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
And I liked that he was a writer director in a way, because he would not just wrote the comic, but he drew it too. A lot of times it's a different writer or a different comic artist. He's like a real, like a kinship, you know, this is someone who writes and directs his own thing. But I was looking at it and I went, oh shit, I know how to do this now. I just did it on the green screen.
If I shoot this on green screen, the actors on green screen, I can make the backgrounds look just like this and I can contrast up the actors and I could get this very graphic look, which sometimes for a window, it's just a white box. So it's even got a sliding scale for budget. If I run out of money, just put the actors in black and white, just put like a white dot behind them for a street light.
And that looks just like the book. So I'm going to bring the book to life. So- I'll show you how fast we go from development at Troublemaker. It was October. Once upon a time, Mexico had come out. I was like, oh shit, I know how to do this now. Sin City. I'm going to do a test. I went to my green screen here in my studio. You'll see my green screen where I shot all these movies.
And I shot my sister, myself, put it black and white. Looks just like the comic, but it's moving. So I called a comic book artist friend of mine, Mike Allred, and I said, do you have Frank Miller's number? He goes, yeah, I do. Okay, I'm going to call him up. So I called Frank Miller. Hey, this is Rob Rodriguez. I have a test I want to show you for Sin City. I'm going to be in New York tomorrow.
He's like, tomorrow? Okay, yeah, sure. Come by. Meet me at this bar. Okay. Book a flight for New York. I fly up there. I have my laptop just like this. I go to the bar. I show him what looks like an image from his comic and it starts moving. And he's like, wow, how did you do that? I said, I got my own studio and all this.
And then I started telling him, man, let's make this movie because no one had the rights to it. He never gave the rights to a studio. A lot of comics, oh, Warner Brothers bought this a while back, you know, or whatever. Then you got to go through the studio. He still owned his own rights.
In fact, he'd gotten burned by Hollywood so many times as a screenwriter that he said, fuck it, I'm going to go back and draw a comic that's so raw that can never be made into a movie. So of course I call him, hey, let's make a great movie. So I show him how we can do it. And I go, I know you don't know me and I have to earn your trust for you to give me your baby, but we can make this right away.
And he's like, he's all excited for about two seconds. oh no then we got to write a script and the studio's gonna have notes all that shit he's been through before and it's not like that i have a whole different setup i got my own studio in austin this is how it's gonna be if you like this idea i'm gonna you're not gonna have to take any risk let me take all the risk
I'm going to go write the script myself next month. It's going to be unremarkable because I'm going to write it right out of your book. I'm going to edit three of the stories down. I'm going to just take stuff out, really. It might add a few things to connect it, but I'll write the script in December myself. No money involved. Then we'll call some actor friends of mine.
We'll have them come to my green screen. We'll shoot the opening scene as a test, but it's also the opening scene. I'll do the effects myself. I'll do the sound, do the music. I'll do fake credits. We'll watch it together. If you like what you see, we'll make the movie. Give me the rights then. If you don't like it, keep it. It's a short film to show your friends. This would be really cool.
So he's like, all right. There's nothing on him to do. It's all on me. I write the script in December. January, Josh Arnett, Marlee Shelton come down, fly Frank in. We're shooting for 10 hours on my green screen. We shoot that opening sequence. Incredible opening sequence. Record his voiceover right then in my little voiceover booth. Marlee Shelton comes up. Why did I hire him to kill me?
I don't know. Let's go ask Frank. He's right here. Let's go ask Frank. I want to know myself. So he tells her and he's like, He's already, as I tell you, Frank, I used to be a cartoonist. It's the same thing. You're already a director. You're just using a pen instead of a camera. The performances you get out of your paper actors are phenomenal.
The shots you do are like beyond any DP has ever done. And the visual look, we've never seen that. I want to just take this and make it move. I just want the comic to move. Any other studio would just go make it look like any gritty crime movie and they would miss the point. The visual is half of it.
I want it to look just like this because it would be the boldest movie anyone's seen because that's how it reads when I read the book. It's like, if this was moving, it would be the most phenomenal movie. In fact, I asked him, do you ever... Feel like directing any of these short ones? I thought about directing The Big Fat Kill maybe as a short film. You should come direct that one.
Shit, you should direct all of them with me because I'm really copying and writing a book. You should direct it with me. All right, let's go. So then January. Okay, so remember, I met him in November. I wrote it in December. January, we shoot the test. Took me a couple of weeks to do the effects. He loves it. I make a meeting with Bruce Willis, show it to Bruce Willis.
What's so cool about doing that opening scene is that any actor I show it to now, I show them the book, which is awesome. You'd be playing this character, but look at this test. Let me show you the book, what it looked like before I turned this test into a test. Watches it, Josh Arnett, voiceover, music, titles come on. First name on the screen, Bruce Willis.
And I go, hey, look, you're in the credits. You have to do it now. Manifesting it, right? He's like, shit, man, this is great. I'm in. He's in. Wow. Go get everyone else from that. It was just easy to get. And we were filming the movie. So February, right?
building the few little sets we had like the bar i told frank we don't need to build a bar but i'm gonna go ahead and build a bar so we have a place to go have script meetings everything else will be green screen we'll build fake steps and things out of green so we're doing that and i'm casting the first one we're shooting the movie by march the beginning of march and i remember because my son was born march 3rd and i was in la for his birth because i was also recording the orchestra for the score i wrote somehow in the past few months for kill bill 2
That's how much stuff was going on. Yeah. You know, that's like when you just let it flow, you're just riding the wave. You're not doing any of that. That's what's by staying in that urgent, the deadlines are just pushing you to create stuff. We shot the movie so fast in record time. Now, not only that, I shot a whole other movie that year.
I shot The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl with kids that came out two months after Sin City the next year. Within less than a year, Sin City was out. You're shooting that in parallel with Sin City. That's hilarious. Is that great? Yeah.
Showing 1061–1080 of 1,180 · page 54 of 59
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