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
Sometimes the only way across the river is to slip on the first two rocks. You fail and You have to really sift through, it's like the silver lining, but I call it, sift through the ashes of your failure and you'll find the key to your next success is in there. But if you're not looking for it, you don't find it. I'm going to tell you one and I tell them the four room story.
I said, I made a movie called Four Rooms. I didn't make any money, right? When Quentin asked me, hey, do you want to make a movie with me and two other filmmakers? It's an anthology. It's on New Year's Eve. It's in a hotel. You have to use the Bill Hop. We're not going to know what each other's making. And we make it, we put it together. My hand went up right away, just instinctually.
Yeah, I'll do that. I'll go make that with you. Now, should I ask the audience? I like to throw it to the audience and her. Should I have not raised my hand that quick? Shouldn't I have done a little studying first? Or should I just go blind instinct? Or should you do instinct with some studying? Okay, well, I could have gone and studied and I would have found that anthologies never work.
Like even when it's Coppola, Scorsese, Woody Allen, they bomb because people can't quite rip the hand. What is this, Twilight Zone? I don't want to go see that. But that's not, I still said, yeah, I think I should still go by instinct. So my instinct was to raise my hand. We're going to make that movie because I love short films. I made like bedhead and short films.
And I thought, Oh, here's a way. If this works, I can make short films in anthologies and I can have the best of both worlds.
Yeah. The audience can't quite wrap their end. And then it feels like the movie starting three times, you know? So I make that movie. It bombs. Now I could feel real bad about that, but if you really think about it, you go, well, Why did I sign up for it? Did I raise my hand because I thought it was going to go be this big financial success?
No, I did it to work with my friends, to do something creative, to try something. But that's still not good enough. I need to really sift through the ashes. And if I look through the ashes of that failure, I find two keys to my biggest successes in there. While I was on the set, they said it has to be New Year's. So I thought, I'm just going to do like bed.
I'm going to have two little kids that are running around in this room. And we have to use the bellhop as a babysitter. Well, it's New Year's. Let's dress everybody in tuxedos because it's New Year's. They're all going to go out. But the parents leave without him. When I saw Antonio and his wife, I thought, wow, they look like a really cool international spy couple. What if they were spies?
And these two little kids, one of them keeps falling asleep on the set. He's so young. They barely tie their shoes. They don't know parents are spies. They have to go save them. Okay, there's five of those movies now, right? The other one was I really love making short films. I really want this anthology thing to work. What if it's three stories, like a three-act structure, not four?
Same director, not four different directors. I'm going to try it again. Why on earth would I try it again? Well, because I had already done one and figured out how I could do it better. And that's Sin City. Those are by far two of my biggest successes that came directly from that failure. So I always say, follow your instinct. If it doesn't work, just go.
Sometimes the only way across the river is to slip on the first two rocks. So where's the key in the ashes of the failure? Because if I had an instinct, that means I was on the right track. I didn't get the result I want. That's because the result might be something way bigger that I don't have the vision for and the universe is pushing me that way.
But like I said, like I would say, well, it was successful because, you know, even Roger Ebert said, hey, you furnished my favorite room. I was like, hey, I could take that. But now I think there's something else still there. I keep sifting and it's like, oh, yeah, two big successes came from that. It's an amazing lesson to have because it makes you feel better about, failure.
Think of like The Thing by John Carpenter. He put that movie out the same weekend as E.T. That thing bombed. Critics were calling it pornography, you know, because of all the weird special effects and audiences didn't go either. And he thought he made a great movie. So, you know, it makes you question your instincts. Well, 10 years later, turns out, oh, it's a classic.
So sometimes it takes the audience a while. So if you've have some kind of failure on something. You don't let it knock you down. Just go. Maybe in 10 years, they'll think it's great. I'm just going to commit to making a body of work, a body of work. Some will succeed. Some will overperform. Some will underperform. It's not your job. You just want to be a creative person. Just create.
I tell you, just create. Stop thinking about movie per movie and worrying so much about each one or project to project. If you're a business person, just commit to making a body of work like an artist would do. And you don't know what the masterpieces are going to be or which, you know, someone's going to come and say, oh, that one that bombed, there was some really creative stuff in there.
And it's not for you to decide. You just go and do it.
Sometimes it's right there, and then sometimes you come back, revisit it later, because you may not have had some information you have now that makes you look at it a lot differently. Like when I did, I just did the audio book for Rebel Without a Crew. Yeah. Thank you for that, by the way. I hadn't read it since I wrote it. Yeah. So I didn't remember a lot of the details.
I voiced it. So I was reading it real time.
Yeah. I can't believe how crazy that story is. I forgot a lot of details. And when you're younger, you know, when you're 21, 22. Six months feels like six years. I didn't realize how short that window was until I reread it and how impossible most that is. But you see some places where... a setup falls in my lap and then pays off immediately in a big way, like magic over and over again.
It's clear I don't know what I'm doing. It's clear the universe is just pushing you places. So you can't fight it. Because I remember I was really disappointed. And it says in the diary, I'm really bummed that I go home that Christmas not having sold it to the Spanish home video market, which was my goal. I walked home penniless and I was like, Merry Christmas. I feel like a freaking failure.
Showing 561–580 of 1,180 · page 29 of 59
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