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
Yeah, the procrastination really cripples people. Yeah. It really does. Or thinking that they need to know more. And you don't realize the answers you get that you need are not going to be figured out sitting at a desk, going to be on the floor.
Because he knows the process.
If you trust the process, you don't have to worry. And if you question, well, I don't know if... You're an artist. That's what an artist should think. But don't let that cripple you. I call it fear forward. Like you should have some fear going into something. Yes. Like I might screw up, but that's good.
It's really fun. Fun. Now the making of it might be very painful.
But it's a very short amount of pain versus a long-term pain if you're not living your dream. That's the longest. That's the longest time you can spend. That's the longest time in pain. You just rip the Band-Aid off and jump in.
We have to keep reminding ourselves, because we know, and we've got to remind ourselves. Sometimes we forget, and we don't apply it to other areas of life. I'll talk about that. That's when I really found success, was when I took these ideas and moved it to another area.
But I tried to figure this out when I was doing that other method, the wrong method, when I was cartooning, because it would be so hard to come up with a cartoon strip each day. But I needed the money. And I had a daily cartoon strip here at UT. We had the biggest comics page in the country. It was really everybody wanted to be the next Burt Bread that he'd come out of there. He did Bloom County.
He was a UT student. His college art was like national stuff. So we all wanted to be him. So I would go like, it's got to be an easier process than sitting here and working it out. I want to come home and develop a process where I sit on my couch and I just picture it first. I picture the comic. I picture the jokes. I picture the drawing. Then I just go draw it, right?
I'd be there two hours, three hours. My deadline's coming up. Shit, it's not working. So I have to go, fuck, start drawing again. Then be like, okay, this kind of goes with that one. Oh, here it is. And I realized something really profound back at 19. And it's really carried into mariachi, which is when you pick up the pen or the keyboard or the camera and you start drawing,
It starts doing itself. You realize it's not you. It's coming through you because there's a creative spirit assigned to us that needs hands. And it's not going to reward you if you're doing that because it can do that. But as soon as you pick it up, it takes over. So I realized, oh, I just have to be a conduit or a pipe. And if I just start, I'm going to be like, whoa.
And you've got to keep your ego out of it because then you go, wow, how did I do that? I wonder if I could do it again. You just shut it. You just shut it right back up because you think it's you and it's not you. And I know this works because I taught it to my kids when they were younger. I thought I got to teach it to my kids.
And since they hadn't learned any bad habits, they went, oh, so we didn't have to do anything. We just have to start writing. It's going to come out. Go. Yeah. And they win. They wrote some amazing stuff. And I was like, they don't have to be reversed, you know, reversed. But that that was a very powerful lesson.
thing and i saw when i did another seven thousand dollar movie recently i had a tv series based on rebel without a crew where i i got independent filmmakers so it only made short films and i gave him two weeks so you gotta do like mariachi you can bring one person to be either a cameraman or your sound guy but you gotta do the whole movie yourself write it direct it edit it and be shot in two weeks that's how long it took me to shoot mariachi
And they're all, oh, we don't know how we're going to do it. By the week they started shooting, they were already talking about their next three films. Like they changed their idea of what was impossible. It just dropped out. So I was really curious to do mine. I was doing one based on my medical experiments I did to pay for mariachi, which is another story.
I brought my son, Racer. Because I knew he hadn't been working with me on the movies for a while. I'm going to make him my second guy. He's going to be my co-writer, my co-lighter, and he's going to be doing the sound. I didn't show him how to use the sound equipment until we're filming because we're documenting it. We made a documentary about it.
And people really loved about how we made this movie today for $5,000. And he was fumbling around and we're going. And I thought, he's going to hate this. He's got his own interests. He doesn't want to work on a movie. But I need him. And so he comes to me at the end of the day with his brother and goes, Dad, actor didn't show up, the set didn't match, the location didn't match the script at all.
Everything was falling apart. We asked you how we're going to finish the day. And you said, well, I don't know. We'll see what happens. And we thought, oh, my God, is this the movie that finally, you know, he can't figure out? But by the end of the day, we figured it out. Their eyes were all wide open. Oh, they don't realize that's the creative process. And that's every day in life and in work.
Life, you don't know. You're going to figure it out as you go. Art should be the same way. And by the end of the two-week shoot, they're interviewing him. He's all waxing philosophical about the creative process like he's been doing it for years. He goes, I never knew how my dad did mariachi. And now I know because I just did this project. He didn't know either. He just started.
And he figured it out day by day. Most people never start. I mean, he succinctly encapsulated everything I tried to say in my book, which was you just got to go. And identity is key. Identity is the main thing. All these people who are out there, you got to tell them this. If you are listening and there's something you're not getting in your life that you really want, it's not a matter of desire.
You have the desire. There's a missing element that I talked about in the book and I'd forgotten myself. We forget our own good advice. Over the years, people would say, hey, in your book, it says this. I'd go, I wrote that? I was so smart back then. What happened? I got to go reread my own book. But it was this thing where I told people,
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