Robert Rodriguez
speaker
1,180 appearances
3 recordings
3 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 16 Nov
Robert Rodriguez’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Nov 2025 with 1.
Appearances
Man, I appreciate that.
It was an experience for sure. I had a really good plan. And it backfired. So I tried to, right away, when it worked in a different way, I wanted to share that experience. I wrote a book called Rebel Without a Crew that really inspired filmmakers.
Just recently. I couldn't believe it. I hadn't read it since I wrote it. And I had forgotten a lot of the details. And now I can see why it inspired so many people, because it... You know, when you're in your early 20s, six months feels like six years. Right. So when you read it now and go, oh, my God, from inception to making it penniless by myself to Toast of the Town, it's like that.
It was unbelievable. I couldn't wait to shout from the rooftops to all the other filmmakers like me who thought they couldn't get in how I did it exactly. I wrote a book about it. And I'd read it now and I'd go, oh my God, this is an impossible story. I keep laughing during the audiobook going, okay, what you're reading right now never happened before and it never happened again.
It was like lightning in a bottle. And you would see every time I thought something wasn't going my way and I was really bummed about it, within weeks, an upshot beyond. And it really taught you that you just got to follow your instinct. If you have an idea, go. Even if you know no one else has ever done this before. And you'll end up someplace different.
I want to ask you about that because I know you end up doing the same thing a lot.
Where it's not manifesting so much in that way. You're just kind of following your nose. You're doing something that just sounds ridiculous. Even when I try to tell one of my teachers what I was going to go do that summer, I said, I'm going to go try and make a movie. He goes, oh, yeah? Who's going to be your director of photography? And I said, I didn't want to tell them I'm the whole crew.
I'm the DP. Oh, the actors are going to hate you. You're going to be there setting up your lights all the time. I'm like, OK, I'm not going to tell them I'm the rest of the crew. It was just because I had read this advice that meant to be good advice, but it sounded really depressing. It was someone had written, if you want to write screenplays, write three full screenplays, throw them away.
Your fourth screenplay will be it. It's like, I've never written a screenplay. It's very hard to write a screenplay. It's hard to write. It's like three huge meals that you're just going to dump. Why not? Okay, write the script, throw it away. But while you're throwing it away, why not also shoot it and direct it? Light it yourself.
Do the sound yourself so that you're training yourself on each one. So I thought, where can I do this? where I can get paid to do that, like my own film school where I get paid to learn. So I discovered that there were these straight-to-Spanish movies that are action movies. You go to the... You've seen the HEBs around here?
There used to be a video section to rent movies, and there was a Spanish section. The Spanish section had movies like, they were just action movies. They had a soap star. They were made for 30 grand, 40 grand. Shot on video, no action, but it had a title that looked kind of like a U.S. title, like Perros Rabiosos 2, written like Lethal Weapon 2.
And you would rent it and be like, just crap, people in an apartment talking. So I looked at the back of those and I thought, we can make a better one, probably for like $5,000. Because I had made a short film called Bedhead. by myself with a wind-up camera. It was eight minutes, and it cost $800.
So I thought, multiply it times 10, I could do an 80-minute movie for $8,000, but with dialogue and everything, I bet I could get it for under eight, probably more like five or six. Let's go shoot a movie, write it, shoot it. I'll be the whole crew, so I learn all the jobs, And then we'll sell it to the Spanish home video market.
No one will know it's me because it's Robert Rodriguez, a bunch of Robert Rodriguez's. I'll make three of those because I was so young. I was winning a lot of film festivals with short films. But I thought if someone sees one of my short films that's winning all these awards, they're not going to hire me to do a short film. They're going to hire me to do a feature. And I've never practiced that.
So I need practice. So I'm going to practice three films, take the best scenes from them, have a demo reel with the money I make from them. I don't know how much I can sell it for, so I got to make it really cheap. Let's just do the first one, then we'll know. Then I'll take that money and make my first American independent film, and that'll be more serious.
Because I threw it away like that, I just thought, well, let me just make something fun. Action movie, I guess I could do action. I started as a cartoonist, so it was more comedic than anything else. I said, well, an action movie, let's make it fun. Let's make it about a guy with a guitar case full of weapons, kind of like Road Warrior, who goes from town to town with a guitar case full of weapons.
But I can't afford Road Warrior on the first one. So how about I just do a Genesis story? So I took out these cards and I go, okay, maybe he was a guitar player. In fact, that'll be a funny title because I have this comedic sense.
I thought, I'm going to make a movie that's got so much action and it's actually shot on film, but I'll call it basically The Guitar Player, which promises no action whatsoever. Put it on the shelf. And if someone happens to be so desperate to watch it, they'll be surprised. You know, that was like my joke to myself, but I just want to practice.
So I did this method where I just got the cards and I go... I'm used to making short films. Guy with a guitar case walks into a bar looking for work. They refuse. We don't hire people. We use a synthesizer now. He leaves. A guy with a guitar case full of weapons walks in after, shoots the place up, says he's going after the guy who owns it because he did him wrong.
So I put those two cards down and I went, okay, that's how a short film would start. But shit, this is a feature. So let me put, it's gonna need like three scenes before. This is how fast you write a script. I wrote that script because it was, again, I'm throwing it away. I'm just gonna make something that I wanna see because no one else is gonna see it.
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