I come from a mixed family, where my mother is art house cinema and my father is B-movie genre cinema. They're estranged, and I've been trying to bring them together for all of my career to one degree or another.
One thing that's thematically consistent in 'Sin City' is that all the performances seem to be of the same genre, like we're singing the same song.
The job of the director is to make certain that the film has one voice and a sense of a single vision, even though it's produced by a large number of people making contributions - to turn all those contributions from individual voices into one coherent one.
The way I see it, I belong to the film as any other department.
The biggest challenge of any cinematographer is making the imagery fit together of a piece: that the whole film has a unity to it, and actually, that a shot doesn't stand out.
And the best films feel like a fist punching you in the solar plexus and all elements of the filmmaking process - the acting, the design, the cinematography, the music, is all working to one end.
I really believe the form of the film must be in the scenario; cinema is not just added value to the scripting. I believe in it as a totality.
The challenge to me as a director was for the audience to see the film as going on in a straight line, so that they did not sense all of these break-ups. I did not want a film to be a collage of all these images.
It's all just one film to me. Just different chapters.
In the end, with all of my films, I want to understand the continuity between these films and understand what they're trying to do.
You know, and it really doesn't have a lot to do with the movie. That's the trick to doing a good musical is that, if you take that music number out, there's less to the movie there. You would miss it.
