Robert Rodriguez (TW: @RODRIGUEZ, ELREYNETWORK.COM) is a director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer, editor, and musician. He is also the founder and chairman of El Rey Network, a new genre-busting cable network. There, he hosts one of my favorite interview-format shows, The Director’s Chair.
While a student at the University of Texas at Austin, Rodriguez wrote the script for his first feature film while he was a paid subject in a clinical experiment at a drug research facility. That paycheck covered the cost of shooting. The film, El Mariachi, went on to win the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival, and became the lowest-budget movie ever released by a major studio. Rodriguez went on to write, produce, and direct many successful films, including Desperado, From Dusk Till Dawn, the Spy Kids franchise, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, Frank Miller’s Sin City, Machete, and others.
Spirit animal: Great white shark
This is the motherlode. The stars and caffeine aligned to make this interview extremely rich, and Robert hit a home run. My personal highlight doc for this episode was a book by itself. So, please indulge me, as this one is longer than usual. It’s worth it.
The term “Rodriguez list” has come to mean writing down all of your assets and building a film around the list. It originates from Robert’s approach to making El Mariachi, which he shot as a “test film” for himself. This “What assets might we have?” question is also asked by billionaire Reid Hoffman (here). Here’s Robert’s story:
“I just took stock of what I had. My friend Carlos, he’s got a ranch in Mexico. Okay, that’ll be where the bad guy is. His cousin owns a bar. The bar is where there’s going to be the first, initial shootout. It’s where all the bad guys hang out. His other cousin owns a bus line. Okay, there will be an action scene with the bus at some point, just a big action scene in the middle of the movie with a bus. He’s got a pitbull. Okay, he’s in the movie. His other friend had a turtle he found. Okay, the turtle’s in the movie because people will think we had an animal wrangler, and that will suddenly raise production value.
“I wrote everything around what we had, so you never had to go search, and you never had to spend anything on the movie. The movie cost, really, nothing. [The only cost] was really just that I wanted to shoot it on film instead of video, so that it would look more expensive, and try to tell people I made it for $70K and try to sell it for $70K. [Robert spent $7K on El Mariachi.]
“Instead, it ended up going to Columbia and getting released. When we won Sundance, the Audience Award, my acceptance speech said, ‘You’re going to get a lot more entries next year. When people find out that this is the one that won, a movie made with no money and no crew, everyone’s going to pick up a camera and start making their own movies.’ It’s been flooded with entries since then. It was a real change in the paradigm.”
“I didn’t think anyone was going to see [El Mariachi]. It was really just a test film. That’s why I did it in Spanish. I did it for the Spanish market…. [I figured] I’ll do two or three of these things, cut them all together, take out the best portions and use it on my demo reel, and then use the money that I make to go make a real first English-language, American, independent film….
“I didn’t overthink it at all. I would have treated it completely differently, had I thought I would ever even show it to anybody. Had I thought it would go to a festival and I would submit it, I would have spent ten times as much. I would have gone and borrowed money. Instead, everything was one take, even if it didn’t work, because the film’s so expensive. And it was a noisy camera and a soundless camera. It would make so much noise, you couldn’t record sound [at the same time]. So, I had to record sound the way you’re doing right now. I would shoot a take, put the camera away, get the sound out, put the mic up close…. So I got great sound, but it was out of sync. But, you kind of talk in your own rhythm. So if I say, ‘Hi, my name is Robert,’ you put the camera away, and now you do the audio: ‘Hi, my name is Robert,’ you can pretty much get it to sync…. If you look at Mariachi, it’s [almost] all in sync…. Where it started to get out of sync, I cut away to the dog, or I cut away to a closeup. It created this really snappy editing style, but it was really just to get it back in sync because I couldn’t stand it….
“There’s a freedom [in] limitations. It’s almost more freeing to know I’ve got to use only these items: turtle, bar, ranch. You’re almost completely free within that.”
