INDEX
1. INSPIRATION FOR GRINDHOUSE
2. PLANET TERROR SYNOPSIS
3. ABOUT PLANET TERROR
4. SICKOS, SHORT SKIRTS, EXPLOSIONS AND BLOOD
5. DEATH PROOF SYNOPSIS
6. ABOUT DEATH PROOF
7. STUNTMAN MIKE
8. NOVA/CIVIC
9. AFTERMATH
10. MUSTANG/CHALLENGER/CHARGER
11. THE WAR OF THE DODGES
12. CLOTHES AND CRIME SCENES
13. SHOOT TO KILL

MUSTANG/CHALLENGER/CHARGER

A second group of gifted actors joined the production: Zoë Bell, Rosario Dawson, Tracie Thoms and Mary Elizabeth Winstead. Direct from a plane from New Zealand to deliver a karmic high kick to Stuntman Mike (and the fourth wall) is Zoë Bell. Bell met Quentin Tarantino when she auditioned to be Uma Thurman’s stunt double for KILL BILL. She had just arrived in America following the successful beginnings of her stunt career in her homeland of New Zealand.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Lee), Rosario Dawson (Abernathy),
Zoe Bell (Zoe) and Tracie Thomas (Kim) star
in Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof.

“I had never really done a stunt audition before because in New Zealand there weren’t that many stunt women. We were cast according to the size of the woman that was needed, and the skill that was needed. There was a small selection.”

“She’s just a wonderful personality, and she’s an incredible physical specimen as far as all the things that she can do, and pull off. She was Sharon Stone’s double for CATWOMAN, and she spent three years doubling Lucy Lawless on ‘Xena,’” Tarantino says. “She starred in a documentary called DOUBLE DARE about her life and the life of Jeannie Epper who was the first legend of stuntwomen. In the course of watching that movie -- I’ve watched that movie with a few different audiences -- Zoë just comes off the screen. You just fall in love with her. She has that personality in real life that you capture on film. It just comes out in the audience. You care about her, you love her, you’re just charmed to pieces by her. I knew she had that quality and that she could totally pull it off.”

Bell was the only actress in the group who had been directed by Tarantino before. She knew what she was in for: “He has this amazing energy. He’s just so enthusiastic, and fun, and he swears a lot which is useful for someone like me to feel comfortable,” Bell jokes.

A friendship was forged during KILL BILL, and Tarantino divulged that he had plans to include Bell and Staggs in his next movie when the three attended the Stunt Awards ceremony: “He hadn’t even written it or anything, but he said that it was about a group of girls that get stalked by a serial killer who uses his car as a weapon. My assumption was that I would be in a bar, and the two leads would be in the forefront and I’d be in he background ordering pints.”

Time went by, and Bell received an invitation to dinner with Tarantino, who shared the news that he had finished the script for DEATH PROOF.

“Before we went out for dinner, he said ‘I just want to show you a couple of pieces.’”

The “pieces” included a mock-up of a script cover that included her name in an old-school billing block. He flipped through pages of the script and she saw her name repeated over and over again. He stopped on one portion of the script and read some dialogue to her.

“I was just sort of in a state of shock really,” she recalls. “It was hilarious because it all sounded like me, like he’d written me. He got my lingo and everything, and some of the stories that we’d actually been through together in China. It was pretty shocking.”

The shock never subsided. Mary Elizabeth Winstead observed that Bell was in awe of her experience through the entire production. “She’s still shocked by the fact that she’s acting, and the fact that people call her as one of the actors, and she has her own chair, and she has a stand-in. I think she just continually surprised and shocked by that every day.”

“But it’s amazing how natural she is,” Winstead continues. “She’s never really done this before, and she jumped into it and she was great. People might think, ‘Well she’s playing herself so it’s not that hard.’ Trust me, if you’ve never acted before in your life most people would be pretty atrocious at it. It takes a while to catch on, and she was amazing from the get go. She’s a natural actor, and I think she was surprised by that herself.”

