Robert Rodriguez: Sin City, Desperado, El Mariachi, Alita, and Filmmaking

I write the script in December. January, Josh Arnett, Marley Shelton, come down, fly Frank in. Shooting for 10 hours on my green screen. We shoot that opening sequence, incredible opening sequence and the visual Look, we've never seen that. I want to just take this and make it move. I just want the comic to move. Any other studio would just go make it look like any gritty crime movie, and they would miss the point that the visual is half of it. I want it to look just like this because it would be the boldest movie anyone's seen because that's how it reads when I read the book. It's like, if this was moving, it would be the most phenomenal movie. Just by being around him and working with him you get by osmosis, you learn stuff and it just ups your game because they're just swing way beyond you. Jim Cameron was like that. So when I first met him, I was trying to impress the hell out of him because I was such a big fan. I was about to go do Desperado and I went, "Hey, I just took a three-day Steadicam course because I can't afford a Steadicam operator, so I'm going to operate Steadicam myself on Desperado." Now if he was just my peer, he'd say, "Oh, I did the same thing," and I'm going to do the same thing. That would be hanging out with somebody of your I, but you want somebody who's above that. Do you know what he said? He goes, "I bought about a Steadicam, but not to operate it. I'm going to take it apart and design a better one. Us mere mortals trying to learn how to operate the camera. He's designing all new systems. That's the guy you want to hang out with, not someone who's doing what you're doing.

The following is a conversation with Robert Rodriguez, a legendary filmmaker and creator of Sin City, El Mariachi, Desperado, Spy Kids, Machete from Dust Till Dawn, Alita, Battle Angel, The Faculty, and many more. Robert inspired a generation of independent filmmakers with his first film, El Mariachi, that he famously made for just $7,000. On that film in many sense, he was not only the director, he was also the writer, producer, cinematographer, editor, visual effects supervisor, sound designer, composer, basically the full stack of filmmaking. He has shown incredible versatility across genres including action horror, family films and sci-fi with some epic collaborations with Quentin Tarantino, James Cameron, and many other legendary actors and filmmakers. He has often operated at the technological cutting edge, pioneering, using HD filmmaking, digital backlots and 3D tech, and always through all of that, he's been a champion of independent filmmaking, running his own studio here in Austin, Texas, which in many ways is very far away from Hollywood. He's building a new thing now called Brass Knuckle Films where he's opening up the filmmaking process so that fans can be a part of it as he creates his next four action films. I'll probably go hang out at his film studio a bunch as this is all coming to life. His work has inspired a very large number of people, including me to be more creative in whatever pursuit you take on in life and have fun doing it. This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Robert Rodriguez.

Has there been a time when there was one take and you only have one take to get it right? Oh, all the time where you're just like, or just how long it'll take to reset and you're just, but then you know what? You got to just work with what you got. You got to work with your results.

So you write the story, the script, and then you have it collide with the chaos of reality. And in that moment when you said you see the chickenshit, you have to be able to keep your eyes open. You have to do that.

Every aspect of your journey is super inspiring. We'll talk about it. Let's go to the beginning because there's a few technical things that are fascinating about your beginning. So you started making films when you were very young with an old Super 8 camera and you were editing on a VCR. You see, I've met a lot of filmmakers who they start a certain way, but then they finish another way. They get to be big filmmakers and all that. I still do it that way. I like doing things that way. I have a new company called Brass Knuckle Films where the audience can actually participate by being investing investors in these movies that are done the same way. They're action films like we did with Mariachi, but 10 to 30 million. It doesn't take a lot of money to start a billion-dollar franchise. John Wick only cost $20 million, the first one. Second one was 40, third one was 80, fourth one was a hundred because the audience kept growing and growing.