TF: Excuses are a dime a dozen. In the case of entrepreneurship, the “I don’t have” list—I don’t have funding, I don’t have connections, etc.—is a popular write-off for inaction. But lack of resources is often one of the critical ingredients for greatness. Jack Ma, founder of China’s Alibaba Group, is worth an estimated $20 to $30 billion, and he explains the secret of his success this way: “There were three reasons why we survived: We had no money, we had no technology, and we had no plan. Every dollar, we used very carefully.”
“I remember on From Dusk Till Dawn, the film, the special effects guys put too much fire in the explosion, and the actors come running out of the building. It’s in the movie. You see the building blow up, the bar at the end…. It just kept going and engulfed the whole set, and that was the first shot. We still needed to shoot lots of other stuff with it. Everyone else was freaking out, the production designer was crying. That was all their work. My assistant director comes over and he goes, ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’ I go, ‘Yeah, it looks good the way it is. It’s all charred. Let’s just keep shooting, we’ll do the little repair that needs to be done for next week, and we’ll shoot that exterior next week. But let’s just keep shooting.’ You use those gifts, because nothing ever goes according to plan. Sometimes I hear new filmmakers talk down about their film, and ‘Oh, nothing worked and it was a disappointment.’ They don’t realize yet that that’s the job. The job is that nothing is going to work at all. So you go: “How can I turn it into a positive and get something much better than if I had all the time and money in the world?” I love those experiences so much…. I talked to Michael Mann about this [during] The Director’s Chair. We talked about Manhunter once, years ago. He didn’t have money, he’d fired the effects crew.
“Some of the really cool staccato editing was to cover up the fact that they didn’t have effects, and I didn’t know that. I always thought it was a stylistic choice. And he says, ‘No, it’s because we didn’t have any money or time. I had to almost cut it myself, and I was throwing ketchup on the guy between edits.’ It was like, ‘Oh, my God, I thought that was a brilliant stylistic choice.’ I said, ‘I’m going to do that for all my movies now.’ I want all of them to not have enough money, not enough time, so that we’re forced to be more creative. Because that’s going to give it some spark that you can’t manufacture. People will tap into it or they’ll go: ‘I don’t know why I like this movie. It’s kind of a weird movie, but there’s something about it that makes me want to watch it again and again because it’s got a life to it.’ Sometimes art should be imperfect in a way.”
“It’s good not to follow the herd. Go the other way. If everyone’s going that way, you go this other way. You’re gonna stumble, but you’re also gonna stumble upon an idea no one came up with….
“That way, at least it’s a new frontier. I always found success by just going the opposite way. There was too much competition over there. If everyone’s trying to get through that one little door, you’re in the wrong place. Sometimes at a film festival when people ask, ‘How do we break in?’ I say, ‘The problem is you’re at a film festival. Nothing wrong with film festivals, but everyone else here is trying to get through that same door, and they’re not all going to fit.’ …
“So you’ve got to think bigger than that. There’s less competition up there. I always wanted to get into TV, but instead of going and competing with everyone else trying to get in on 7 p.m. on NBC on a Friday night, [I decided to] own a network. You know how many people are trying to own a network? Nobody. When that network I got, El Rey, was up for grabs, there were 100 other applicants. Now, that sounds like a lot. But out of the whole country, 100? Really? How many actually had a solid business plan and a vision of something that could be implemented? Probably 5. So you’re competing with the top 5 instead of the top 20,000 trying to get in on NBC on Friday or Saturday night. So I always say: ‘Try to look bigger….’”
One of my favorite episodes of The Director’s Chair is with Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, etc.), and Robert refers later to this quote from Francis: “Failure is not necessarily durable. Remember that the things that they fire you for when you are young are the same things that they give lifetime achievement awards for when you’re old.”
ROBERT: “Even if I didn’t sell Mariachi, I would have learned so much by doing that project. That was the idea—I’m there to learn. I’m not there to win; I’m there to learn, because then I’ll win, eventually….
