The 1995 anthology title Four Rooms is a roundtable; four directors each shot a short film set in the same hotel. Though the movie was critically panned, it’s actually pretty enjoyable; the segments are all enjoyably loopy, and the Robert Rodriguez section is actually laugh out loud funny, with some great slapstick and nice turns by a couple of talented child actors.

One notable aspect of the Rodriguez segment (“The Misbehavers”) is that none of the characters is white. Tim Roth the bellhop is a prominent figure in all the segments, and he’s still there — but the family in the room is composed of Antonio Banderas as the father, Tamlyn Tomita as the Wife, and two children (played by Lana McKissack and Danny Verduzco). And yes, I think that’s the only mixed Hispanic/Asian family I’ve ever seen on film. Even the corpse in the bed is played by Robert Rodriguez’s sister, Patricia Vonne.

The rest of the segments aren’t especially racially homogenous by Hollywood standards; the opening coven-of-witches one is all white, I believe, but Jessica Beals (who is African-American) is the only person besides Roth to appear in two segments, and Paul Calderon (also African-American) shows up in Tarantino’s closing scene. Still, except for Rodriguez’s section, white people predominate.

The fact that the film is an anthology roundtable, and the fact that one of the films is so different in its approach to race, shows with unusual clarity that representation isn’t an accident, or a random function of hiring the best actors — especially since Rodriguez’s segment is pretty clearly the most inspired of the collection. Casting diverse actors is a choice — and casting white actors is a choice. Rodriguez’s room is one in which whiteness is not the default. If only white people can get into the other’s hotels, that’s because, to one degree or another, they’ve closed their doors.