And it even exposed and Mariachi the same way. You have to think about it. I shot Mariachi on film with a bar of 16 millimeter camera. I didn't know how to use it. I called up a place in Dallas that rented that kind of equipment and I said, "I have an AR-16s here, two motor looking things. One has a 24 and one has a bunch of numbers." "Oh, that's a variable speed motor. That means you can do different speed." "I can shoot slow motion with this? Oh wow." "Do you have a torque motor?" "I don't know." "What is that?" "Is there something on the side of the magazine?" Yeah, now you can just look up on YouTube and it shows you how to use it. I was doing it by phone that way, and then I went and shot the movie right then and I didn't know if any of it was exposing or if the film camera was working until I finished the whole movie. So imagine you have to go down to Mexico, shoot for two weeks, come back, send it off to the lab. You want to talk about being nervous? Yeah.

I totally believe it, because when you start doing this, you go, "Where are these answers coming from? I'm asking the right question, but how come the answers just keep coming like this?" I believe, because I do so many different jobs, I've learned this over the years. When I was in 2002, I was like, "How is it that I'm the production designer, the composer," which I don't even know how to read or write music, and I'm writing orchestral score and I'm doing the editing and I'm doing the cinematography. I haven't been trained for any of these. I never went to school for these specifically. Must be something about creativity. So I went on Amazon, it's 2002. I look up creative books. Anything that has creativity in the title, I just ordered it. And I've got a bunch of books on creativity, and I was reading them through. One of them was really speaking to me. "Yeah, that's it." That's the process. And then it says gels and mediums, and I'm like, "Oh, this is a book specifically about painting," but it applies to music, editing, cinematography, writing, it's all the same. So that's when I realized that creativity is 90% of any of those jobs. The technical part of setting up the cameras, of writing a script in format or reading or writing music, that's 10% of that.

He loves movies. In fact, the next time I heard him laugh that way was at his own premiere for Kill Bill. We're watching Kill Bill, and he's laughing like it's somebody else's movie. He still enjoys the movie. He loves what all the actors did. And it's like, that's the kind of energy you really love. But I'll tell you what happened. I'm a very shy person, very shy. I'd have to go talk. I'm sure you probably feel like you're not an orator or anything, just have to go do it. I thought, well man, I'm going to have to introduce my film and talk about it afterwards. I'm afraid of that. What am I going to do? I don't remember talking in front of more than five people before. So I went to see this other movie and it was good, and I was watching it, and then the director comes up at the end, he goes, "Yeah, well, that was my movie and here's the writer." And it's like, oh man, I don't like the movie anymore. This guy's kind of a dick, so I cannot do that. I'm going to have to go be who they imagine made that movie. So I wrote out my whole intro. It was like a 20-minute intro. Because no one had ever heard of anybody making a movie for no money, much less without a crew, much less, the way I did it was just very new. Nobody knew it was possible. So my whole intro is like, "You'll see the Columbia logo slapped in front. It probably cost more than the whole movie." And then I go through, "This is how I made it with a wheelchair for a dolly, a turtle. I wrote around things I had," I mentioned the turtle, the pit bull, the bus, the ranch, all that stuff.

I think you've spoken about that filmmakers, especially early on in their journey, critics and the audience can destroy them, meaning it creates too much of a burden, too much, just wear them down to where they're almost scared to be creative. Can you just speak to that how to ignore the critic? I'll tell you something that my best advice ever got early on, I was so fortunate, from an unlikely place because he's such, he sounded like Clint Eastwood when he said it, it was funny when you said that. But I got, I did Desperado and had Antonio Banderas, I brought Antonio to be in it from Europe, big action movie. And so Spielberg saw it and he said, "Hey, I want you to do Zorro with Antonio." So we're working on it for a while, I was working on the pre-production, got to work with Spielberg doing that. It ended up stalling because there was two studios involved and Amblin was moving or it was some weird thing where, but I got to work with him for about five months and I started getting really nervous because it's like, oh shit, you start thinking about, even movies of his that people would say, "Oh, Temple of Doom is not as good as Raiders." Have you seen Temple of Doom? I would kill to fucking do that movie.