“You’ve got to be able to look at your failures and know that there’s a key to success in every failure. If you look through the ashes long enough, you’ll find something. I’ll give you one. Quentin [Tarantino] asked me, ‘Do you want to do one of these short films called Four Rooms [where each director can create the film of their choosing, but it has to be limited to a single hotel room, and include New Year’s Eve and a bellhop]?’ and my hand went up right away, instinctively….
“The movie bombed. In the ashes of that failure, I can find at least two keys of success. On the set when I was doing it, I had cast Antonio Banderas as the dad and had this cool little Mexican as his son. They looked really close together. Then I found the best actress I could find, this little half-Asian girl. She was amazing. I needed an Asian mom. I really wanted them to look like a family. It’s New Year’s Eve, because [it] was dictated by the script, so they’re all dressed in tuxedos. I was looking at Antonio and his Asian wife and thinking, ‘Wow, they look like this really cool, international spy couple. What if they were spies, and these two little kids, who can barely tie their shoes, didn’t know they were spies?’ I thought of that on the set of Four Rooms. There are four of those [Spy Kids movies] now and a TV series coming.
“So that’s one. The other one was, after [Four Rooms] failed, I thought, ‘I still love short films.’ Anthologies never work. We shouldn’t have had four stories; it should have been three stories because that’s probably three acts, and it should just be the same director instead of different directors because we didn’t know what each person was doing. I’m going to try it again. Why on earth would I try it again, if I knew they didn’t work? Because you figured something out when you’re doing it the first time, and [the second attempt] was Sin City.”
TIM: “Amazing.”
ROBERT: “So Spy Kids and Sin City came out of [Four Rooms]. If you have a positive attitude, you can look back. That’s why what Francis [Ford Coppola] is saying is correct. Failure isn’t always durable. You can go back and you can look at it and go, ‘Oh, that wasn’t a failure. That was a key moment of my development that I needed to take, and I can trust my instinct. I really can’.”
Robert has made all of his own movie posters since Desperado. Here’s how he got there:
“The [creative] agency shows up [to shoot the movie poster]. Antonio was sick that day, and they were like, ‘We’re here only one day so we’ll put his outfit on one of the other crew members and we’ll paste his head on later.’ I’m thinking, ‘That’s not going to look right. Nobody moves like him. Oh, geez, this is going to be awful.’ So we shot our own poster on the set, the famous one of him with the gun. I saw him doing that one day on the set, and I went and took a little snapshot that would be a great poster.
“When we went to show the studio the posters, the ones the other guys did looked like DVD covers. I put mine up there, too, and Lisa Henson, the president of Columbia, looked at all of them. She looked at the one that I had and said, ‘We like that one,’ and I said, ‘That one’s mine.’ She looks at me like, ‘Oh shit, had I known it was you, I probably wouldn’t have said that.’ She goes, ‘Really? Oh, we didn’t know.’ I’m glad I just put it up there along with the others and didn’t say anything. Then that set a precedent. From then on, I could go to every studio and say, ‘I do my own posters, too. So you guys can go ahead and try and make one, but we’ll try and make one.’
“The key is to do it early. Do it while you’re still shooting. First impression is everything. I’ll cut a trailer while I’m still shooting and send it to a studio. They’ll try to make their own, over and over, and they can’t get that first thing they saw out of their heads, ‘It’s still not as good as the one we saw.’”
Robert takes copious notes. He sets an alarm for midnight every night to input the day’s notes into a Word document. He dates everything and stores them by year, so he can find whatever he might want later:
“I have a little alarm that goes off at midnight, because around midnight is usually a good time, and I’ll write something down. Because I found that even when I just wrote some items down, I could go back and fill them in later because I would remember. … What kept it going is when I would go back and review the journals and realize how many life-changing things happened within a weekend. Things that you thought were spread out over 2 years were actually Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and that Monday. So many occurrences happened in chunks that could blow you away, things that kind of define you….
