“When I got to the set of “From Dusk Till Dawn,” I was a little skeptical. It looked like an old Spanish mission, not a movie set. Little did I know!
First I went with other press people to the production offices to meet the director, Robert Rodriguez, 27. He had just finished “Desperado,” with Antonio Ban-deras. In walked a guy wearing a bandanna, jeans and a T-shirt. I thought he was one of the guys who moves the props around. No, it was Rodriguez.
Rodriguez said he got his start by drawing little cartoons on the pages of a dictionary. He never thought he would make it in the movies. He figured he’d just be a bum. Actually, he did his first movie by selling his body to science. He showed us the scar on his arm where they took a piece out. Really, that’s what he said.
He showed us a preview of the R-rated movie that looked cool: action, girls, monsters, blood and jokes. “It’s very schizophrenic. Sometimes I feel deranged, sometimes I want to make people laugh,” he said.
As he described the movie, I realized this was probably not something your mom would want you to see. It’s a creepy vampire movie about this sleazy bar on the Mexican border where all the passing truckers go to have a drink and leer at the dancing girls—but they don’t come out again. But they’re not regular vampires, they’re weird Aztec and Mayan vampires.
In the special effects room, I got to see where all those weird monsters come from. The room was filled with ghastly batlike creatures, including a balding dog-vampire with blood-shot eyes and sharp fangs. We watched as one of the special effects assistants glued on yak hair, a few strands at a time.
Then we got to see one of the sets—the sleazy bar, right after the big fight scene. It had several stages for performances, a disco ball, and the walls were decorated with hubcaps and truck seats collected from the vampires’ helpless victims. Man, this place was a mess, worse than my room. As I sat down on the steps, I felt like I was sitting on something. I looked down to find a man’s decapitated head staring up at me. At least, I think it used to be a man! It was nasty. Body parts were thrown here and there, and pieces of busted up furniture littered the place.
Then we went to have lunch, even though I don’t know how anybody could have lunch after visiting the bar. We had a fabulous lunch of chicken and steak, and talked to all the actors. Ernest Liu, who was 15, plays the role of the kidnapped boy Scott Fuller. He said being in a movie is not all that glamorous. He works hard all day and has no social life. Liu, who had to leave school before the end of the semester at Calabasas High School, was worried because he had to learn the material on his own and take finals after the movie finished filming.
I talked to Tom Savini, who plays the character “Sex Machine,” which he called his dream role. He said this movie is so fast that if you blink, you will miss something. He said it took them two weeks to shoot something that is only one line in the movie script: “And now the biggest barroom brawl you’ve ever seen.”
George Clooney, who’s probably best known as a doctor on ER, plays a mass murderer in this movie. Clooney said he wanted to clear up any misconceptions about Rodriguez. “First of all, he’s a drunk and he steals. I caught him in my trailer,” he said jokingly.
Ernest said, “Don’t listen to George. He’s a television superstar.”
Clooney didn’t seem to mind being teased. He said you never know where your career will go in the acting business. “You know, next year it’ll be, ‘You want fries with that?'”
Finally we spoke to Quentin Tarantino, who seemed shy to me, considering how much he has accomplished. He and Clooney play the two stars in the film, runaway criminals who end up in the vampires’ bar. Tarantino is best known for writing, directing and starring in “Pulp Fiction,” which won a whole bunch of awards. He also wrote “Reservoir Dogs,” “Natural Born Killers,” “From Dusk Till Dawn” and other screenplays.
Tarantino’s advice to aspiring screenwriters: “One of the biggest problems is they write something like what they just saw. You don’t feel it’s coming from the heart. They’re trying to write what they think will sell. Don’t try to write like this or that. Throw all that stuff in the garbage and find a movie you love to tell and just write it… I never bought a book [on how to be a screenwriter.] I just write what I feel.”
Tarantino graciously signed an autograph for me, and we said our goodbyes.”