Lex Fridman Podcast - #465 – Robert Rodriguez: Sin City, Desperado, El Mariachi, Alita, and Filmmaking

Episode Date: April 17, 2025

Robert Rodriguez is a legendary filmmaker and creator of Sin City, El Mariachi, Desperado, Spy Kids, Machete, From Dusk Till Dawn, Alita: Battle Angel, The Faculty, and his newest venture Brass Knuckle Films. Thank you for listening ❤ Check out our sponsors: https://lexfridman.com/sponsors/ep465-sc See below for timestamps, transcript, and to give feedback, submit questions, contact Lex, etc. Transcript: https://lexfridman.com/robert-rodriguez-transcript CONTACT LEX: Feedback - give feedback to Lex: https://lexfridman.com/survey AMA - submit questions, videos or call-in: https://lexfridman.com/ama Hiring - join our team: https://lexfridman.com/hiring Other - other ways to get in touch: https://lexfridman.com/contact EPISODE LINKS: Robert's X: https://x.com/rodriguez Robert's Instagram: https://instagram.com/rodriguez/ Brass Knuckle Films: https://brassknucklefilms.com/ Rebel without a Crew (book): https://amzn.to/3G7gtQJ Rebel without a Crew (audiobook): https://amzn.to/3Ri5wyc SPONSORS: To support this podcast, check out our sponsors & get discounts: Invideo AI: AI video generator. Go to https://invideo.io/i/lexpod Brain.fm: Music for focus. Go to https://brain.fm/lex NetSuite: Business management software. Go to http://netsuite.com/lex Shopify: Sell stuff online. Go to https://shopify.com/lex LMNT: Zero-sugar electrolyte drink mix. Go to https://drinkLMNT.com/lex OUTLINE: (00:00) - Introduction (10:04) - Explosions and having only one take (17:39) - Success and failure (26:28) - Filmmaking on a low budget (38:41) - El Mariachi (50:10) - Creativity (1:12:06) - Limitations (1:18:22) - Handling criticism (1:34:32) - Action films (1:45:53) - Quentin Tarantino (1:55:52) - Desperado (1:56:54) - Salma Hayek (2:01:40) - Danny Trejo (2:06:55) - Filming in Austin (2:13:05) - Editing (2:22:35) - Sound design (2:27:43) - Deadlines (2:31:14) - Alita: Battle Angel (2:39:36) - James Cameron (2:52:39) - Sin City (3:06:48) - Manifesting (3:18:12) - Memories and journaling (3:27:56) - Mortality PODCAST LINKS: - Podcast Website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast - Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr - Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 - RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ - Podcast Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4 - Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/lexclips

The following is a conversation with Robert Rodriguez, a legendary filmmaker and creator of Sin City, El Mariachi, Desperado, Spy Kids, Machete, From Dust Till Dawn, Alita, Battle Angel, The Faculty, and many more. Robert inspired a generation of independent filmmakers with his first film, El Mariachi, that he famously made for just $7,000.

On that film, and many since, he was not only the director, he was also the writer, producer, cinematographer, editor, visual effects supervisor, sound designer, composer, basically the full stack of filmmaking. He has shown incredible versatility across genres including action, horror, family films, and sci-fi, with some epic collaborations with Quentin Tarantino, James Cameron, and many other legendary actors and filmmakers. He has often operated at the technological cutting edge, pioneering using HD filmmaking, digital backlots, and 3D tech, and always.

Through all of that, he's been a champion of independent filmmaking, running his own studio here in Austin, Texas, which, in many ways, is very far away from Hollywood. He's building a new thing now called Brass Knuckle Films, where he's opening up the filmmaking process so that fans can be a part of it as he creates his next four action films. I'll probably go hang out at his film studio a bunch as this is all coming to life. His work has inspired a very large number of people, including me, to be more creative in whatever pursuit you take on in life and have fun doing it. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description.

