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
And I gave her a role in that so we'd have an example of her doing English. And they still were like, we need a screen test. We need to have a screen test with a bunch of other actresses, you know, So I said, sure, let's do that. So I went over to her house the night before, before the screen test.
And we worked on the scene, which is the best scene where she's operating on his arm and they've got all this chemistry. And I was just directing her through it, like completely down to when you pick up the water and you hand him the water, don't scream, oh, hot water, just be like, hot water, while he's spitting it out. It's going to be a big dramatic action with a very light delivery.
We got it down to the science. The next day we show up, Antonio does a scene with all the girls who come in. He does it with her. Clearly, they've got amazing chemistry. She just nails it. He's great. He loves her too. Studios like, okay, you can hire. Reluctantly like that, right?
But once they saw the footage come as we're shooting and they saw it on the big screen when they're watching the dailies, then they were like, oh my God. And then they saw it. Then they saw what I saw when I met her. But sometimes, like you say, what do you do when people are like, hey, why come you're using this? Just know that not everyone's going to see it. You may have the only vision.
Just keep going. There's an instinct that tells you to keep going that way. You'll get proved right or wrong, or maybe you're slipping on the first two rocks or whatever. But follow your instinct because everyone's going to have an opinion. And it's not necessarily the right one.
And when you're an independent filmmaker, you can make those decisions that change people's careers, that changes the world. And that's why you want to remain independent. That's why what's happening now in the industry is great because I have to make movies like... the way I started, which is what I've always liked to do, which is just doing it where we create our own destiny.
We go, Hey, we're going to make a movie. We're going to make it for this budget so we can make it. And the story is going to be so character driven and cool. We're going to get big actors to be in it because they're going to want to be in it. So Danny Trejo, you asked me about Danny Trejo. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Okay. Danny Trejo. We're doing Desperado now. I'm casting all kinds of people.
Now I have this character that I want to have a bunch of knives. He opens up his vest and there's a bunch of knives. So bring me all the coolest looking, you know, Latin actors we can find. And before he even walked in, there's a picture of him. He already looked like the guy, but he was younger. He always just played prison inmates. It was a picture of him as an inmate in a prison.
I want to give him a cool role, you know, wherever this actor is. He walks in and I see him. It's Danny Trejo. He sits down. And I had the prop knife already made. And I say, you need to have this in your hand and look like you sleep with it. Like just practice flipping it around your hand. And I gave it to him. You got the role. Just start practicing with that. And he gets up and walks out.
He didn't have to say anything because there's no dialogue. Yeah. He walks out. We get to the set and he kept saying, put me in coach. Give me a line. Give me a line. It's like, no, no, you're such a nice guy. You're going to blow the whole mystique. I want this guy to feel like the most evil, scary guy of all. And you're such a nice guy. I didn't let him talk till dusk till dawn.
But one thing I noticed was that the town we're shot in the Mexican town, which is the same town I shot Mariachi. We went back there because I wanted to pay back the city. And so we had this big movie there and, um, They didn't really know Antonio because he was in European movies. Salma hadn't come to the set yet, but they saw Danny Trejo there in his vest looking like a Mexican icon.
They would go like this. Everyone thought he was the star. And I just know magnetism when I see it. And I went, this guy's got something. So I went to him and I said, I got a movie we're going to do someday. This was 94. We didn't make this movie for 15 years. Machete. You're going to be machete.
had i had an idea for machete then it wasn't the same story i had seen a story uh actually mariachi the guy from march sent me this funny story he said hey look at this story that the usda and fbi sometimes would hire a mexican federale to come do a job for 25 grand that they didn't want to get their own guys killed on i said that's machete the guy that they pay
But he's not doing it for the money. It turns out he has to get this guy that escaped Mexico, and that's the twist. So that was the original story I had. I said, we're going to do this someday. And we talked about it for years and never did it. Never got around to doing it.
So when I did Spy Kids, I put him in Spy Kids, and I said, hey, let's pay tribute to that character we never got to make, and you'll be Uncle Machete. He's a gadget guy, but he's got a mysterious past. But then a few years later, Quentin and I were doing Grindhouse. And he'd already done Dustal Domini. I was building my own Latin star system. Salmo showed up in a bunch of my movies.
Cheech shows up in every movie. Danny shows up. I brought Cheech out of retirement and put him in my movie. I needed to create my own Latin star system because all my scripts, because when you write in your own voice, you're going to write probably somebody that's Latin.
So you need to have a star system that matches that so that you don't have trouble casting and people are like, well, you can't hire this person. So I built up my own star system. So Danny was one of my stars. So after we're doing Grindhouse, we had to do fake trailers for Grindhouse. And I told Quentin, I know what trailer I'm going to do for the movie I never got to make with Danny Cole Machete.
That'll be so fun. Finally get that out of our system. And doing a trailer is so fun. It's two days of shooting. Just still being that resourceful guy. We asked this company that had a digital camera we wanted to use. Can you let us send it to us for a couple of day screen test? I mean, camera test. Instead of shooting a camera test, we shot the trailer.
So we got a free camera, shot the trailer with him. And it's just the money shots, him opening his vest full of machetes, you know, him aiming that gun, him in a waterfall with two gals. And I just came up with this really funny trailer. and we shot it, people were screaming at the premiere. You couldn't even hear it.
They just wanted that movie so badly, because there was blaxploitation in the 70s. There was never mexploitation. It felt like this should have existed, but it didn't. It's Mexican superhero. They just never seen anything like that. You know, now you know. But like, even his mom calls him Machete. Like, he just became this guy.
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