If you ask Netflix right now, what do you need more of? They'll say, "Action, action, action. We don't have enough action. The last regime didn't leave us enough action. We need action." They'll pay a premium for an action film that we can make at a lower cost. A $20 million action film is very cheap. Studios don't know how to make them that cheap. That's why they'll pay for an independent to go do it. And right now that's the key is to be independent because a lot of studios that can't even green light anything because things are so expensive they don't want to lose their ass, but they need action films. So let's make something that everybody needs and let's make it at a price and we'll make it in my studio because I got my own studio and I can keep all the costs down because we have all the costumes and props and sets from 25 years of filmmaking to keep the cost down and we'll have the audience gets to invest. It's not crowdfunding or Kickstarter, you are actually an investor. Anyone who puts money in can pitch their idea for an action film to me. And I'm going to make one of the four films in that slate from one of those ideas because I want the audience to win. I want the audience to win and be a part of it because the audience is an afterthought in Hollywood. They make a movie, they show the audience the movie, "Go tell your friends now so you all spend money on our movie." Well where's your cut of that? So I want them to be successful. So if any of the movies in the slate do well, they make money off that one and then sequels or anything. But they're all going to do well because everyone needs an action movie or we're going to keep the cost down.

Let me just ask you, you're the perfect person to ask about the genius of Quentin Tarantino. What makes him special as a director, as a creative mind, what do you see in him that's beautiful, that's brilliant? Since I met him, he was just like this brilliant ball of energy. And if you see him, I walk around his house and I'll see a few sheets of paper all handwritten out. I'm like, "What's that?" He goes, "Oh, that was something I was starting to write, not going to finish." I'm like, "Can I take these and go turn it into the whole trilogy of films?" What he throws away, all us mortal men would kill for, you need people like that.

And drawing Danny Trejo, of all people is like, there's so much going on there. It's like he's so expressive. He's so expressive, and so much-

Yeah. How did you find her? I mean, this is one of the greatest- It was a crazy story-

So, Danny Trejo, you asked me about Danny Trejo. It's great story. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

Yeah, that was beautiful. You're actually known in part, maybe you can correct me, but to do pretty unexpected, surprising, kind of interesting casting. So Robert De Niro is an example of that, and that's just a great role. The second aspect of that, I heard the story that, you can just get an actor in and out in just a few days. Really fast. The Robert Rodriguez experience, as they call it. How do you make that happen? Can you just tell the story of Robert De Niro? Well, I'm the editor, I'm the cameraman, I'm the DP. And so, when I call him and say, "I've got you as the villain in this whole movie, but I swear, I'm going to shoot you on four days. You come down in four days." In fact, there's a scene where he's in the hospital. He's just smiling, he's having such a good time, because he couldn't believe it. I said, "Guess what? When you wake up from your hotel room at the Stephen F. Austin, you just cross the hallway, that's the set. The room next to yours, we turned into the hospital set. So you're just going to come lay in there, in your pajamas.

So I'm going to show you this test. Okay, so for Dusk Till Dawn, the TV series, I would always shoot the first episode and the last episode of a seven or eight episode season. There was three seasons. By the time we got to the third season, I was doing Alita, so I couldn't do the big finale episode, and my actor who plays the George Clooney character, D.J. Cotrona, he's somebody who wanted to be a writer, and was writing. He wrote Fight and Flight, it's this movie that's going to come out, with Josh Hartnett. That's his, he wrote it. After doing this. He was like, "Man, hearing you talk, you know what? I got..." This is what I love about, you inspire people, the feedback loop inspires you back. He said, "Man, hearing in your talk for Red 11, and the cards. I've got a script that's partially written, I'm just going to go crank it out in... I'm going to cut off the phone in three days. I'm going to finish that thing in three fucking days." Fuck yeah.

And also, yeah. I love that you're thinking about where the eyes of the audience will go. I feel like too many people might think about some more general concept of a scene, versus the audience, where's their eye? Where's their eye? Well, you're drawing it through sound, through picture. I'm going to show you, if you notice, without the sound. You don't really see him click that thing back. Watch.

