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
I bet there's some other job out there that exists that I don't even know about because I don't know other jobs. So I looked up, you're going to believe it, but I literally bought jobs for dummies. Nice. It was just like, I don't even know what, I don't know what basic jobs are even out there. Turning the page. Oh yeah. Don't want that job. Don't want that job. Don't want that job.
I'm just going through. And it gets to filmmaker and there's a little icon behind each job. This icon is a guy like this. Literally, you look it up and it says, this is the best job ever. You get to just be creative with your friends, sit back, watch the money roll in, cross the desk. And I said, but 99% of film students don't get this job, so give up that dream.
So I was like, I guess I got the best job. But then I started working with my kids when we had a TV show called Rebel Without a Crew, based on that, where I found filmmakers who had only made a short film. They hadn't made a feature. I picked this diverse group of filmmakers. Gave him $7,000 and we documented them making a feature two weeks like I did.
You can bring one person, like I had Carlos Gaeta, the producer and star of Bariachi, bring one person. He can be your cameraman or he can be your sound guy or whatever, but it's only that for the shoot and you'd have to do the whole thing And I saw those guys. By the time they're like, I don't know how we're going to make this movie.
By the first week of shooting, they're already talking about their next feature. They became so confident because their idea of what impossible is drops really quick when you take it.
Yeah, so that's the one I did. So then it came time for me to do one. So I made a movie called Red 11 based on my experiences in the medical hospital, but I'll turn it into a sci-fi thriller just to use that as, so that I can use like somebody getting stabbed in the eye. So I'm still going to have more elements to show how you can do camera tricks and stuff with no money.
And the old days make it for less than $7,000, which I think we're like $5,000. Um, mainly because we had a lot of actors I wanted to pay. Um, but the movie itself can make it for nothing. Um, But I brought my son aboard as my number one, who hadn't been working with me in a while. I mean, he wrote Sharkboy and Lavagirl when he was seven, but then he hadn't really been working on my crew.
So he didn't know how to operate the sound equipment, the separate sound system and all that. I didn't show him until the day of filming because I knew we were documenting it and it would make a better tutorial. So by getting them working on the movies together, they came to me super excited by the end of the day. I thought for sure, oh, they're going to hate this.
Even though it's only two weeks, they've got other interests. They don't want to be filmmakers. I thought they were going to be like, all right, I'm out of here after one day. But instead he came to me and his brother who acted in it. And he went, dad, the actor didn't show up after the first day. The location didn't match the script at all. We asked you how we were going to solve the problems.
And you're like, I don't know, figure it out. We thought dad stumped for once. Is he stumped finally? But then by the end of the day, his eyes were all wide open. we figured it out. They went, oh, they don't realize this is the creative process. Every day is like that. And in life too.
Every day, you don't know your machine's going to not work or you're going to get a flat tire or you get fired that day. So life is very unpredictable, just like a movie set. So I realized I'm going to make them all work on my movies now because it's teaching them about life. I'm teaching them very little about the
It's about life lessons, about how you take on something impossible, turn chicken shit to chicken salad and make it work. And that's the straw and that's life. That's the process of life. So many people say, well, I'm not ready to make my projects. Like, you're not ready for life either. You're like this all day. You're dodging shit that's going on. How come art has to be perfect?
It's like, it should be the same. Life and art should be the same.
And in a short little microcosm too, within one project, you've got a whole blueprint for how you're going to solve life because you've just done it on a creative level.
And so like, there's so many ways to fuck things up to learn from, but any of the disciplines, if you add those to it, like I teach my actors to paint. In between takes, we'll go and I'll take a picture of them in character. I show them a canvas. I show them paint. You don't need to know how to paint. This is to show you the brush is going to know where to go. You just got to pick it up.
Pick the colors you want. Doesn't matter how crazy they are, whatever's speaking to you. You lay it down. I'll show you some of the pictures. You're not going to believe the masterworks these actors did like in a day. They just start doing it. Lady Gaga had her fingernails in there. You know, Josh Brolin's doing his thing. Then I take a picture of them in character, do a line drawing of it.
We project it on top. And mostly it's the painting coming through. They're line drawing with a little bit of their eyes painted in. You're not gonna believe these things. They couldn't believe it. But it teaches them that that thing about that, the creativity is going to come through.
So even though they're already acting, they're already being creative or already making a movie, like you said, that's already a really great creative endeavor. When we would sneak off and paint, you could tell it's firing a whole other part of their brain. It was funny. I think Josh Brolin's girlfriend said,
You leave the set and you come back and you're all like, no, we're painting, we're painting. But that makes sense that you say that because when you get your creativity firing, it's more powerful than any drug. And we would come back and he'd be on the set going. Is it bad that I'm still thinking about the painting? No, I think it's good. I think it's all good.
But you can tell it's opening a whole other part of their creative brain. So you can be doing acting in a movie And the painting's still going to tap. It shows how much untapped potential your creative brain has. So the more you can do, the more you're firing off. And it was so cool. Like I remember we did one with Joseph Gordon-Levitt was painting. We came in and the table was like this.
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