Synopsis

In the corrupt streets of Basin City, several hard-bitten characters confront murder, betrayal, and exploitation. Marv hunts the killer of the woman he loved, Dwight protects the women of Old Town from a violent police officer, and aging cop John Hartigan risks everything to save a kidnapped girl. Their intersecting stories unfold in a brutal, stylized world where justice is personal and rarely clean.

Factoids & Trivia

• The film combines material from Frank Miller's graphic novels The Hard Goodbye, The Big Fat Kill, and That Yellow Bastard, with framing material from the short story The Customer Is Always Right.

• Before full production began, Robert Rodriguez created a test version of the opening sequence to demonstrate that Miller's stark comic-book imagery could be translated faithfully to film. The footage also helped attract the eventual cast.

• Most of the movie was shot digitally against green screens on soundstages in Austin, Texas. The backgrounds and much of the environment were created later with visual effects, allowing the production to closely reproduce the composition and perspective of Miller's panels.

• The film was photographed in color before post-production transformed it into high-contrast black and white. Selective touches of color, including yellow, red, and blue, were retained to draw attention to specific characters and objects.

• A dispute with the Directors Guild of America over the film's shared directing arrangement led Rodriguez to resign from the guild so Frank Miller could receive a directing credit.

• Quentin Tarantino contributed a guest-directed sequence involving Dwight and Jackie Boy in the car. The arrangement was connected to Rodriguez's earlier work on the music for Kill Bill: Vol. 2.

• Mickey Rourke and Elijah Wood reportedly never met during production because their characters' scenes were made separately. They met for the first time after the movie had been released.

• Sin City screened in competition at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival and received the festival's Vulcain Prize for an artist technician, recognizing its visual and technical design.

• The film's Recut, Extended, Unrated home-video edition reorganizes the separate stories into longer individual segments rather than presenting them in the theatrical version's interwoven structure.