“For anyone who is a parent, it’s a must. It’s a must because your children—and you—forget everything. Within a few years, they’ll forget things that you think they should remember for the rest of their lives. They’ll only remember it if it’s reinforced. I’m a real family man, so I really love every birthday. I’ll tell my kids, because they forget by the next year, what their first years were like. I’ll just read through the journal entries, and it blows them away. Or they’ll say: ‘Hey, we should go camping again.’ I go, ‘Camping? Oh yeah, remember that time we went camping and I put the tent in the backyard and it had electricity going through? We had fans, and we were watching Jonny Quest and we were playing…. I must have a journal on that, and I must have video.’ So year by year, I just search ‘camping.’ ‘Oh, May 4, 1999. We went camping. It’s on tape 25.’ I go find the tape and show it to them. After I’d show them the tape, they didn’t have to go camping again. They just relived it….
“[Or] you ask your girlfriend or your wife, ‘What did we do last year on your birthday?’ They won’t remember. A year goes by and you will not remember the details. You go back and you see the journals, it’s even better the second time. You live through it again and you realize the importance of it.”
Robert has many different “jobs” and doesn’t view creativity as job-specific. It’s a meta-skill. He routinely plays guitar on set and invites master painters to set to teach the actors during breaks. He believes that if you develop creativity, trust and getting started often take care of the rest:
“The technical part of any job is 10%. 90% is creativity. If you already know how to be creative, you’ve kind of got the battle half beat, [because] you don’t need to know. You don’t need to know what note specifically you’re going to play when you get on stage and do your solo.
“Everybody will ask, what did you just play? And you’re going to go, ‘I don’t know.’ I asked Jimmie Vaughan: ‘How do you know what you’re playing just now?’ ‘I don’t even know what I played.’ … Ask any of the greats. I studied under a painter, Sebastian Krüger. I went all the way to Germany to watch him paint, to figure out his trick. How does he do it? Because I tried to do what he did, and it looked like garbage. He must have a special brush. He must have special paint and a special technique. So, I go and now, he starts with a mid tone, starts knocking in some highlights, a little bit on the chin, and then he goes to the eye. I ask, ‘How do you know where to go next?’ He says, ‘Oh, I never know. It’s different every time.’
“That drives me bonkers. ‘What do you mean? How come I can’t do that?’ and I’d go sit down, and suddenly I could do it. It blows you away. So I take those lessons back and I teach my actors that. I teach my crew that. You don’t need to know.”
TIM: “Sorry to pause, but this is so fascinating to me. So what clicked? What was the realization when you sat down and suddenly … ?”
ROBERT: “You get it in your own way—thinking that you needed to know something, a trick or a process, before it would flow. If you got out of the way, it would just flow. What gives you permission to let it flow? Sometimes if you take 4 years of schooling or you study under somebody, then you’ve suddenly given yourself permission to let it flow….
“You’re just opening up the pipe and the creativity flows through. And as soon as your ego gets in the way, and you go, ‘I don’t know if I know what to do next’ you’ve already put ‘I’ in front of it and you’ve already blocked it a little bit. ‘I did it once, but I don’t know if I can do it again.’ It was never you. The best you can do is just to get out of the way so it comes through.
“When an actor comes to me and he says, ‘I’m not sure I know how to play this part,’ I say, ‘That’s beautiful because the other half’s gonna show up when we’re there.’ They say knowing’s half the battle. I think the most important is the other part—not knowing what’s going to happen but trusting that it will be there when you put the brush up to the canvas. It’s going to know where to go.”
TIM: “So the trust comes first.”
ROBERT: “The trust comes first.”
While at the University of Texas, Robert produced a comic strip called Los Hooligans:
“I used to come home and I’d have to do a strip a day, and it might take 3 or 4 hours. I would sometimes not feel like facing the blank page, so I would go lie down and try and figure out if I could create this method, where I could stare at the ceiling and it will just appear, fully formed, and then I could go and draw it. I never could get that to work. I’d be running out of time. I’d run back to the table, and I’d realize the only way to do it was by drawing. You’d have to draw and draw and draw. Then one drawing would be kind of funny or cool. ‘That one’s kind of neat. This one kind of goes with that.’ Then you draw a couple of filler-ups and that’s how it would be created. You had to actually move.
