Wednesday, December 7th at the Arclight Theater in Los Angeles, California, Buena Vista Home Video gave movie and comic fans alike an early Christmas present. Nearly one week before its release date, hundreds of fans were shown special features from the new Recut, Extended Version of Sin City. After the screening, Robert Rodriguez, Quentin Tarantino, and Frank Miller talked about the making of the movie, and fielded questions from the audience…

I managed to get in a question that I was eager to have answered, and in the process scored a super-sweet DVD set (which, by the way, comes with the first volume of Sin City) in the process. Rodriguez spotted me and requested that “the guy who looks like Kevin Smith” ask the next question. I obliged by asking Frank Miller if his positive experience with Sin City would open him up to the possibility of adapting more of his comics work to the big screen. Miller said that he wasn’t necessarily opposed to such an idea, but suggested that should he adapt more of his work, it would be Rodriguez and his Troublemaker Studios that he would want filming it. Then, after Rodriguez had fielded the last question, a special guest stood up to ask the last last question: Kevin Smith, making a surprise appearance, demanded to see “that guy who looks like me,” and received a free DVD for his efforts. When I talked to him after the show, he told me I should slap Rodriguez (though he referred to him as “that motherfucker”) for making the comparison.

IGN: Another film recently re-released on DVD was Mallrats. As a joke in the movie, you describe how you borrow from your own life and experiences to create these characters and situations. How accurate is that in real life?

Lee: Well, it’s a good question, but I really never knew anybody who turned into a green-skinned monster (laughs). No, I think that every writer is subject to all of the things that we’ve seen and heard and experienced in our life, and they’re all buried in our subconscious somewhere probably. I’m sure when we try to think of a story, all of those things swimming around our subconscious come to the fore. I have never consciously based a story that I can remember on anything that I myself did or on people that I knew personally. I would base characters on archetypes rather than on definite people, and as far as the stories themselves, most of the things I wrote were so farfetched it’s pretty obvious I didn’t base them on experience or anything like that. Most of it was, I think, a product of my imagination – my warped imagination.