One Night is all that stands between them and freedom. But it's going to be one hell of a night
EDITED & DIRECTED BY: Robert Rodriguez
STORY BY: Robert Kurtzman
SCREENPLAY BY: Quentin Tarantino
MUSIC BY: Graeme Revell
STARING: Harvey Keitel, George Clooney, Quentin Tarantino, and Juliette Lewis, introducing Ernest Liu, Cheech Marin, Danny Trejo, Tom Savini, Fred Williamson, and Salma Hayek
RUNNING TIME: 108 Minutes
DISTRIBUTED BY: Dimension Films
From Dusk Till Dawn starts out following two brothers who are on the run from the law and trying to escape to Mexico. After one of them, Richie (Quentin Tarantino), kills their hostage the other one, Seth (George Clooney), takes a family hostage. Using the family for cover they are able to sneak across the boarder to Mexico. Once they reach their destination, a bar called "The Titty Twister" (which is opened "from dusk 'till dawn"), Seth promises to let them go in the morning. Once inside the bar they are treated to a dance by Santanico Pandemonium (Salma Hayek) who promptly turns into a vampire, as does the rest of the bar's staff. With the help of two other patrons, (Tom Savini & Fred Willamson) they are in a fight to survive until dawn; and get out alive.
Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez first met each other when they were touring film festivals with their debut films (Reservoir Dogs and El Mariachi respectively.) Quentin showed Robert the script for this movie (which he had written for Robert Kurtzman of KNB Efx group) Robert thought that it was a great script and he would make it if given the chance. After the two of them had even greater successes on their second efforts (Pulp Fiction and Desperado, respectively) they decided to get together and produce this Mexican/Vampire/Crime/Horror/Action script. Robert (who had proven his ability as an action director) would serve as Director, and Quentin (who's writing skills were undisputable) would serve as writer and co-star. Both men would also serve as Executive Producers, better to keep creative control in the hands of the filmmakers and out of the hands of the suits.
Robert and Quentin anounced the project at the 1995 "Fangora Weekend of Horrors" convention. While their they met John Saxon, who said to them "if you have a role for an FBI agent in your film I'm your man". Since they were trying to cast an FBI character in the film they decided that it must be fate and they cast him. Making his third appearance in a Tarantino film Harvey Keitel was cast as Jacob Fuller. Wisely choosing to make the jump to the big screen by playing something completely different than his ER character, George Clooney was cast as Seth Gecko. Quentin himself chose to play the geeky Richey Gecko. Going against type casting Juliette Lewis was given the role of a wholesome preacher's daughter. Robert brought in several of his own people. Danny Trejo, as yet another tough bad guy, was cast as the bar tender Razor Charlie. Cheech Marin played a total of three roles; the boarder guard, Chet Pussy (the funniest role in the movie), and Carlos. Salma Hayek was at first very apprehensive about her role as an "exotic dancer" (one couldn't call her a stripper since she never actually takes anything off) who does a routine with a big snake. Since she feels incredibly grateful to Robert for his casting her as the female lead in Desperado he was able to convince her to do it. She later said that she is glad that she did because she overcame a fear of snakes and had fun with such a wild and crazy role. Also from Desperado Tito Larriva and his band played the Titty Twister vampire band. One part that they had a hard time casting was that of store clerk Pete Bottoms. First he was going to be played by Steve Buscemi, than Tom Roth (with a Texas accent). After both of them had to decline because of scheduling problems Robert cast John Hawkes who appeared in Roadracers and was Robert's backup if Steve Buscemi was unavailable to do Desperado.
The movie was budgeted at $20 million and an 8 week shooting schedule was drafted. One decision that ended up having some unexpected repercussions was the fact that they shot the film with a non-union crew. The reason that they did this is because the unions set strict rules on what each person's job description is. For example, if the lighting guys don't have anything to do one afternoon the producers can't just tell them to go help the makeup guys for a few hours. Such ridged structure would not have really fit a movie that was trying to put so much on the screen in such a short time and for such little money, particularly with Robert "one-man-crew" Rodriguez at the helm.
Because of all of the special effects involved the Titty Twister stuff was shot first; in fact the bulk of the film's shooting time was spent on those scenes. Robert was frequently moving the camera around himself and getting 3 times the number of setups that most directors can get in a day. Once his TV show ER was in production George Clooney had to go between ER and From Dusk Till Dawn on different days. He says that it got quite confusing going between playing such different characters in the same week. He jokes that as people were getting killed on the Dusk... set he would want to try to stop the bleeding; and on the ER set he would give a kid a lollipop pop and have to stop himself from saying something like "take it you little fuck!"
Ironically one of the last things shot was the opening scene at Benny's World of Liquor. Quentin had written it with the usual layout of a liquor store in mind only to get on set and find out that their production designer had decided to get creative with the layout and the Gecko's and the Clerk were going to have to practically be next to each other during the shoot out . Robert told Quentin not to worry he'd just use some creative camera angles and editing tricks and it would look like they were further away from each other than they were. For the shot of the Gecko's walking to their car as the store exploded behind them they really blew up the store behind the actors. Since they could not afford to rebuild the store they knew that they would have only one usable take.
Most of the vampire effects were old fashioned makeup effects but they also used some digital morphing CGI (Computer Graphic Imagery) for the vampires transforming. Ever since Terminator 2 most people have tried to duplicate the T-1000's fluid morphing effect. On this move they wanted to go in the other direction. They tried to make the morph look as solid as possible, than they dubbed in some bone-crunching sounds. They wanted to show that when these vamps transform it's not fluid and smooth, and bones are changing shape in the process. During the opening credit sequence their is a shot where we see though the Gecko's car and see the hostage in the trunk. Quentin wrote that into the script as "Superman vision". Their first visual effects supervisor said that it would cost a lot of money to do. Knowing that such an effect could be achieved cheaper as a dissolve than an optical effect they fired him and got another visual effects man. They figured that if he was wanting to spend so much money on such a simple shot he would never be able to do everything they wanted with the limited money that they had.
The movie was released January 19, 1996 in the USA. Many of the critics were none too kind to it, they wanted Quentin follow up his Oscar win (Pulp Fiction) with something more high-brow; not something that even Quentin and Robert say was designed to be a big budget version of those exploitation films they used to love in the 70s. Strangely some audience members were not too pleased with the whole film either. Some crime-film fans did not like the fact that the second half "degenerates to a splatter film". Some splatter fans did not like the fact that it takes 45 minutes to get to the vampires. fortunately the film did find it's audience and became a cult-classic in the best sense of the word. It made $25.7 million domestically, $33.5 over-seas and $19.8 million in rentals. It also showed that George Clooney could be a box office star.
