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
Sometimes we'd be shooting with the kids and in the afternoon, Rudger Hauer would come and some of the Sin City girls to finish shooting stuff that we needed to film. It was just insane how fast we had to move. I was doing it in my head. I was editing. I just edited it. And then I would scan the artwork into the computer.
and I would edit the storyboards with the sound effects, and I would do the voiceover. I would imitate Mickey, and I would imitate Bruce, and lay out how fast it was gonna move. And you were like, wow, so now we have a template with the real drawings and the lighting on how we're gonna do it.
As funny as I can do pretty good in Bruce Willis, because I've known Chris so long, if you're doing his voiceover, and he would hear my guide voice for the timing, And he'd be like, is that me or is that you? Can't tell. That one was me, but just do that. It's like, man, it sounds like me.
Well, it's a very specific look because it went into that comic. The first piece of music I wrote for that was the main title and I called it Descent. I wanted the notes to descend because it felt like you were descending into this dark world and you don't come out to the end of the movie.
You're just like in this world where all these layers of unreality, like water doesn't photograph that way, snow doesn't, but it's there and you're seeing and you're seeing the actors. So you're just really, it's like a dream world. So I was really into it and I did tests for the most difficult shots first. Like how do I get his...
his tape to glow in the dark like in the comics, so it's still in the shadow and I realized, oh, I'll use fluorescent tape and a fluorescent light, that way I can keep it, we can still key it. I started just doing my own visual effects like that early on because I knew technology was changing so fast that I would need to just know how to do it like a magician.
Shooting digital, nobody wanted to touch digital back then. DPs were all afraid of digital. They didn't want to have to learn something new. So I had to DP it. So me photographing it, I'm like, it's so fun to cut because, I mean, to light, like you have to have that light out of frame right now. But I could bring the lights in right here as long as it was, they're not crossing it.
I'm just going to take it out of the green anyway. So I could have the coolest light on everybody. Cool edge lights. You could have an edge light back here, an edge light back here, a fill light here. I didn't even erase them. I just take him out.
Well, if you look at the drawings too, sometimes it's the absence of light. Like you would see this face, but then this would be completely black, but you would still see my eye, which is like impossible, right? But you believe it when you see it because it's there. So things like that were a lot of the tricks I tried first because I liked that about it.
It's like you have a guy completely backlit, so there's no light on his face, but yet his glasses are glowing white. So we'd put fluorescent tape in there, hit that with a light, then we could turn it white later. The black and white really helps. And then just upping the contrast. But I mean, it's just something that you have a feeling for, but you're able to try it.
In fact, when I took it to George Lucas, George Lucas said this to me early on, because we're the only guy shooting digital. He said, man, it's so good you live in Austin. That's why I'm in Marin County. Because when you live outside of this box of LA, Hollywood, you think outside of the box automatically. You're just going to stumble upon innovations. And he was right.
It was like, yeah, why aren't we shooting digital? Let's shoot digital. Why aren't we shooting digital 3D? Let's do that. Why don't we just use green screen for the background? You just start innovating because you're away from anyone saying, hey, you can't do it that way, which they would say if I was in LA. So we just came up with a whole other method.
So I took him to Sin City to check out the first thing I was going to show at Comic-Con. He said, yeah. Now, this will really show people what digital is capable of. This really shows how avant-garde you can get with that shit, that you could never have done that on film. And so by me versing myself in that technology early, I was able to make a movie like that.
And then everyone had to play catch-up. So you should always just follow your... That's why some people say, don't use those curtains, that's not going to work. Just blow past those guys. Go innovate your own thing because... Sometimes not knowing is better, you know, being too naive to, like, don't you know you shouldn't have been able to make that movie that way?
People would say like that all the time. How did you make Movement March for $7,000? You know, it's impossible. It's like, why do you keep using that word? Because it can't be impossible if I did it because I'm not that smart. And it's like saying, how did you get to the top of Mount Everest? It's impossible. Well, I just kept walking. I didn't realize it was kind of at a slope.
I didn't really realize it was going up that high.
Yeah, I noticed a little bit. And I was like, I'm going to free you up so that you're never uncomfortable again.
Because you think there's a lot of people who go, well, you're not an artist. You're not a creative person. But you're not saying I'm an artist. I'm saying I'm a creative person. But that's an artist too, isn't it? An artist isn't necessarily a guy with the French mustache and the funny hat. That's not necessarily what an artist is. Artists are regular people.
and regular people relate to art that's imperfect if you can make art that's perfect no one will relate to it so when you think about it like that you go well i can make imperfect art so yeah i'm an artist and if you have doubt you're an artist that's an artist real artists always wonder if they're good enough so you are an artist just by the fact that you had uncomfortable saying it you're a real artist yeah and there's some degree i don't know if you could speak to this but um
Okay, but you're judging something that you have no business judging. Right. Like, I have so many people. That's why I like making movies on purpose that have less money and less time. On purpose. Right. Like the biggest movie I said all time on Netflix is we can be heroes. I told them, I don't want to spend more than $50 million.
Showing 1081–1100 of 1,180 · page 55 of 59
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