SXSW is in full flow and the a couple of American based film sites are on hand to keep their eyes peeled and their ears open for any interesting nuggets of news. There seems to be a lot of focus on ‘Grindhouse’ at the festival and Rodriguez has been very chatty on several interesting subjects; the possibility of a ‘Once upon a time in Mexico’ spin-off, the the visual stylings he’s employed to give ‘Planet Terror’ an authentic look, but of most interest to me was the possibility that his Grindhouse trailer ‘Machete’ will become a full film… Danny Trejo playing with knives…. hellllll yes…

Here’s the quotes that IGN nabbed:

“I’ve got a direct-to-video in the States Machete movie, and internationally it could go out as a feature,” revealed Rodriguez. “We’ve got a script already and Danny Trejo says, ‘I’m in the best shape of my life, bro. I am so ready to do this movie!’ So it’s really cool. I’m going to direct some other sequences in it for sure, and maybe the whole thing. I don’t know if I should do it like El Mariachi, but I want it to look really good. That trailer came out fantastic. Danny is really great in it and there’s some other surprise actors that show up in this trailer. And it just looks fantastic.”

“It’s an idea I came up with back during Desporado,” said Rodriguez. “When I met Danny, I said, ‘This guy should be like the Mexican Jean-Claude Van Damme or Charles Bronson, putting out a movie every year and his name should be Machete.’ So I decided to do that way back when, never got around to it until finally now. So now, of course, I want to keep going and do a feature.”

They also announced the winner of the ‘Make your own Grindhouse Trailer’ competition, which if i’m honest I hadn’t been that impressed with, but I obviously didn’t get very deep into into the entries as the top 3 are all really good…