It's the best way to support this podcast. We've got NVIDIA AI for video generation, Brain FM for focus, Netsuite for business, Shopify for e-commerce, and Element for hydration. Choose wisely, my friends. I do try to make these ad reads interesting and personal, often related to stuff I'm reading or thinking about, but if you must skip them, please do check out the sponsors, sign up, buy whatever they're selling.

I enjoy their stuff, maybe you will too. Also, if you want to get in touch with me for whatever reason, go's remember that com slash contact And now on to the full ad reads. Let's go This episode is brought to you by in video AI a video generating app that allows you to create full-length videos Using just text prompts perhaps obviously in video is the perfect sponsor for This conversation with Robert Rodriguez. He has been for decades the guy willing to use cutting-edge technology, digital HD, VR,

3D. Now we're in a time and a space where it is not quite used by the big filmmakers because they're not really sure how to leverage its power. And so I think it's really the role of the independent filmmakers to start playing with video generation. Start playing five seconds, 10 seconds at a time, seeing what you can do in a storytelling art form. I do think it's a skill I've used in video a lot. There's some aspect of it.

You have to kind of nudge the system into that direction. I mean, it really is like having two directors and there's things that humans are really good at and there's things that AI is really good at and the dance between the two is where the art form is. Anyway, you could try NVIDIO AI for free, saving you lots of time and money you'd otherwise spend on the editing, animating

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and deeply focus on a particular thought or line of thought or on nothingness or on your breath. You know, like you do in meditation. You should be able to do that just with the power of your mind. And in some sense, I still believe that, but I think there's just some things that make it easier. I first discovered that, I don't know how long ago now,

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where you want to optimize the kind of audio landscape. Increase your focus and try a brain.fm free for 30 days by going to brain.fm slash lex. That's brain.fm slash lex for 30 days free. This episode is also brought to you by NetSuite, an all-in-one cloud business management system. Boy, are we really getting to understand the inner workings of individual businesses and the interaction between those businesses within the supply chain domestically and internationally

now with the new evolving trade policy. I probably have several conversations with the top leadership on this topic soon. The economy is both an incredibly resilient and a fragile system. Whenever you have these centralized, big, giant hammer type policies, they can have a impact that reverberates

not just through the direct consequences of those policies, but just second, third, fourth order effects. Plus they create the psychological effects within human minds of uncertainty, of fear, and based on that they make decisions which are often suboptimal for the economy. So you get to see the inner workings of businesses and how they function in response to those almost like a immune system within each business to see how can we survive? How can we turn a profit still?

And all of that comes into play, all the HR, all the inventory, all of that. I'm deeply grateful for the wisdom and the power of the market. We should be careful not to mess with it too much. Download the CFO's guide to AI machine learning at netsuite.com slash Lex. That's netsuite.com slash Lex. That's netsuite.com

slash Lex. This episode is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store. Speaking of capitalism, I've also been reading a large amount of literature on China to understand the culture, the peoples, the mechanism used by the government, all that to help me understand and break through some of the propaganda of the Western perspective. Of course, there's truth to it, the skepticism and the caution that the West has. But I think there's a lot of interest at play here and a lot of warmongers that want to wage war instead of make peace.

I do think that the economy and economic relationships and trading and buying and selling, all of that is a fundamentally peaceful action that protects us from escalating military conflict and otherwise. I continue to hope we're past all that military conflict. But anyway, the thing I love about America is the companies, the huge number of entrepreneurs building stuff, creating stuff, dreaming, buying and selling from each other.

I don't know. That just fills me with hope that individuals can dream and have the power to bring that dream to a reality. Anyway, sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash Lex, that's all lowercase. Go to Shopify.com slash Lex to take your business to the next level today. This episode is brought to you by Element, my daily zero sugar delicious electrolyte mix that I'm drinking now as I'm traveling in the middle of nowhere.

Barely know where I am, barely know who I am, barely know what time it is. I've been feeling lost and out of balance for many reasons. Hoping there will be a sign of some sort. Some sort of little miracle that'll help me find my way. This conversation with Robert was an inspiring one. He really did everything he's done against all odds. Fearless and bold. When shit goes wrong he just figures it out. There's something about him just being around him the energy of urgency, of creative excitement to just take on the problems of the day.

