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
Good thing I didn't sell it then. You know, with time you look back and you go, wow, I got an agent the next month. He wasn't even going to help me sell it. He said, oh, if you can get 20,000 for it, take it. I chased those people down for those contracts, Spanish market for months. And they never answered me back. And then Columbia ended up buying it for like 10 times as much.
And we made it, we released it and did a sequel and did another sequel. If you look back in time, good thing I didn't get my way. My way had, had this for a vision. And it needed to do that, which you would never know. You don't know that going through. So just, if you don't have the answer right away, or even in 10 years, go, well, maybe it's coming in 20 years. Don't let anything slow you down.
Just keep plowing forward, committing to making your thing happen. Don't get shook up. by something that you might not have an answer for.
You see, I've met a lot of filmmakers who, you know, they start a certain way, but then they finish another way. They get to be big filmmakers and all that. I still do it that way. Like, I still, I like doing things that way. I have a new company called Brass Knuckle Films, where the audience can actually participate by being investors in these movies that are done the same way.
They're action films like we did with Mariachi, but 10 to 30 million. It doesn't take a lot of money to start a billion dollar franchise. You know, like John Wick only cost 20 million, the first one. Second one was 40. Third one was 80. Fourth one was 100 because the audience kept growing and growing.
It's not for an action film.
But you know, you're going to hire bigger actors. You can get a big actor like Keanu Reeves for a $20 million movie. You know, I asked Jim, I said, Jim Cameron, I said, you know, like Terminator costs 5 million. And he goes, I wish we had that much. He had less than 5 million for that. So you can start a billion dollar franchise using these methods.
And, uh, and with the audience investing, they get to make money on them. And this is what I'm going to say now about how I started. You see that DNA of how I give out, you know, I want people to know how I did things with rebel without a crew or with these methods that I started with. You see, that's how we kept going. Hollywood spends way too much.
And when you can make stuff for less, your profit margin is much better. So when I first started, I didn't have any money. So I still play like I don't have money. So I had Super 8. My dad had a Super 8 camera, but I couldn't afford it. I shot two rolls that you had to buy the film, shoot two minutes. I shot two rolls of that.
It's another same amount of money that it costs to buy it, whatever that was, 12 bucks or whatever, to develop it. You get it. There's no sound. Most of the shit's out of focus. But then my dad, who sold cookware, had a VCR, one of the first home VCRs for the market, that he would play his sales tapes to his salesmen. And it came with a camera attached, like this cable you got coming out.
Imagine if that had to go into your VCR. for you to even see what it's shooting. And it's this old camera, manual focus, manual iris, and 12 foot cable. And I would start making movies with that. Instead, now I have for $8, I have a two hour erasable tape of sound and picture. So I got into digital basically really early. I was doing, which was really frowned upon back then.
And continued to be all the way to when I was using it for real in the early 2000s before everyone realized, oh, that's the future.
Yeah, well, because of the means and the democratizing of that. The elite didn't like that. You could just go make a movie like that. But I started practicing. And it's much easier to practice when it doesn't cost any money. Like if you want to be a rock star, right? If you want to learn how to play guitar really well, you're not going to just jump on stage and suddenly be able to play.
You have to practice till your fingers bleed. Well, the same with movies. You got to keep telling stories and cutting them together. And you just can't afford that on film. Nobody can with a two minute roll costing as much as a two hour tape. So I was moving all these, doing all these movies. First, I would cut in camera.
And that VCR, that old VCR had a really great pause button that they stopped making. That when you hit pause, it stopped right there and it stopped with a clean cut. It didn't have all this color bars like the later ones had. So I, that was my, and it had an audio dub feature where you could add another second soundtrack to it.
So if I have people talking, I could hit audio dub and add sound effects. So I could have two tracks on the same one. So I, that was my filmmaking kit for a while. until I needed to start doing real editing. And my dad bought a second VCR for his business because I stole his other one. And I found that if I hooked them together, I could play on one and use that pause button on the second.
and this was the limitation, this is what taught me how to edit in my head, is that if I shot a bunch of footage, I needed to shoot very little footage so I could find it. Sometimes you shoot out of order. So when I cut it, I have to cut in linear order because if you push pause, it's a nice clean cut, but it only holds for five minutes. You have five minutes before the machine shuts off.
So you got to find your next shot within five minutes
do that otherwise if you have to start the machine over it added all these color bars and it would be all screwed up so i'd have to sit there and not move for like all day while i cut knowing what the next shot was and once i had it cut i would then add some sound effects to it remember because i have the audio dub function but now if i want to add music i take that tape which has two tracks now into the first deck
and put it into the VCR again, one generation of loss, but I have a little cassette tape player with the music and I do a Y splitter so I can add the music and the, yeah, right. Just like that. That's like being resourceful with what you have. And I made a warrant winning short films that way on video. There were some festivals that would allow video, not many, but they would always win.
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