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
Because they would come up to me a lot because I was making films really early on and say, I'm an aspiring filmmaker. You might hear that. I'm an aspiring comic. I'm an aspiring filmmaker. And he goes, stop aspiring. You're calling yourself an aspiring filmmaker. That's now your identity. You're always going to be aspiring. Just say you're a filmmaker.
Take one of these cards and make a business card, even if you have to handwrite it, who you are. I'm a director. I did one. I had it printed up. Director, cinematographer, editor, composer. That's who I am. Now you're going to have to conform to that. And you're going to start making films. I started making these films even for Spanish video. And so you have to think it through.
And I'd forgotten that lesson. So I wanted to use your gym because, you know, I like to work out now. I never did. You started as a cartoonist. I'm surprised. I was always an artist. I was really tall, you know, for school.
You know, you start drawing and then suddenly.
Yeah, well, it started when I was 19 doing the comic, but then it kept getting repeated.
It felt like something else, but then it really hit me later on. And I'll get to that one. It really hit me later on where I kind of put it all together around 2001, 2002, when I was doing a movie where I was, again, kind of going back to the way I did Mariachi. I was on a big movie, though. I was the writer, the director, the producer, the cinematographer, the editor, the composer.
I was doing all these things. Plus, I was doing the production design now, and I was taking on more jobs to make it more like a handmade film, more like a lot of factory movies are being made. I said, I want people just to feel different. I think they'll get a feeling from it they don't get from, you know... a McDonald's process.
They're still good, but, you know, there's something about a home-cooked meal. And I didn't even know how to read or write music, and I was writing...
music for a hundred piece orchestra and i was like how i figured it out by notes going there's only 12 notes you know even less than a scale so you hit three no four notes that's not bad that's a bad note okay that's pleasing to the ear and i was just writing a note by note because it's a kid's movie so i figured it should sound like a kid wrote it and i'm like a kid sound like that and i was writing pretty complex stuff not knowing what i was doing i go how is this even possible that i'm doing all these jobs i wasn't trained in so i went on amazon and i looked up
any book that had the word creative or creativity in it i just ordered it i don't know what section it came from they just arrived and i'm thumbing through them and one of them was really speaking about the creative process how it worked and i was like wow wow that's how it is that's how it is and then it said gels and mediums and i was like oh this is a book particularly about painting but it applies to all the other things i'm doing that's when i realized that
It's all linked. That creativity is 90% of any of those endeavors. 90% of it is just being creative. The technical part, like reading or writing music, and there's a lot of great musicians who don't read or write music. They're fantastic. The technical part, you can fudge that, like how to shoot the movie. You can fudge a lot of the technical stuff. 90% is creative.
And if you know how to be creative, you can literally jump from job to job and do it really well because you're coming with your own experience and your own point of view. That's why I teach my actors to paint on the set because they've never painted before and they're already being creative by acting.
But in between takes, we'll go paint a portrait of their character where I take a photo of them in character and have them paint a background. I said, just pick up the paint. You can use these three methods, any color you want. The paintbrush is going to know where to go. even though you've never painted before, it's gonna know where to go.
And they do it, and I put a stencil of a line drawing of their face over it. I'll show you some. You're not gonna believe it. Josh Brolin was way into it, Lady Gaga did one, Bruce Willis did one. And it's just like magic how it comes together. And it's to teach them that you don't have to know. We always think, I need to know this, I need to know that. What about the other side?
Half of the battle is knowing. What about the other half? Not knowing, I think, is the more beautiful and where the magic is. Because you don't need to know what's going to happen. You just need to show up. You just need to pick up the pen. You need to do the keyboard. Because it just starts coming through you. And they see it. And it helps them go back to the set and solve any creative problem.
It was much harder in the faint room figuring out gels and mediums and all this stuff. They go back to the set and they can solve any problem instantly. And you'd think that they're already in a creative mode by acting, but it fires off a whole other part of your brain to go do something else creative at the same time. Remember on the set, Josh goes...
is it okay I'm still thinking about the painting? I go, I think so.
Yeah. So that's where I started piecing together that it was something, because I really wanted to look it up because it would feel like when I would go to write the music, I don't have to write very many notes before. It feels like I'm being pulled by the hand. Like, I didn't make that. I didn't make that. And I didn't do that. And I didn't do that.
Well, if you ask all the disciplines. I ask Jimmy Vaughn. How did you play that? That solo was amazing. Did you have that worked out? It's kind of like tuning a radio. You know, if you get it just right, you can't even believe what's coming through. Yeah. You know, you always hear everyone's version of that. And so I called it something. I thought, I'm going to call it the creative spirit.
Like there's a creative spirit. Imagine the creative spirit that's assigned to you. And if you're someone who's just like... I don't think I can do this or that. And they don't pick up the pen. They don't actually start. How frustrated that spirit must be.
Showing 81–100 of 1,180 · page 5 of 59
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