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
Oh, my God, will you just pick up?
But yet still, even though it's like that, where it still feels like you have to do a lot. Well, that's how Pressfield talks about it. You just go, I just need to be a pipe. Yeah. A clean pipe, a conduit. So more stuff comes through. And that means take your ego out of it. I mean, just just do the work. Just show up and start.
You're tapped into – I had a friend of mine. Tim Ferriss was over at my house and I was telling him about some – it's a very creative house. Really because it's where I do a lot of my creative work and a lot of creatives like coming to this place. See, you have to come check it out. You can see the frisettas I have.
We'll get to that. We'll get to that. Oh, my God. Are you going to make a note? Totally. Totally. You have so much of favorite Frazettas. Totally a creative place. And I like people to come there. But it's just inspiring to be in an environment where... Everything around you is about creativity because then you get in that headspace and you're able to do more because you realize it's not you.
It's just coming through you and you just have to witness it. And it just takes a lot of the load off of you. A lot of people can start easier if they know, oh, it doesn't have to be me. Like my kids, oh, I don't have to do it. I just have to actually pick up the pen. Yeah, it's very freeing.
And they're doing that to themselves. You're literally doing this to yourself. So when you say... Well, I don't know if I can just chopped off your leg right at the beginning of the race. Right, right, right. Well, I tried it once before. You just cut the other one off. I mean, you're literally doing your your your own worst enemy. I had this one gal and fear of failure.
This is the base of the best thing. One gal in one of the talks, she said, okay, you're all positive, but what do I tell myself when I just spent a year and a half doing something and it didn't work out? I said, well, that's a very negative way to ask that. Can you rephrase the question first? Then I'll attempt. And she went, I learned a good lesson the hard way. I said, no, that still sucks.
If you're focused on the failure, if you followed your instinct and it didn't work out, It doesn't mean you're wrong. Sometimes the only way across the river is to slip on the first two rocks. It's the only way. And if you just stay there, you're not going to go. So you have to embrace the failure.
Because if you're going on instinct, I mean, you're doing it literally on instinct, not like someone said, hey, go over there. There's a money-making scheme. Go do that. Literally, you had the instinct. And my best example is four rooms. It's a movie I did with Quentin. Because if you study the ashes of your failure, you'll find a key to your next success.
Four different movies, four different stories. And I love short stories because I had made a bunch of short films. I thought, oh, I want to do that. So when Quentin asked, and I asked the audience, I like asking the audience, how would you answer this? Quentin goes, hey, I'm going to make a movie called Four Rooms. Four different directors. You've got to use the bellhop. It's New Year's Eve.
Yeah.
I figured because that's why you're here right now. Because we're not that smart. I'm not that smart. I couldn't have figured this shit out. It's because I was just at an instinct to go that way when everyone else was going that way. And you're going to stumble. You're going to fall. But you're going to stumble upon.
You're going to stumble upon ideas no one thought of because you're going the way that's not picked clean already. Right, right. So I just like four rooms. I said, yeah. Now, if I had just studied a little bit, I would have seen that anthologies like that never work. Like even when it's Scorsese, you know, Woody Allen and Coppola, they did one.
Nobody goes to see it because they don't know how to wrap their head around it. What is this, three movies? Is this an anthology? It doesn't work. If I had studied first, should I have changed my answer? Nobody knows that answer. Well, I'm going to go on instinct. I'm going to say I say instinct anyway. Movie bombs doesn't do well at all.
Now I could be really upset about that and go like, wow, I got to be really careful now going forward. I have to tiptoe around as an artist. Well, that's not the state of mind I was when I won Sundance. I was throwing stuff out.
Okay, no, no, I'm not done with this story.
There's a lot of great stuff in it, but it goes even better than that. My whole thing is... Examine the ashes of your failure and I don't find one I find two keys in there to my biggest movies directly from that experience So my instinct was right, but again, sometimes the only way across the river is slipping on the first two rocks I was on the set had to be New Year's.
So I dressed everybody up in tuxedos and Antonio had just done Desperado the next week. He came and appeared in there the little boy from Desperado He had a little brother so I hired him And then I just found the best little actress, who's a half-Asian girl, Asian-American, so I cast an Asian mom. So it would look like they were a family.
So I'm seeing Antonio and Tamela and Tamita all dressed up to the nines. I went, wow, they look like a really cool international spy couple. What if they were spies and the two little kids who can barely tie their shoes don't know it? They get captured, and the kids have to go see them. So Spy Kids, there's five of those now.
The other key to success that I got on that set was I love doing short films. That's why I signed up for it. It didn't work, but I'm going to try it again. Not four stories, three stories, like a three-act structure. Not four directors, but the same director. I'm going to try it. Why on earth would I try it again?
Showing 101–120 of 1,180 · page 6 of 59
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