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
He's designing all new systems. That's the guy you want to hang out with. Not someone who's doing what you're doing. So surround yourself by those kinds of people. And that's when you learn things like don't blink, you know, like somebody who's like really swinging for the fences and accomplishing so much. And Quentin was like that. So I met him at the festivals. He saw Mariachi. He loved it.
We came up, we talked and he said, you're like my next film I'm writing right now, Pulp Fiction. So I thought, man, I'm going to put this guy. He's so fun. I'm going to write him in my Desperado script, which I was writing. So that was before Pulp Fiction and all that when I had cast him. I didn't know he was going to go become such a household name.
I just was drawn to his energy and I'd already written him in. And I met Steve Buscemi there and I was like, I'm writing a character for Steve Buscemi. But then I went back to the Sony lot where I was working on Desperado and Quentin and I ended up having offices right next to each other on the Sony lot by accident. I didn't even know that.
I just met him and I go back and he was, cause originally Pulp Fiction was for TriStar cause Danny DeVito was a producer and he was going to make it for TriStar. So he was there writing Pulp Fiction and I was writing Desperado. So I'd go show him like storyboards from Desperado and he'd come act out scenes of Pulp Fiction.
And when we got to be really good friends that way, we'd go eat lunch at Versailles across the street. uh, the Sony lot. And then Sony passed on Pulp Fiction. It's too weird. It's too long. $8 million movie or 7 million. They're like, ah, we're going to go make the next Pauly Shore movie instead. You know, like we don't understand this thing.
And Miramax got it and they'd just been bought by Disney. So they produced their first film was Pulp Fiction. And then that thing went to Cannes and it was a whole thing. But what I loved about his story is that when he made Pulp Fiction, he had a director screening. He showed it to some directors and I wasn't able to go.
But anyway, I had dinner with him once and it was in my journal because I keep a journal. At 2.40 a.m. when after I dropped him off at his house, I said, oh wait, how did your movie come out? You know, Pulp Fiction, he had just finished it and he went, nah, it still feels like a movie Quentin would make. It doesn't feel like a real movie. And I was like, That's fine. What does it mean?
It feels like one of those movies I would make, like Reservoir Dogs. It doesn't feel like a real movie. And I was trying to be the supportive friend going, oh, man, he was so excited about this movie. Now he's bummed about it. And I was like, well, it should be different. It should be like, he's like, wouldn't have it. Drove off. So I thought, oh, I guess that wasn't the one.
So I went home and I called some of the directors that were at the screening. And they go, yeah, this isn't the one for him. It's not. None of them saw it. None of them saw it, but that, I know you're like surprised. Yeah. But that happened with George Lucas too, with Star Wars. Everybody saw that movie and was like, poor George. They showed it to all his director friends.
Poor George, what did he waste all this time with this for? Only Spielberg was the one who said, it's naive and it's going to do really good because it's naive and kids will like it. But everyone else was like, what's he doing? We're artists. We're making art films. What's he doing this garbage for? Because nobody knows. It shows no one knows anything. Not even the filmmaker.
When you're being groundbreaking, you don't know what groundbreaking is. Not you or anyone around you. Except maybe one or two people. So he said, there's one person. I go, oh yeah? Who is your Spielberg? He goes, Catherine Bigelow. Without a doubt. She's the only one who said, there's something here. No one else was saying that.
He said, in fact, because he remembered suddenly, he'd forgotten the story. But if it wasn't in my journal, I would have forgot it too. He goes, in fact, one of my friends, Simon, said, I want to sit you down and tell you all the things that are wrong with your movie. But I'll wait till you get back from the Cannes Film Festival. And he goes and he wins the Palme d'Or.
Then his friend's like, what the hell do I know? I've only made one movie myself. So never mind. I guess we're all wrong. So even he didn't expect that at all. So that was a shock, you know, even to him. So think about that. Yeah. That means, what do you do? Commit to a body of work. Just do that. You don't know.
You don't know what's going to be a Pulp Fiction and what's going to be a Jackie Brown. What's going to be, you know, you don't know. And you'd like to think they know, but they don't know either. They feel it. Like I asked Jim Cameron, I said, do you see your movie really clearly? Like, can you see it like with, with hyper-focus? Cause it seems like that. And he goes, it's like really far.
It's out of focus. And you work on it and you work on it. It starts coming. I said, okay, good. So that's, that's normal. I thought maybe he had laser vision or something, but no, even him, he doesn't really know, but he feels that he can make decisions and he understands everything. what a creative drive is and how to just keep being relentless about it.
But it's not like they have all the proximity is huge. Proximity will change your life. Did for me, just being around those guys, they didn't teach me, Hey, I'm gonna teach you how to make a movie. Just being next to them, being in their world, just ups your game. and you're able to do things you weren't able to do before. You get ideas you didn't get to do before.
I'll show you one of my painting things. You're not going to believe this freaking thing. I had a painter friend in Germany, Sebastian Kruger. He gives a workshop once a year. I thought, I'm going to go there, and I bet I'll learn more about directing by watching this guy paint than I will by watching another director, because that's just now I know how creativity works.
You're going to learn lessons outside of the box by doing that. And I tried to practice before going out there. I was doing a Danny Trejo. I'll show you the before and after. You're not gonna freaking believe what you see. But this is, it really tells a story of how important proximity is. So I'm, I do this painting. It's like, ah, it looks garbage. I'll show you. It looks like garbage.
I'm not used. I can't do paintings that are just like, see, you never should say I can't just cut your leg off, but I couldn't at the time paint, just paint brush into paint and then write on the canvas like that without using some kind of medium. which this guy Sebastian Kruger would do. So first I did a digital painting of Danny Trejo, like just to get the framing and all that.
And then I- That's just like, that's like on a Wacom tablet. But then I did it with paint and it's like, oh, it's all cruddy and it's too thick, the paint. And it just looks, it looks, and I just gave up right away. I went, I was trying to pre-practice so I wouldn't be a total buffoon there. Cause I was going the next week and I thought he's using a different brush, obviously.
Showing 841–860 of 1,180 · page 43 of 59
← Previous
Next →