Robert Rodriguez

Start here

Episode highlight

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.