Robert Rodriguez’s hugely entertaining Planet Terror is one half of the ill-fated Grindhouse experiment, along with Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof. Ian Spelling chatted to Rodriguez about zombies, cult actors and collaborating with Tarantino.

On familiarising the cast with grindhouse films…

Quentin has a thing called Quentin Fest that he does every year in Austin. One night will be Hillbilly Movie Night or Revenge Movie Night or Cheerleader Movie Night. He’d have all the prints he’d bought and that was a way to show them to people and enjoy them. When it came time to hire the actors and rehearse the actors, to give them a sense real quick of what we’d been watching over the years we put together a couple of movies that kind of resembled our double feature experience.

We put together the Italian movie Zombie [aka Zombie Flesh Eaters] by Lucio Fulci and Torso, which is an Italian slasher pic from the early 70s and was kind of the model for a lot of the slasher pics here from the 80s. We put them together for the actors, with a few trailers in between, just so they could get an idea of what our movie experience would be like. It was great for them to see how we were going to take that and run with it in a whole different way.

It wasn’t going to just be a recreation of that, though. You could say that Sin City was based on pulp noir movies of the 40s and 50s, but you watch the movie and it takes the idea and runs in a different direction with it. That’s kind of what we’re doing here.

On how Planet Terror evolved

I started writing a zombie movie 10 or 11 years ago, right around the time I was doing The Faculty. I remember that I was telling the young actors from that that zombie movies had been dead for a long time, but that they were going to come back. I knew they were going to come back, because everything always comes back. And we had to be the first. I had about 30 pages written and I would read it to them, and everyone wanted to be involved.

I never got around to doing it. The zombie wave came and went again, and I realised that no one had really done it the way I had pictured it. So when Quentin and I were talking about doing this double feature, that was a script I remembered being one that I really liked, but that was less than half-written. I went back to it, picked it up, read it again and when I re-read the story of this girl with the missing leg I realised, “OK, we’re going to do a grindhouse picture. We’ve got to think about what would be in the trailer for this grindhouse movie? You’ve got to have a trailer image, so I’ll put a machine gun on her leg, and that’ll be our image. That’ll get people.”

On his penchant for casting cult favourites, such as Planet Terror co-stars Michael Biehn, Michael Parks and Jeff Fahey

They’re just people I have always wanted to work with. I just kind of go through my movie collection and go, “OK, which actors have I always enjoyed?” Whether they’re in high-profile movies today or not, it’s a question of who have I always to work with. Mickey Rourke was one of those guys who I just always admired and had wanted to work with, and I got a chance to [on Sin City].

So this was me going into my collection and going, “Who have I not worked with that I want to work with?” And that’s pretty much my entire cast, people that I’ve always wanted to work with. Josh Brolin, I worked with him briefly on another movie [Mimic] where I shot second unit as a favour to a director friend of mine, and he was so terrific to work with. I tried to work with him over the years and finally had a good role for him.

On how involved Tarantino was on Planet Terror

He came on for the first couple of weeks. He operated second camera. I wanted to get him into the camera work because originally I was going to D.P. his movie. But then I thought, “I should just continue finishing my movie and he can go D.P. his.” He’s been wanting to learn to D.P. and I think the best way to learn is on the job. And he did a terrific job.

So he was there for a while in the beginning, off and on, and then after a while he stayed away from mine and I stayed away, really, from his because we realised we just wanted to surprise each other and show each other our movies when we were done. Even when I visited him on the set [of Death Proof] I’d try not to go to the actual set and see anything because I wanted it all to be a surprise for when I’d see it all put together.

On how Planet Terror has come together

It’s really terrific. I’m really excited about it. It’s really fun. It’s just a bullet train. I cut it tighter for the [U.S.] theatrical release…The international release, in places that aren’t showing it as a double feature, is about 15, maybe 20 minutes longer. But this one is tight, tight, tight. It just flies. It’s like, “Oh my God!” It’s really terrific to make a movie like that.

Planet Terror is out now on region 1 DVD and is released on region 2 DVD on 10 March 2008.