“I applied that to all my other work: filmmaking and everything. Even if I didn’t know what to do, I just had to begin. For a lot of people, that’s the part that keeps them back the most. They think, ‘Well, I don’t have an idea, so I can’t start.’ I know you’ll only get the idea once you start. It’s this totally reverse thing. You have to act first before inspiration will hit. You don’t wait for inspiration and then act, or you’re never going to act, because you’re never going to have the inspiration, not consistently.”
TF: This is also how Kevin Kelly (here) writes, and the sentiment reminds me of Rolf Potts (here): “The simple willingness to improvise is more vital, in the long run, than research.”
“[On The Director’s Chair, Robert Zemeckis said] he thought he was making the worst movie ever in Forrest Gump … or that he was so punchy in Back to the Future [that] he almost cut the ‘Johnny B. Goode’ sequence because he thought, ‘Well, it doesn’t really fit. I’m going to cut it before we even preview it.’”
TIM: “That’s when his editor was like, ‘Just leave it in for the screening.’”
ROBERT: “Let’s just preview it…. He said, ‘We couldn’t peel people off the ceiling.’ You never know. It shows that you don’t know. I want people to hear those stories because when you feel like, ‘Oh, I don’t know if I’m doing it right. These other guys seem to know.’ No, they don’t know. None of them know. That’s the beauty of it. You don’t have to know. You just have to keep moving forward.”
“When people say: ‘You do so many things. You’re a musician, you’re a painter, you’re a composer, you’re a cinematographer, you’re the editor. You do so many different things.’ I go, ‘No, I only do one thing. I live a creative life. When you put creativity in everything, everything becomes available to you.’ …
“[If] I’m going to get into this character’s head, maybe I’ll paint him first and see what he looks like visually, or musically [figure out] what he sounds like. You can work completely nonlinear that way.
“How you journal things, how you cross reference, how you present things, how you inspire your crew, how you inspire other people around you, how you inspire yourself—it’s all creative. And if you say you’re not creative, look at how much you’re missing out on just because you’ve told yourself that. I think creativity is one of the greatest gifts that we’re born with that some people don’t cultivate, that they don’t realize it could be applied to literally everything in their lives.”
“I went to Frank Miller, and I showed him this test I did for Sin City [based on the graphic novels]. I said, ‘I know what it’s like to create original characters and to not trust Hollywood, but this isn’t Hollywood. This is something totally different. I made this on my own, and I’m going to offer you a deal. How about I write the screenplay, and it will be unremarkable, because I’m going to copy it right out of your books. It’s November. I’ll have the screenplay by December. We’ll go shoot a test in January. I’ll have some actor friends come down. We’ll shoot [the opening scene], I’ll cut it. You’ll be there, you’ll direct with me. I’ll do the effects, I’ll do the score, I’ll do the fake title sequence with all the actors we want to be in it [e.g., Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke]…. And if you like what you see, we’ll make a deal for the rights, and then we’ll make the movie. If you don’t like it, you keep it as a short film you can show your friends.’”
“That’s what my kids always say, ‘Dad’s not cheating. It’s just creative sportsmanship,’ when I beat them at a game because I bent some rule in my favor. They’re entertained by that. They don’t feel bad. They actually look forward to how I’m going to bend the rules.”
Robert’s most-gifted book is Start with Why by Simon Sinek.
“I realized better what I was doing when I read that book, and I gave it to people to show them how to clarify what they’re doing right and what they’re doing wrong.