The audio is first. Sound is first really, even though it's a visual medium. That's so crazy. Just what's the plan with the four action films? What are the next steps? I'll probably direct more than one because there's already several that I want to do, but I'm going to direct at least one, but I'm producing all three, all four there at my studio.

I have to ask you about Alita. So you've done so many incredibly innovative projects. This is one of them. It turned out to be this visual masterpiece. There's a bunch of complexity, beautiful complexity about it in that it started out as a film that James Cameron was supposed to make. And then you started to collaborate with him on it. And then these two, I would say brilliant directors, but with different styles like you were talking about. And so plus there's the complexity of for people who haven't seen it, you're putting this artificial creation, this beautiful photorealistic, artificial creation of a human being into a real world. So you have to capture the performance, not just the motion, but the performance of this actor, put them into this, with the power of technology, into the real world. So convey all the emotion, the richness of the human face. Can you just speak to the process of bringing that world to life? Sure. I mean, one, I never would've attempted if it wasn't Jim, because Jim has figured all of this out. So just to get you again, remember like I said, "Hey Jim, I'm operating a steady cam, what do you think of that?" "Well, I'm designing a new system." That's always how it is between him and I. So when I went to show him Desperado when it was done, he said, "You might not want to sit through, if you don't want to sit through it while I'm watching it, it's fine. Do you want to read any of my scriptments, my treatment scripts?" They're called scriptments. Sure. He goes, "I have Spider-Man and I got Avatar." So this was in '95. He was showing me the scriptment for Avatar, which there was no technology for that. He was already doing stuff that didn't exist. And I was reading it going, this is a great story.

Since we talked about a few the directors, can you speak to the genius of James Cameron? What makes him special? You talked about some of the difference in your approach and his. He's created some of the most special movies ever also. What's behind that? What would you say is interesting about the way his creative mind works? I think that any of those guys, George Lucas, him know John Lasseter when he did Pixar. It's a mix of, and I always got really lucky. My first job was a photo shop because my dad had a friend who owned a photo shop. He said, your summer job. And I was 16, go work for my friend Mario. I go to Mario's Photo shop and I'm developing pictures or develop photos from film. And he said, here, take this camera home. Gave me one of his cameras. Take this camera home and some film. I need you to learn how to use the camera so you can help me sell the cameras.

Have to ask you about Sin City, one of my favorite films of all time. It was a visually stunning world. What are some maybe interesting detailed aspects about you creating that world? This is why you just got to follow your nose and go do something. Jim and I were both into 3D early on. I visited his set for the Terminator 3D ride. Dusk Till Dawn, I wanted to be 3D. Actually when they got to the bar, if you've watched from that point on and everything's kind of set up for 3D, everything was shooting into the camera and all this, but the cameras they had for 3D and film were those old shitty ones that were so bad that I went, "Okay, we can't do it." But I really wanted people to have to put on glasses when they got into the bar and it was going to turn into a 3D different movie. I got to do that on Spy Kids 3D.

Yeah. I noticed a little bit. And I was like, I'm going to free you up so that you're never uncomfortable again. It's scary to say that about yourself, to allow yourself-

So important. Living is-

Does it make you sad? Does it break your heart that the number of memories we get to create is finite, that this life ends? Eventually the story is over? I had this theory. I'm going to put this in a movie. I don't think I've ever said this before. Because I woke up from a dream and it was like trying to remember it. You're like, "God, it was so real." If you don't write it down right away, it kind of fades away. But while you're dreaming it, it's really real. And it's like you can almost see the walls. By the time I went to go tell somebody, it's like, shit, I forgot most of it. I wonder if that's what it's like when you wake up in your consciousness after you die. You wake up in your next consciousness getting ready to move into whatever your next body is and you're like, "Wow, I was a filmmaker? I had five kids? And oh well, I'm go be a fish now." It's like a dream. It's like that, gone that way. And it's like that's what past lives are. They're like distant memories, like a dream that's faded away.