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
I'll just figure out a way to edit around all the stuff that didn't come out. Not everything came out. But yeah, it was really just following your nose and not knowing if it was going to work. Somebody must have thought to do this already, but no one had ever done that before because it's so counterintuitive. You're told... But that's how movies started.
You know, you think back in the old days, Charlie Chaplin and a guy behind the camera doing this. They didn't have 200 people. It turned into a business just like with comedy. And it turns into a business to where you think that's the art form. That's not the art form. That's the business of the art form. The original art form is you by yourself doing it. This is how by myself I was.
It was like, you got one guy here now, right? Because you have all these digital cameras. I had one camera, and I had the sound. And I can't do them at the same time because the camera sounds like this. Really noisy. And it sounds like all your money is going away. So I had no slates. I would just go, run. The guy starts running. Stop filming. Cut.
I would just shoot my little pieces like this much. After I would do a whole scene, one take, one take, one take, one take, put the camera down, get the microphone really close to him like that. Okay, see all your lines again. Pick up the glass again. Do all that stuff again.
Cut it in by hand.
So when they're not, because they're non-actors, a lot of times, like, repeat what you just said. Wait, so you cut it by hand and it would match, right?
And if it didn't match, I would cut away to the dog or to the knife or to the other person. That's why it's got a really fast cutting style, which became my cutting style, was just to get them back in sync because I didn't want it to look like a low-budget rubbery lip thing. But if you watch it, you see them in sync. Every time they're on screen, they're in sync.
But this is about being resourceful. But it saved me a ton of money doing it that way. And it made it actually interesting to watch. It makes it more interesting to watch. Yeah. Oh, so anyway, so originally, I didn't have any ideas. I was going to make three of these movies before making my serious American independent film. But my first movie, I gave it to an agent in Los Angeles.
And he said, I can get you work off this right now as a writer-director. And I went, writer-director?
i'm not a writer well i guess i wrote the script i guess that makes me a writer again i didn't know how to own stuff yet so you just got to say you're a writer i still thought well like i'd even written a movie i didn't consider myself a writer that's that's the we do to ourselves right so i said okay so he sent it around all these studios were flying me up it's in the book it's just crazy how fast it happened and they're offering me these deals because they saw that i went and did something that's why you just got to go make something because people are sometimes they're so impressed that you even did anything most people never start and
And they went, wow. And I thought, well, it's actually a good calling card now. If you like the cinematography, I did that. Hire me as a cameraman. If you like the editing, I did that. Hire me as an editor. But they hired me as a writer-director. And they said, what movie do you want to do? I go, this all happened so fast. I didn't really have a chance to think about it.
I was going to do three of these practice films and then make a real one. But you like Mariachi. Why don't we remake that? And they said, with Antonio Banderas. Okay, okay. But... audience might not like that the girl dies. So we're going to screen this version that you have now to an audience. So we screen it to an audience and they liked it the way it was.
So they said, we're going to take this to some film festivals. I was like, no, don't show this movie. It's my practice movie. Literally, no one's supposed to see this one. They go, no, no, you got something really special. I said, no, dude, I'm telling you, I can do much better than that. Give me $2,000. I'll go reshoot half of it.
Just knowing that people are going to see it now and do completely differently. And they go, you've got something. They're smart. Mark Kenton there said, you got something really special here. We're going to take it to the festivals. And we won Sundance because I made it for myself. It was a real lesson in that.
Like if I was trying to think about what all the audience was going to want to see, I would have changed so many things because I knew no one was going to see it. It's probably the only movie in history ever made where people were guaranteed not to see it just by the title. I titled it that way so nobody would see it. I didn't want anybody to see it. I wanted to just throw it away and practice.
I figured maybe the third one might be the better one. Like that advice, throw three scripts away and then do a fourth. Well, I'm going to throw three movies away so that by the fourth, I'm so savvy, know how to film and do all these things. This first practice film is not going to be it. That's the one that's going to be it. So commit to a body of work. Throw shit away.
Don't be precious about it. Just go make it. Don't blink when people criticize it. And just keep going. Make a body of work. That's it. That's the secret. And that's the secret to life, too. Just keep trying to make it the best.
That's why I accomplished it, by doing those things, which everybody can do. It's not because I'm not that smart. I'm telling you, I'm not that smart. I just follow the instinct like you did. When you follow your instinct, you're letting the universe do all the talking. And I know this sounds wonky, but I just call it that because it is from some other place. And you're just an instrument.
You're just a pipe.
The soul that gets into your body. And you realize that when you have kids, I don't know if you had that experience. As soon as I had my first kid, I was like, this isn't my kid. You can just tell it's not my kid. I mean, it has physical characteristics. It may even mannerisms in my walk. But there's another soul in here that's from some other place. And each one is so different.
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