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
I was 19 years old when I did that. And then years later, I'm making Sin City. I shot Mickey not knowing who the other actor was going to be until I cast him eight months later and it was Rudger. I'm cutting them together to look like they're in the same movie and it's in black and white. And I'm like, done this before. Oh my God, I found that old video.
It's like, oh my God, I already made a movie with him in black and white. That's some weird shit, right? That's the magic of creativity. It's like sometimes when you have a vision, it's not clear, but it's coming to you from the future. So you got to just follow the voice.
No matter what anyone says about your curtains, just follow the voice you got in your head because you don't know and you're not smart enough to know. And you don't need to know. You just need to do. You just need to be the hands. So this is like what you can do with no time or money when you know all those jobs. It's the benefit of knowing those jobs.
Like I said, the more you know those jobs, the more you know your main job, which is being creative, but on the day, thinking on your feet. So I'm going to show you this test. Okay, so for Dustled on the TV series, I would always shoot the first episode and the last episode of like a seven or eight episode season. There's three seasons.
By the time we got to the third season, I was doing Alita, so I couldn't do the big finale episode. And my actor who plays the George Clooney character, DJ Catrona, he's somebody who fucking wanted to be a writer, was writing. He wrote Fight and Flight. It's this movie that's gonna come out with Josh Arnett. That's his, he wrote it.
And after doing this, he was like, man, hearing you talk, you know what, I got, this is what I love about, you inspire people, the feedback loop inspires you back. He said, man, hearing your talk for Red 11 and the cards and I've got a script that's partially written. I'm just going to go crank it out in 3D. I'm going to cut off the phone in 3D.
I'm going to finish that thing in three fucking days. And he came back and he said, I finished the script and I read it. And I go, you read it in three days? And he goes, well, I wrote some of it before, but it... I just kept thinking I wasn't ready. And then you told me the thing about not being ready. And you said that it really resonated. I went and I finished it in three days.
I go, man, I'm going to do that. I'm going to go do the DJ method. I call the DJ method. I have a bunch of half-baked ideas that I'm just going to go turn off the phone and finish the thing in three days. And I'll fix it later. But the three days, it's going to be pure pipe. It's just going to be coming through because you're just going to be picking up the pen.
So anyway, he came to me with this idea. He said, oh man, I was hoping you'd do the last episode of Dust Till Dawn because I had this great idea for a scene. We're in a zombie town, Western town. We have those guns where you have to pull the trigger, you know, the hammer back before you can fire.
So I thought, what if I have a gun that's empty and I got bullets in the other hand and I bump into a zombie, the bullets go flying, I jump and I catch all the bullets and shoot the guy before I hit the ground. Okay, that's kind of a real cool, like, desperado type thing, but dude, this is a seven-day shoot for these episodes. Every one of the crew will have a different idea on how to do that.
Stunt guy will put you on wires because you have to do all that action or... The DP isn't even operating the camera. It's a camera guy. The director doesn't know how to shoot. He's not operating the camera. Your editor's in a room somewhere. VFX guys aren't there. You're not going to be able to ask them how to do it.
But I, in my own VFX, I came up with how we did all the shots in Sin City and all the spiking. We need one guy to come do it. I'll come do it for you. I'll come do it because I'm already going to be there because I have to shoot a second unit fight scene for the other actor who wanted a cool fight scene. So I was already doing that.
When it comes to your scene, we'll switch places because it's got to be done quick because you've got, you got to shoot it in 20 minutes because you got a ton of other shit you got to shoot and you'll just never get it. You won't even get it in a film schedule, you know, in a regular movie schedule. It's just too crazy. You need somebody with a vision to do the whole thing.
So this is what it would look like if you're on the set. I'm going to show you the footage and I'm going to show you the scene. I have to show it to you a couple of times because you're not going to believe what you're about to see. So if you were on the set, this is what it would look like. So I get there. They said, we're ready for that scene.
So I get over there to the set and I go, okay, where are you coming out of? This building. Where are you getting the bullets from? That body. Okay, bring that body closer. Okay, stunt guy, bring a pad over. I want to see you just jump and start to twist as if you're turning. I just want to see how much air time you can get to get any action before you hit the pad. He starts to jump.
He barely starts jumping. He's already hitting the pad. So I was like, okay, that ain't going to work. You get out of here. DJ, you're going to do it. I have no idea how I'm going to do this. I hadn't thought about it before. But now you're there. This is so awesome. And now the options are very limited. You're very limited. Look at the sun. You're going to see the sun not move.
You see, that's the point where the sun starts getting lost. I have to shoot this in 20 minutes. You're gonna do three jumps and I'm gonna cut it to look like one jump. All the bullets are gonna miss, only one's gonna go in. So here, just follow what I'm saying because we don't have time. What cameras do we have? What's on the A camera? A long lens. Oh yeah, that's my camera. I'll operate that.
What's on the B camera? Steady cam, leave it on steady cam. No chance, no time to convert it. At one point, I wanted to lower it. So just flip it upside down. We'll flop it later. Give me the main camera. Okay, DJ, start running towards that bullets and grab it and pretend like it gets shot out of your hand. I shoot it in slow motion, but I'm showing you how it would look on the set.
Okay, now the bullets are flying. I'm going to add those digitally. I'm going to hold the bullets up to the light in each angle so that they know what it's supposed to look like so they can match that. Otherwise, it'll look phony. Now, first jump. I just want you to commit. to just jumping out and just look at the barrel.
Just look at the barrel on your hands when you're jumping, because that'll look like you're looking at the bullets. And just don't even think about that you're going to catch a bullet. Don't think about that you're going to start turning. Just stretch your body out. Get a really graphic look at how cool that looks. And then the side view, shot this at the same time, you can already tell...
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