THE BEAT: I just reread the first few last night and was like "Whoa." What do you think is the appeal of noir and this kind dark, revenge driven fiction?

MILLER: It's going to sound odd, but I think it's the romance. Every Sin City [story] is a romance of some sort. They're very dark and the consequences are bad and they're usually futile, but I think that's at the heart of it. You can't have virtue without sin. What I'm after is having my characters' virtues defined by how they operate in a very sinful environment. That's how you test people.

4. Making actors act against screens, not other actors

Actors usually hate shooting scenes alone because they feed off give-and-take with other actors. But many Sin City sequences were created by piecing together footage of performers whose busy schedules kept them apart.

Brittany Murphy plays a barmaid who has an exchange with Bruce Willis, but she never met him until Monday's movie premiere. Jessica Alba's stripper character interacts with Clive Owen and Rourke's hulking bruiser, but they weren't really there, and Wood's mild-mannered serial killer pulverized Rourke in absentia.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 12:59 PM  |