Tracie Thoms plays Kim, a stunt person who can raise hell behind the wheel of a car. She auditioned for the role at Tarantino’s home: “I was extremely nervous,” Thoms recalls. “I almost threw up in the parking lot. But I didn’t. I don’t throw up in the parking because it was the parking lot of his house. He has a parking lot in front of his house because he’s fabulous like that.”

When I met him it was as though we were almost like kindred spirits, and we instantly clicked. And he instantly put me at ease,” she adds. She was extremely excited by the concept of the movie, and by the thought of involving herself in something so violent.

“That’s my idea of entertainment -- just a lot of gore, and crazy stuff that you’ve never seen anywhere else. I always love watching movies for that reason. I’m not going to see it anywhere else really, especially not movies that are made currently. I don’t know about anybody else. I’m just saying it excited me.”

Thoms and Dawson forged a bond during the production of the film version of RENT, because they were the only two members of the cast that had not been in the original Broadway production “It’s just such a pleasure to be with her again. It makes it so much easier to play best friends with somebody you’re really close friends with. It makes it easy.”

“Kim is this bad ass stunt chick,” she says. “She will kick ass if she needs to. If you need an ass kicking, she will deliver that to you. She’s kind of ghetto fabulous and smart. I love her. She’s really complicated.”

Thoms, who is perhaps best known for her role on CBS’s “Cold Case” spent much of the production jetting between Austin, the Santa Ynez Valley and Los Angeles to film DEATH PROOF and “Cold Case” at the same time.

“My girl in ‘Cold Case,’ is kind of badass in her own way. Luckily they’re both in the same neighborhood of girl. They both carry guns, and they both will kill you if you give them enough reason to. I have to keep two story lines going at the same time with two completely separate crews of people. There have been days when I’ve been on both sets in the same day.”

Rosario Dawson plays Abernathy, the movie makeup artist who gets to take a back seat to the action: “I am so lucky playing Abernathy. I think that all the time ‘cause I get to be in the car while they’re doing these crazy three-sixties, and doing these crazy crashes. Surprisingly, I’ve never felt so safe in a vehicle before.”

“I was so excited to work with Rosario,” Winstead says of Dawson. “She does one really cool movie after another. I’ve always admired her for that. I was so excited to see that she really is what I pictured her to be, which is really cool, down-to-earth, smart and independent. It’s great to be around her, and I feel like I’m really learning a lot from doing scenes with her.”

But Winstead, who made an impression in FINAL DESTINATION 3 and BOBBY, also had the sudden opportunity to sing. “We used the song ‘Baby It’s You’ earlier in the movie on camera for this really fantastic version done by a group called Smith from the 70s,” Tarantino says. “We had the rights to that song so I could have her sing that song. I just got her a copy of the song, not the same version we would use the more normal version of it and she goes, ‘Let me just learn it.’ She plugged it into her iPod and just listened to it about eight, nine times until she had the words down, and then we just did it. And she opens her mouth and out comes this really wonderful voice. She kind of almost brought everybody to tears. It was just so terrific. And her mom was on the set that day, and I said, ‘Did you know she’s such a good singer?’ We were all blown away by what a great job she did singing this song. It was just fantastic.”

“I think the day that I got really excited was the day that he gave me the song to sing, and I had no idea I was going to be singing in the movie. Suddenly he’s like I want you to learn this song and sing the whole thing, just belt it out. And I’ve always loved to sing. It’s such an exciting thing for me. That day I just had butterflies the whole day long.”

Joining the women as Jasper is Jonathan Loughran, who appeared in KILL BILL. (“I got to climb on top of Uma Thurman,” he says of his memorable scene in which he victimizes a comatose “Bride.”

“It worked out well for me. I don’t know about how well for her. I felt bad for her.”) “Jasper’s just a guy in Tennessee who’s a mechanic, has cars, and he has a car that the girls want to get from him. Zoë from New Zealand, she’s been hunting down this 1970s Dodge Challenger and she brings the girls to meet me.

NEXT:
THE WAR OF THE DODGES
For the film’s white-knuckle chase scene, the production relocated from Austin to the Santa Ynez Valley, just north of Santa Barbara. The towns of Buellton, Los Olivos, Lompoc and Solvang hosted the final chase scene between Stuntman Mike and Zoë, Kim and Abernathy...