Robert Rodriguez Talks 'Grindhouse' Inspirations

Robert Rodriguez, the director who helms one of the two movies in Grindhouse, told SCI FI Wire that he got the idea for the project after watching 1970s exploitation movies at Quentin Tarantino's house. "Quentin is the one who grew up going to these movies the most," Rodriguez (Sin City) said in an interview in Beverly Hills, Calif., over the weekend. "He's a film collector, [and] for the past 12 years he's had his own theater in his house, [and] he's been showing me these double [and] triple features. Either stuff he's grown up with or stuff that he's discovered and he wanted to turn me on to."

Watching films such as Vanishing Point and Blood Feast gave Rodriguez the idea to do his own version of a "grindhouse" double feature. "I got really excited about doing a double feature, and when I took the idea to Quentin after Sin City, I said, ... '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."