The Many Hats of Robert Rodriguez From no budget to big budget, this one-man band is still a master of DIY filmmaking.
by Emily Soares about the author >>
If you were ever surprised to learn that the director who delivered the low-budget miracle El Mariachi for $7000 is the same one who produced three blockbuster Spy Kids pictures, take a closer look. Robert Rodriquez, king of cheap thrills and some very unHollywood resourcefulness, has kept his independent instincts intact even though his budgets have boomed.
Of course what else would we expect from a man who loaned his body to science to come up with the funds for his first feature film? To finance El Mariachi, which was originally intended as a straight-to-Spanish-language-video venture, Rodriguez signed up for a month-long stint with Pharmaco, which he describes as "a drug research facility that pays healthy young males to be guinea pigs to test their latest medical breakthroughs." There he wrote the screenplay in isolation, reportedly giving blood as often as 10 times a day and handing over¿um¿other bodily byproducts to eager researchers. He even managed to do some talent scouting while at the lab: Peter Marquardt, who bunked next to Rodriguez, was cast as Moco, El Mariachi's villain.
El Mariachi opened up Hollywood's gilded doors to Rodriguez. After the film's stellar showing at Sundance, Columbia offered him $6 million to do El Mariachi much, much bigger as Desperado (1995). Antonio Banderas enters as the title character, and the story works as a sequel, picking up as the Mariachi returns to town to seek his revenge. This is also the first of many films Salma Hayek would do with Rodriguez.
Once known as the "rebel without a crew" Rodriguez learns by doing, and wants to learn it all. That's how he engineered the special effects for the first Spy Kids movie, and how he manages to make action films on a relative shoestring. The Spy Kids movies have averaged $38 million, a modest budget for the genre. "I'm from a family of 10 kids," Rodriguez told Time magazine. "I can't stand waste."
Growing up in his large San Antonio, TX, family, Rodriguez is used to taking inspiration from relatives. He had long admired his uncle Gregario, a special agent for the FBI (a character who shows up in his most recent film Once Upon a Time in Mexico, 2003) but the idea for Spy Kids didn't hit until Rodriquez was working again with Banderas on Four Rooms (1995). He was directing kids in tuxedoes when it hit him: "They looked like little James Bonds, and I thought, 'Wow, that's the angle. A spy family,'" he told Time.
But the Spy Kids would have to wait. Rodriguez knew he had a lot to learn about special effects and he figured out an ingenious way to educate himself. He worked with Tarantino on Dusk Till Dawn (1996) to, among other things, get effects experience. Rodriguez acted as director, sound mixer, camera operator and editor, among other things on the project.
While he was writing Spy Kids, Miramax offered Rodriguez a gig directing Kevin Williamson's The Faculty (1998). Ever inventive, he made them a deal: He would direct The Faculty if they would green-light four films of his. And so the funding for Spy Kids was secured and Rodriguez got yet another director credit under his belt...and one each for producer, editor, sound mixer, camera operator...
Rodriguez didn't hire a special-effects supervisor for the first Spy Kids movie¿he did it himself, one of six hats he wore for the films. "If I had hired a big effects supervisor from Hollywood and asked him how to achieve various shots it would have cost time and money," he told the The Palm Beach Post. The films represent a return to Rodriquez's roots¿a cross between the award-winning shorts of his days at the University of Texas at Austin, starring many of his nine siblings, and the cartoonish sensibilities of his "Los Hooligans" comic strip that ran in the university paper, a project that had it's nascence in the margins of his grade-school books.
With the aim of making his family the center of his life and working around that, Rodriguez puts together as much of his films at his Texas castle (complete with turret!), perched high above the Pedernales River, near Austin. He filmed on a sound stage at the old Austin airport, but did everything else (performing the work of eight on this film, including original music, production designer, cinematographer and editor) for Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over at home. He supervised the digital effects, done mostly by Canadian company Hybride Technologies, from his home computer and had his wife, Elizabeth Avellan, act as the film's producer, as she has done on all of his films.
Up next is Once Upon a Time in Mexico (budgeted at $30 million), and Rodriguez is doing his usual multi-tasking best with seven production parts to play. The film, shot in 24-frames-per-second high-definition video, with a small crew, is titled in homage to one of the directors Rodriguez admires most¿Sergio Leone. The idea came from Tarantino, who suggested that El Mariachi and Desperado were the first two installments of a trilogy, such as Leone's "Dollars" trio. The film is, among other things, "shot, chopped and scored" by Rodriguez. "The reason I do so many jobs," he says on the film's Web site, " is that I find no matter how big the movie may be, it becomes more personal. I don't ever want to feel like I'm just telling people what to do. I want to lead by example."
Schedule
Series
Movies
Originals
Sports
Games
by Emily Soares
