the hotel and try to sleep after that.From your past work, you do not come to mind as the first person picked as an action hero for a zombie movie.

Rodriguez: Really?How did that happen?

Rodriguez: You know, I auditioned for it like everyone else, but I think the real reason why it happened was that Robert ... always thinks outside of the box. ... He looks towards anything as what the conventional choice would be, and I think he did that with ... Antonio Banderas. Before he did Desperado, he wasn't an action hero in Spain, you know? ... So I think if you were to see him you would probably think the same thing. But he just always thinks outside of the box, and that's part of Robert's genius.