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
And there were always funny as, uh, I stumbled upon Spy Kids that way. Like I wanted to make these action movies in my backyard. But when you're a teenager, you don't know anybody who can come be your action star. And if you just bring your high school buddies, well, they just look like high school kids. So I use my little brothers and sisters because I'm one of 10. They're oldest.
They're just sitting around watching cartoons anyway. And I made them the action stars just to like learn. And I found those things would be a winning formula. They'd win every festival I'd send them to. So Bedhead is, was my first time using a film camera. It was a wind up film camera I got in film school.
I went to film school for one semester and realized I already knew more than the film students because they taught you a whole other outdated way of doing it. So I thought, I'm just going to use that film camera to make a low budget, movie, a definitive film version that I can send to all film festivals of these action kids, which is a precursor to Spy Kids. Bedhead's a precursor to Spy Kids.
It opened up your brain, especially because those video festivals, I would win like a trip to New York and and a director's chair with a video of shorts that I would put in festivals. But I knew the film festival, if I could get into film festivals, I could send that all over the world. So I made that little short film, sent it, and it was winning all the festivals.
And I thought, wow, I made that with a wind-up camera, film camera, filming just one take each shot, just no slates, because I'm the editor. And that cost 800 bucks. And it was eight minutes. I bet I can make an 80 minute movie for $8,000 if I'd use the same method. So that movie I did six months later, I was making mariachi because it opened up my mind to that. I could try it in a feature.
Let me tell you the trick to that, and mariachi is the same way. And this really helped people. Like even Kevin Smith from Clerks said, wow, Robert said, when Mariachi was a success, I talked about how I did it. And I said, I looked at everything I had. What do I have? We have a pit bull. We have a turtle. We've got a bus that Carlos's cousin owns.
His cousin, his brother-in-law has a bar and he owns a ranch. So the bad guy lives at the ranch, the fight scene's gonna be in the bar, he's gonna hit a bus at one point, the girl's gonna have a dog, and a turtle's gonna cross the road. It gives you all this production value, so you write backwards. So for Bedhead, I even did that with a camera.
So I'd been shooting video all this time, and one thing I wished I could do on video, I never could, was slow motion. or stop motion even. So when I got that crappy World War II camera they gave us in film school, I mean, I was so pissed. Like, this is the camera I've been trying to get my hands on. I could have bought this for 50 bucks at a bond shop.
Old Bill and Hal wind up, you couldn't even see through the lens. You were seeing through an approximation of the lens. But you could shoot slow motion, I could do reverse photography if I filmed upside down. I could do, because if I do a fast push into her, I'll never get the focus in right. So I started with it in focus.
went back, pulled backwards on a chair, and then reversed it, flipped it, and now it looks like it stops on a dime in focus.
You have to morph time. You start putting it together, right? So I've got this different camera. Now I go, I don't want to shoot the same kind of movie. If I got a camera now that can do that, I can do stop motion. So that's why there's an animated title sequence at the beginning. I go, wow, I'm a cartoonist. If I set the camera up here, I can slow it down enough.
It's not a frame by frame, but if I get it down like two frames a second, I can just tap it and it'll maybe get one frame off. So I did 300 drawings by hand for that opening title sequence. Holy shit. That was you doing it by hand.
So you watch that, and this is a throwaway title sequence, but I really want this thing to win awards. Okay, hold on a second. How long did that take to draw? That seemed like a lot of work. I remember I drew it over, I was a daily cartoonist by then, so I was pretty fast, but still, that's why it's only penciled, it's not inked, but it looks great.
I mean, the camera's going around and all kinds of crazy stuff, but it's just all faked by paper. It took me all night to shoot it, because I remember I walked into the film school the next day, like all sleeping and I told one of the fellow students, wow, I was up all night doing this animated title sequence and he went, why are you putting so much work in this?
They're not going to grade you any differently. And I was like, grades? Get an A walking in here. I'm trying to get out of this town. I'm not doing this for fucking grades. I want people to see what I can do now. And I want to see what I can do now with this. So a lot of the story came from the limitations or actually the freedoms of that camera. I couldn't have done that story on video.
So when I saw, wow, okay, I can do reverse photography. I can do stop motion. she has to have special powers. Because if she has special powers, then I can utilize, I can really milk this camera for all it can get. There's one of my shots I love the most is where she's standing there and the chair, she makes a chair come all the way up to her and it goes all the way up to her face.
Now, if I do that normally, where would I even put the strings for that?
So I start here with the camera upside down. I have the strings in the back because you're not going to be looking at the back. And as it goes back, you pull it back. And then when you reverse it, it goes... And it looks so good. You can't spot the string. If you look close, you see the strings are in the back, but your eyes. So I did stuff like that. And then just her, like getting the hose.
And then I just do stop motion for the host turning on, you know, the faucet. That's why I gave her special powers so that, and it made the story better. So sometimes the limitations you have with equipment or location, you can use it to make, you know, take chicken shit, turn it into chicken salad. Take this camera that everyone was like, what's this? And I go, I can do so much with this.
But I tell you today, I look at that camera. I can't believe I ever made a movie. It's so ridiculously primitive. I was like, how did I even think I could get anything done with this? And it even exposed and mariachi the same way you have to think about it. I shot mariachi on film and with a bar of 16 millimeter camera, I didn't know how to use it.
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