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
It's just like you're doing here, except you've got sound recording right onto the cameras, right? Or do you have it to the system?
Yep. So I had a camera that, yep. It was not, it was not a sync camera. And the thing was, it was so loud. I would have had to blimp the shit out of it. I didn't have a blimp. And then I would have needed a sound guy.
like it sounds like all your money is going away first of all so i would go like this action you'd start running yeah and i shoot my edit cut yep you know they're still running you know like i'm only using this part and there's no slates there's no nut there's there's guys holding up their fingers at the beginning of rolling this is real seven for just a few frames so i know which reel it is and then that 10 minutes of film
is just one shot after another. And I use almost every frame of those shots because I was cutting in the camera. Now, after I shoot, like, let's say, you know, tell me your name. Lex. What's your last name? Friedman. Where do you live? Austin, Texas. I would do the whole scene. Then I would get the sound, bring the mic in close like that. Say it again.
That'll probably sync. Now, if you were going on and on, there's a place where it'd go out of sync. I hate rubbery lips. So I would cut away to the dog or to the knife or to the girl. And then I cut back when you're back in sync. And since these were non-actors, they say everything the same way each time.
They would say their line, just like they weren't, they weren't performing it to where they didn't remember how they performed it before. They were just talking in their own rhythm. So a lot of the times it's the, anytime you see anyone on camera talking, they're in sync with themselves. And as soon as it cuts away, they're out of sync.
And it created this really fast cutting style that I probably wouldn't have had on such a low budget movie, but it was the only way to keep things in sync. So when I would shoot two people talking, I would make sure I'd film a couple of shots of like the dog or a stuffed cat or something, just so I'd have something to cut away to, to get them back in sync. It's just resourceful.
It's just being very resourceful.
I didn't allow it, but oh yeah, I would let it if I just didn't have a way to cut away. Right. And I would try to sync it as best I could.
Yeah. It seems like you can get away with a lot. You can get away with, I just don't, I'm just particular about that. I just don't like seeing a dub movie where it just feels canned. It makes you not believe in it anymore. Right. So I just cut away where the lips are just way off. I just didn't want any of that. I just felt like I wanted it to just be believable.
And they could be really believable if they were in sync. But I didn't shoot two takes of film or even two takes of audio. Just one take. And what's cool is that because I just had him go through the whole scene again. So I would go ahead and record them like grabbing the bottle or any action they did, opening the suitcase. I'd have all the sound effects too. I just had to sync it by hand.
That's a lot of work for me, but I got great sound that way. Because if I had had a sync camera, the mic would have been so far, we would have had to go get new sound effects. But because the camera's off, I could record everything close up. So there was some blessing to that.
What really helped for those non-actors was that they just look across and it's me filming. They didn't feel like they're being so natural. The guy who played the bad guy, I met him in the research hospital where I sold my body to science. He was my bunkmate. And I said, dude, you look kind of like Rudger Hauer. And then it's like, we saw another movie. Man, you look like James Spader.
Shit, you should be the bad guy in my movie. And it'd be cool to have you as the bad guy. He goes, but I don't speak Spanish. Well, that's okay. All right. And I'll teach you phonetically. And you're going to wear sunglasses. And if you look close, he's holding the,
he's holding the lines here and he's looking at the lines like that and just smiling so i can't believe he's getting away with this he's smiling and he's got the sunglasses on i read that somewhere in the pool there's like a scene in the pool he's like this with the sunglasses on with an oh man but but he was doing it phonetically and i tell you what he was so great that guy right yeah when we do desperado i brought him back
Didn't even have to do any dialogue. Watch that movie. When he shows up in the opening scene, when Desperado, he's playing the guitar in the opening with the credits to tie it into the first movie, he shows up again. And all he has to do is light a cigarette and you see this. He's so nervous because now there's a crew behind me. Now it's real.
Before it was just me and him and it didn't feel like a real movie. So everyone gave a great performance. So how do you recreate that later on a big movie? is just building a report, making a safe zone for your actors. Quentin once told me, sometimes being, you know, we're talking about directing, he goes, yeah, sometimes being a great director is just being a great audience.
You know, being a great audience for the, because you're taking the place of the audience for the actor. They try something, and if you're enjoying it, they know that the audience is going to enjoy it. Or if you're, you know, makes you cry, you know, so sometimes you just, you don't have to tell them a lot sometimes.
And if you do have something very specific to tell them, they usually, you know, go with it. But I always just like to see what they do. And a lot of times they just are in the zone because again, they're getting that flow too. You create the right environment, everyone's getting this inspiration that's all tied together that you never could have directed.
It's just like, you just create that space where we're all going to be open to it and it's going to drop in our lap. And I'm going to point it out when it does. Because you may not feel like you know how to play this role yet, but I say not knowing is the other half of the battle and the more important part. That's the part we're going to discover.
Showing 681–700 of 1,180 · page 35 of 59
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