Before you buy Sin City on DVD next week, you may want to read this Robert Rodriguez Interview at IGN, where he talks about the two-disc Sin City special edition that he is currently working on. Some of the planned special features sound incredible:
The real DVD should come out fairly quick, [and] it’s the one that will be obviously the double-disc set with all of the goodies on it. I mean, it has all kinds of stuff on there—I have a 20–minute Film School, a new Cooking School, Sin City Breakfast Tacos, and my favorite feature: when people watch DVDs, they complain ‘oh, the only thing about home entertainment is you miss that audience experience.’ Well, the best audience is in Austin, especially for a movie that was made there. We showed the premiere with the actors there in a 1500–seat theater, and they would go crazy and Sin City got a big reaction. I recorded the audience in 5.1 so if you’re watching the DVD and you want to see it with an Austin audience on premiere night, you just click a button and they’re all there going ‘aaaah!’ so it’s really cool.Quentin, when he was directing his sequence, he just let the tape roll when we were shooting, and the sequence taped for an hour, so there are some 20-minute uninterrupted takes. You see him wander in front of the camera and talk to the actors, and [he’s] directing and you hear the whole sound of the set. It’s like you're sitting right there on the set seeing the movie being shot from the point of view of the camera that’s shooting the movie, uninterrupted, and it’s really cool. You feel like you’re right there, and you get to see what it’s like to work with Quentin and the actors and how the movie actually gets made. [And] he will do a commentary on his section.
So, if you don’t want to spend the $15 or whatever this current version is going to cost, you might want to wait for the feature-packed special edition. By the way, it looks like it will also have each of the three storylines broken out into individual mini-films, so you can watch them separately (as they were originally published in comic form), or edited together as one movie. Of all of today’s directors, I think that Robert Rodriguez is taking the best advantage of the DVD medium as film school.
