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
You have to get out of the way and open the pipe. And it just comes out and you're shocked. You're like, oh my God, I should do everything at the last minute. Well, no, you don't have to. But if you just learn how to open that pipe earlier, you wouldn't be in a rush. But you had to get out of your way because your deadline was up and you had to come up with it.
So many people are going to come up with all these extra great ideas at the last minute. It looks like everyone who's already signing on Cause they didn't, it's cool. They don't know when the deadline is. They keep writing in saying, when is the deadline for this? And we say, well, when, when we closed the funding in May, but we didn't say when still.
So I think that gives them like a sense of a deadline, like shit, it might be May 1st or maybe May 2nd. So we better get my idea going. So I think it works in your favor because then you come up with stuff and you're going to feel so enriched by doing the idea. that you're not going to care if it gets picked or not.
You're going to love this idea so much, it could turn into 10 other things you never even thought about. That's the beauty of doing a project. Nothing ever goes to waste. So many ideas that were sitting around that I'd come up with and put a lot of time in are now like, oh, I can do these now. I know how to finish it now.
Sure. I mean, why not? I never would have attempted it if it wasn't Jim, because Jim has figured all this out. So just to get you, again, remember, like I said, hey, Jim, I'm operating a study cam. What do you think of that? Well, I'm designing a new system. That's always how it is between him and I. So when I went to show him Desperado when it was done, He said, you might not want to sit through.
If you don't want to sit through it while I'm watching it, it's fine. Do you want to read any of my scriptments, my treatment scripts, you know, called scriptments? I said, sure. He goes, I have Spider-Man and I got Avatar. So this was in 95. He was showing me the scriptment for Avatar, which there was no technology for that. He was already doing stuff that
didn't exist yeah and i was reading it going like this is a great story he's like i don't know how the fuck he's gonna do this it's impossible it's not even he'd just done you know terminator 2 a few years before it's like that was the thing of the art so elita was going to be the movie he did first to prepare for avatar and so he had already done some prep work on it it was based on a manga
But before they did that, they just started doing some tests for Avatar. And then as they got deeper into the test for Avatar to prepare for Alita, they went, I guess we're making Avatar first. So Alita got kind of pushed to the side and they ended up doing it, which ended up becoming such a journey to make that movie, to get the technology, to build it, to make it.
Because I remember visiting him on the set. I mean, I've known him so long, I was on the set of Titanic. That's how long I've been around this guy. I was on the set of Titanic. I was on the set with Sarah Connor and Arnold Schwarzenegger and Eddie Furlong for the 3D ride he made for Universal a few years later. So, I mean, I feel like I've been around him...
a lot of his career, and to be able to visit the set of Avatar and remember him showing me artwork they did, very photorealistic, and he goes, curious to see how photoreal it'll be when we're finally done with this process, because you don't get to see it until it's almost done. And I was like, wow, he's just shooting blind. He's really, talk about me shooting mariachi, not seeing the footage.
He's making this whole movie, not even knowing what the end result's going to look like at all. Because you're not going to know till you get there. And when you get there, if you don't like it, there's not a lot you can do. So I just seen him do that and have that success really made it easier for me to do Alita because then it's like, okay, we don't know. Again, we don't need to know.
We know we'll get there, but we don't know how we're going to do it. We're going to start. And anything that I would come up with on this movie, And his team, because he had all his Weta people working on it, he had them all working on it too. I do a fast version of his process because it's a lot of live action. Avatar's mostly CG. I have live action sets.
You have to come to my studio because I still have the whole Alita city in my back lot.
Yeah.
Yeah, it was shot here. So when you go see my city, I built it very resourceful. This is weird. It looks just like the town from Mariachi. It's in my backyard. I'm like, it looks better than the town from Mariachi. 90,000, it's the biggest, largest standing set in the country because sets are always mowed down for the next movie, but I just kept it there.
So we used to shoot it all the time for Mexico or South America or Europe or whatever. It's seven streets and we added digitally above it. The ceilings are 20 feet high. You gotta come see. You don't believe that it's here. It's unbelievable. Where is it north of Austin? It's where the old airport was. So it's like on 51st Street. It's like really close to town. I would love to visit.
You got to come see. You're not going to believe it. All my props, all my stuff from all my movies. So people who are investing in Brass Knuckle, that's why I say it's like a Willy Wonka movie because they're going to get to come check out all that stuff and be in proximity and see, oh, like me with that painter. It's not a trick. He's just doing it. Then you realize you can do it too.
But we thought, let's shoot mostly live action and we'll just replace her. But we still have to figure her out. You have to cast the right actress. And when I saw Rosa Salazar, she was just amazing. She made me cry in audition for the first time. I was like, oh my God, this person has some, if we can capture even a fourth of her facial expression, it'll bring so much life.
And they got it one-to-one. And it really helped Jim on the next Avatar and Weta because they got to try out a bunch of things. That's why Avatar, the second Avatar, Way of Water, looks so much more refined than the first Avatar because of that middle step of doing Alita. It was training ground for them.
Yeah, I have her in a suit for... capturing her body movements, but also facial capture. It's a performance capture of all her performance, all her emoting. And we have witness cameras around everywhere to pick up where she is and everything else is real. And we're just replacing her, but with someone even smaller in size. So you have to erase everything behind her.
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