“It’s a very simple approach that they should take every day. [For instance] if you go to an actor and say, ‘Hey, I’m a filmmaker and I’m making a low-budget movie, and I kind of need your name as a marquee to help sell it. I can’t pay you very much, and it’s going to be probably a lot of work, but if you want to be in it …’ you’re thinking about only yourself. And [the answer will be]: ‘No, get the hell out of here’ because all you’re talking about is what you do and how you do it, which is: I make low-budget movies. Yeah, so what? It means you’ve got no money.
“Instead, I always start with a why. I go to them [and say], ‘I love what you do. I’ve always been a big fan. I’ve got a part that you would never get. I believe in creative freedom. I don’t work with the studios. I work independently. I’m the boss there. It’s just me and my crew. It’s very creative. Ask any of your actor friends. They’ll say: Go have that experience.
“‘You’re just going to feel so invigorated. I shoot very quickly. Robert De Niro did Machete in 4 days. I’m going to shoot you out in 4 days. You’ll be on your next movie for 6 months. You’re on my movie for 4 days, and it’s going to be the most fun you’ve ever had, and you’ll probably get great reviews.
“‘Your performance is going to be really free, because I’m going to give you that freedom. That’s why I do it. How do I do it? Well, I work very independently. I have very few people on my crew, we all do multiple jobs. We do it with less money, so that we have more freedom. What is it I do? I’m an independent filmmaker. Do you want to come make this movie?’ They’re like, ‘Yes.’ Because it’s all about what they can do and how it’s going to fulfill them.”
Robert recounted a conversation with his son, who was extremely upset:
“I said, ‘I’m going to tell you a secret in life: You never have to be upset about anything. Everything is for a purpose. You just failed your driver’s test, and you’re all pissed off. I couldn’t be happier. I’d rather you fail with a teacher and take it 100 more times than go fail in front of a cop, or make that same mistake and hit somebody…. I can’t even think of a negative reason why you failing that test is a bad thing. It’s really how you look at it, and the way you look at it is so important. If you can have a positive attitude, look at it, and say, “Let me see, what I can learn from this?” … Why would you ever get upset about anything?’ And he said, ‘Wow. That makes so much sense.’ You’re upset because something didn’t go according to plan? It might be for a good reason.”
by Jocko Willink, retired Navy SEAL Commander
(Full profile here.)
How do I deal with setbacks, failures, delays, defeat, or other disasters? I actually have a fairly simple way of dealing with these situations. There is one word to deal with all those situations, and that is: “good.”
This is something that one of my direct subordinates, one of the guys who worked for me, a guy who became one of my best friends, pointed out. He would call me up or pull me aside with some major problem or some issue that was going on, and he’d say, “Boss, we got this, that, or the other thing going wrong,” and I would look at him and I’d say, “Good.”
And finally, one day, he was telling me about some situation that was going off the rails, and as soon as he got done explaining it to me, he said, “I already know what you’re going to say.”
And I asked, “What am I going to say?”
He said, “You’re going to say: ‘Good.’”
He continued, “That’s what you always say. When something is wrong or going bad, you just look at me and say, ‘Good.’”
And I said, “Well, I mean it. Because that is how I operate.” So I explained to him that when things are going bad, there’s going to be some good that will come from it.
That’s it. When things are going bad, don’t get all bummed out, don’t get startled, don’t get frustrated. No. Just look at the issue and say: “Good.”
Now. I don’t mean to say something clichéd. I’m not trying to sound like Mr. Smiley Positive Guy. That guy ignores the hard truth. That guy thinks a positive attitude will solve problems. It won’t. But neither will dwelling on the problem. No. Accept reality, but focus on the solution. Take that issue, take that setback, take that problem, and turn it into something good. Go forward. And, if you are part of a team, that attitude will spread throughout.
Finally, to close this up: If you can say the word “good,” guess what? It means you’re still alive. It means you’re still breathing.
And if you’re still breathing, that means you’ve still got some fight left in you. So get up, dust off, reload, recalibrate, re-engage, and go out on the attack.
And that, right there, is about as good as it gets.