in Comics/Cartoons, Film | June 5th, 2026 Leave a Comment
In the nineteen-nineties, Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez first collaborated on a movie. No, it wasn’t From Dusk Till Dawn, the Rodriguez-directed crime-picture-turned-horror-comedy in which Tarantino plays George Clooney’s psychotic brother. It was an anthology picture called Four Rooms, whose separate but interconnected stories, all set in the same hotel on New Year’s Eve, were directed by an all-star lineup of the “Indiewood” auteurs of 1995: Tarantino, Rodriguez, Allison Anders, and Alexandre Rockwell. Rodriguez jumped at the chance to do short-form work and collaborate with friends, but alas, the concept inspired much more enthusiasm from moviegoers than the result, to say nothing of the critics’ judgment.
“Anthologies never work,” Rodriguez said last year during an interview with Lex Fridman. Even with the best filmmakers participating, “they bomb because people can’t quite wrap their head around it”: they feel like the movie keeps starting over and over again. Yet in the fullness of time, Four Rooms took his career up a level, not down.
“I really want this anthology thing to work,” he says, explaining his mindset about a decade after that film’s failure. “What if it’s three stories, like a three-act structure, not four, same director, not four different directors?” After all, “I had already done one and figured out how I could do it better.” The result was Sin City, from 2005, his adaptation of Frank Miller’s acclaimed noir comic-book series co-directed with Miller himself.
