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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Nov 2025 with 1.
Appearances
We both had films at the same time with first films, guys in black, action, violence. In fact, I had seen his movie already. My first film festival was a few months before that, the Telluride Film Festival and Reservoir Dogs was there, but Quentin couldn't be there. He was at Sundance earlier that year. And the guy who became my agent, he saw it.
He said, hey, you're going to like this guy, Quentin Tarantino. I told him about you. You're going to meet him. He's going to be in Toronto. Oh, cool, cool. Okay. And so I went ahead and saw his movie, Telluride. And I was like, holy shit, this guy's in black again, just like the mariachis dressed in black and action. I said, oh, we're going to like each other.
He's going to like my movie when he sees it. So then in Toronto we met, and we met first on a, because I knew I was going to be doing a panel discussion with him. They asked us to do a panel discussion about violence in movies in the 90s, even though it was only 92. So we're on a panel together, and that's where I met him. And he's like, hey, Robert, what your agent told me about you?
And I was like, yeah, I saw your movie Reservoir Dogs. And he goes, oh, well, you got to come to my screening. And I'm going to come see yours. So he came to Mariachi, and I videotaped the audience reactions because there were insane, insane reactions to it. But I have the first screening he saw of Mariachi sitting next to me, laughing. He's laughing and everything. He was just the best audience.
I have his recording of the first time he saw Mariachi. Oh, no, really? Yeah, because I taped it whole thing. That's so cool.
He loves movies. In fact... The next time I heard him laugh that way was at his own premiere for Kill Bill. We're watching Kill Bill and he's laughing like it's somebody else's movie. He still enjoys the movie. He loves what all the actors did. And it's like, that's the kind of energy you really love. But I'll tell you what happened. I'm not a very shy person. I'm very shy. I'd have to go talk.
I'm sure you probably feel like you're not an orator or anything. You just have to go do it. I thought, well, man, I'm going to have to introduce my film and talk about it afterwards. I'm afraid of that. What am I going to do? I don't, I've never talked in front of more than five people before. So I went to see this other movie and it was good. And I was watching.
And then the director comes up at the end and goes, yeah, well, that was my movie. And, um, you know, uh, you know, here's the writer. And it's like, oh man, I don't like the movie anymore. This guy's kind of a dick. So I cannot do that. I'm going to have to go be who they imagined made that movie. So I wrote out my whole intro.
It was like a 20 minute intro because no one had ever heard of anybody making a movie for no money, much less without a crew, much less, you know, the way I did it was just very new. Nobody knew it was possible. So my whole intro is like, you'll see the Columbia logo slapped in front. It's probably cost more than the whole movie.
And then I go through, this is how I made it with a wheelchair for a dolly, a turtle, you know, I wrote around things I had. I mentioned the turtle, the pit bull, the bus, the ranch, all that stuff, right? So then when they see the movie, In fact, I think my wife was in the audience. She said, at Sundance, people were laughing so much at your intro. They just wanted to hear a story like this.
So badly. I heard someone next to me say, I'm going to vote for his movie. They hadn't even seen the movie yet. Just because the story was so good. They wanted that movie to be great. And when they see the turtle, Big cheers. When they see the pit bull, big cheers. When they see the school bus, cheers.
But then when they see how we use it and he slams into it and falls in it, they freaking lose their minds because they know how I put it together. They know that the rubber bands and the popsicle sticks, I already set it up. And so that's why that audience, I just hate the reaction. They're so with it. the context is so key.
Like, you can watch Mariachi and go, hey, yeah, this looks like a $7,000 movie. But if you know the story behind it, suddenly, I was curious. I hadn't seen it in a long time. I was watching it for the 20th anniversary. We did a screening and the first few shots come up and I'm like, oh yeah, well, it looks like a $7,000 movie.
And then it keeps going and it's in the... Once we're in the jail cell and the shooting's happening and I realized, oh my God, we had these blanks that only fired one shot and it would jam. So I had to... show it going, use the sound effect, cut to the other guy, cut back, have another one go. I had to have to do these editing tricks to make it look like, and then repeat a few frames.
So it goes, so it looks like a machine gun. All this stuff that I'm start sweating as I'm watching it going, I can't believe I made this movie with that freaking camera. I don't know how I did. I couldn't even see. I'm there with this long lens, pulling my own focus. When I finally had to do a real movie, I was operating the camera in my first real movie with a crew.
I get the camera and a guy comes over and he focuses for you. that's your job. You focus shit. I had to do my own focusing on the last movie. I didn't have so hard. You're trying to focus on a guy while you're filming. You don't know where you are. And it's just, I was, couldn't believe how much easier it is when you have a crew.
Yeah, yeah. It's good to know all that stuff. But, you know, it's like, at the end of the day, you could shoot something on a phone. And if you have a great story, no one's going to even notice. They'll be, oh, you shot that on a phone? I didn't notice. So sometimes people get caught up on, what kind of camera should I have? It's like, it's not the camera. That's just the tool. That's just the pen.
That's just like, yeah, you can have different paintbrushes. But you can go, I'm going to limit my palette. I'm only going to use a fan brush. and a detail brush, and I'm going to make a painting. Do you think that painting is going to suffer? No, it's going to take on an identity that you wouldn't have had if you had all the other tools.
So sometimes the limitations help you because when you can do anything, it can be crippling. When I knew I could only use those things for mariachi, it's like, all right, well, it's very simple now. Let me show you how cheapskate I was. I did not spend on anything. So when you see him walking around with a guitar case, it's a shitty cardboard one, like I got from home.
I had to get a heavier one to put the guns in. So we borrowed one. but it had this material ripped off the top. So you could see the wood. It's just the wood on top. So it didn't match the other one because it wasn't all black. And I was too cheap to paint it black. I didn't want to spend money on paint. So you see that cardboard case, he puts it down.
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