At that point, Quentin Tarantino had done an interview with Sight & Sound for every one of his movies (up until “Kill Bill: Volume 1” at least). He’s a rare director that truly appreciates the work of a film critic, a reverence that is perfectly clear with his new book “Cinema Speculation.” Now, if you think Tarantino has a lot of far out ideas rattling around his head, Robert Rodriguez is actually the true idea man between the two. When Sight & Sound asked about how “Grindhouse” was originally conceived, Tarantino said, at that point in his career, he needed something that was somewhere in-between Roger Corman and Mount Everest. “I’d done ‘Kill Bill’ and I wanted a little bit more time before I climbed my next Mount Everest,” he reflected.
Tarantino had also just filmed the “CSI” fifth season finale episode, “Grave Danger,” over two weeks that felt like making another feature film. While he was starting to gear up mentally to take on the challenges of crafting his WWII movie, his old filmmaking pal stopped by his home for an inspired visit. QT told Sight & Sound:
“Robert Rodriguez came over to my house, and he saw I had an old AIP double feature poster of the Roger Corman movie ‘Rock All Night’ and the film ‘Dragstrip Girl.’ And he goes, ‘You see that double feature poster you have on the wall there? I always wanted to do a double feature movie.’ And he was thinking about doing both of them himself.”
Luckily, Rodriguez didn’t wind up shooting both movies alone. The balance between the sensibilities of both directors dovetailed wonderfully together, and there was no way that Rodriguez would have shot anything on actual film.