Rodriguez and Tarantino met in 1992 at the Toronto film festival. Rodriguez was there with his Spanish-language action cheapie, El Mariachi; Tarantino with Reservoir Dogs. ''We did some panel discussions together about violence in the movies, and we were the only two people there dressed in black,'' recalls Rodriguez. Lifelong bonds have been formed on flimsier connections. Tarantino invited Rodriguez up to his hotel room and read him the first few pages of his next film, Pulp Fiction.
When the two directors returned to Los Angeles, they discovered that they had offices just a couple of doors down from each other on the Sony lot. Before long, Tarantino was barreling into Rodriguez's office and acting out scenes from Pulp Fiction, while Rodriguez would show Tarantino the storyboards for his next film, Desperado. And so it went for the next decade. Rodriguez would write roles into his films for Tarantino; Tarantino would donate nuggets of dialogue to Rodriguez's scripts.
Then, one day in 2003, Rodriguez was standing in Tarantino's living room when he noticed an old movie poster spread out on the floor. It was a one-sheet for the 1957 double feature Dragstrip Girl and Rock All Night. Rodriguez owned the same poster. (Click here to see 10 other posters they love.) ''I told Quentin that I'd always wanted to do a double feature,'' says Rodriguez. ''Then I said, 'Hey, why don't you direct one and I'll do the other?' Right away he said, 'And we've got to call it Grindhouse!' It happened that quickly.''
As Rodriguez finishes this story, he gets up from a director's chair and hollers at a bunch of zombies. Damn zombies. They never look as hungry as you want them to. It's 4 a.m. and we're in Austin, Tex., on a muggy July night. Rodriguez is shooting Planet Terror, his half of the Grindhouse double feature, and the first to go before the camera.
In keeping with the whole B-movie vibe, Planet Terror employs a decidedly B-list cast: There's Freddy Rodriguez (Six Feet Under) as a loner who's good with pistols; Marley Shelton (Sin City) as an emergency-room anesthesiologist; Josh Brolin as her psychotic husband; the Black Eyed Peas' Fergie as a hitchhiker who meets a particularly grim end; Jeff Fahey as a grizzled barbecue cook; Michael Biehn as a sheriff; and Charmed's Rose McGowan as a go-go dancer named Cherry Darling, whose leg, an early casualty of the zombie outbreak, gets outfitted with a machine-gun prosthetic. You'll either think this is the coolest thing you've ever seen or want to stay home and watch The Queen on DVD.
Either way, McGowan says the machine-gun leg was torture. She had to run for her life with her right leg in a cast so that a machine gun could be digitally added later. Oh, and in four-inch stiletto boots. ''It reminds me of that line about Ginger Rogers: She had to do everything Fred Astaire did, but backwards and in high heels.'' Of course, Astaire never had to gun down bloodsucking freaks either.
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