Turns out we know very little about the 'Machete' sequel

With the Cannes Film Festival this week, most of Hollywood has moved east for the big event with plenty of big names showing up in the city. With plenty of updates on future projects coming out of the large jumble, Robert Rodriguez also happens to be one of them. The director is staying incredibly busy with two big sequels this summer and yet while speculation and rumors have run rampant not too much has been confirmed. Now, Rodriguez is the latest voice to speak at Cannes, and not only does he have a casting update for Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, but he’s seemed to pull a gag on the entire internet.

Talking with Empire, Rodriguez responded to the rumor that Angelina Jolie may be joining Sin City 2 as the titular “dame” in the sequel’s A Dame to Kill For. While he neither confirmed or denied, he swiftly avoided the question by stating “It’s a great part for any actress. She’s completely diabolical with no mercy. She’s as evil as evil gets.”

However, Rodriguez did reveal that the visual style in the film will be very different. ”I really held back the first time, because I didn’t know whether audiences would go for it. So it ended up looking like a real movie, but in black and white, with a few flourishes. This one is going to push way further towards the books. It’s going to shock and surprise people.”

As for who will exactly be in that heavily stylized film, Mickey Rourke, Michael Madsen, Jessica Alba have been confirmed along with Rosario Dawson, while Clive Owen seems to remain the big holdout. Given the source material of A Dame to Kill For, Owen’s character of Dwight is a huge part of the graphic novel version, and though Empire had said that the actor was confirmed they later retracted the statement. Rodriguez mentioned that he was going to meet with some “seriously big names” once Cannes was finished, but there’s no indication as to who that may be.

On to Rodriguez’s next effort, he also spoke on the plot information previously released by Dimension Films, which revealed that Machete (Danny Trejo) was called in by the President to stop a satellite in space thanks to a cartel lord (Mel Gibson). However, the director revealed that actually none of that is true. “That synopsis we put out is misdirection — it’s all fake. Machete is recruited by the President, that’s true, but there’s no cartel leader and the weapon in space is just one of our early story ideas. That said, there is still a space element, for sure. We’ve given the character a much bigger playground. It’s going to be like a James Bond movie, with a Bond-style villain.”

Rodriguez elaborated on Gibson’s character by promising some pretty big things. ”This won’t just be him grinning, doing bad-guy stuff. He’s going to do something with it that’ll really get people talking.” That certainly sounds like a change of pace from the conspiracy theory attitude that was just one of a few antagonistic factors regarding the plot of the first film.

Sin City: A Dame to Kill For to be released into theaters on October 4th, 2013, while Machete Kills currently has no release date.