You know, it's not like excitement to create, it's excitement to take on the problems that will for sure come when you try to create. The different angle is a more honest one, it's a more inspiring one, more energizing one. Yeah, anyway, what were we talking about? Elment, watermelon salt. Get a sample pack for free with any purchase. Try it at drinkelment.com slash flex. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Robert Rodriguez.

["The Day We Met Again"] Has there been a time when there was like one take and you only have one take to get it right? Oh, all the time where you're just like, or just, you know how long it'll take to reset and you're just, but then you know what you, you, you gotta just work with what you got. You know, you gotta work with your results. You get nervous or no in that moment? Oh yeah.

You're nervous going like, just, I hope it goes off. Because then to fix it, I'll have to go do a bunch of other steps, which we don't have time for. But a lot of times, I've just learned that if something happens, it's just meant to be that way. And I got used to doing things in one take and just living with it, it didn't bother me. One movie, it was even a low budget movie. they had rigged a car to implode because I was going to throw a guy at it. So we needed a car to implode and then we're going to throw them and marry it together. The car guy goes, yeah, we're going to have three cars rigged.

Three cars? Why are you not, well, in case one doesn't work and then we have a second one after, we don't have all night to go shoot take after take. We're doing just one car. And if it doesn't work, we'll figure it out, we don't have all night to go shoot take after take, we're doing just, just get one car. And if it doesn't work, we'll figure it out. You know, cause you don't have time to do it again sometimes.

It's such a long setup. So I go, no, I'm good with just going, what did, in a Grindhouse movie, they only had one take, so that'll make it more authentic. When it all goes to shit, when it fails, you just, what's the next thought? So I'll tell you, two things happened on Just Till Done. First was, okay, you know how those explosions when somebody walks away in

slow motion from an explosion, it's become kind of, you know, that started with Desperado, Desperado is the first. If you look at all the montages, Desperado is the first. That's right. That is the meme. Because it was an accident. It was just supposed to be, it's just two grenades, not a nuclear bomb. It throws them over the side.

I just want to like some body parts or, you know, something to fly up some shrapnel. It literally says shrapnel. My effects guy was so ragged, running so ragged. We get to there and we go, do you have any body parts of stuff we can throw up or something you can shoot up? Pat, I didn't realize it's so high to get past that second floor. He's like, no, I don't. I can give you a fireball. I can give you a nice fireball with propane, but it burns away really quick. Like how fast? Like that, but it'll be big in orange. Okay, we'll shoot it in slow motion so it lasts a little longer because it just goes

poof. So I told the actors, I know how big this fireball is going to be, but just walk really fast and just look real determined and then just keep walking. Don't stop and turn around because you might get your eyebrows singed. So they take off and boom, it goes. And in slow motion, it looks great, right? I remember showing it to Jim Cameron before it came out and his hand went up like, you've never seen that before, you know.

Six months later, Dust Till Dawn came out. So I liked how much it looked so much that in Dust Till Dawn, I did it again. So those movies came out within six months of each other. That's why it turned into a thing because people saw it. And so I thought, how about for the opening of George Clooney and Quentin walking out of the gas station that we have the whole place just blowing up and they just keep talking like it's not happening. You know, like take it another step further so I'm not just doing the same thing.

Okay, that one is like, okay, you're going to walk out and it's all in one take. So we're only going to do one take. We're going to blow the thing up. We're going to start with just some smaller explosions. Then when they're further away and it's safer, then we'll do the big fireballs. So we're going and you're nervous because if one of them trips up a line and the pressure's on them, it's not just you that's nervous. You're nervous for them. They're the ones who got to walk out, do that whole speech, get in the car and drive away. What if the car doesn't start? What do you know?

There's a lot of things that could happen. Well, guess what happens? The thing you would not expect. They go in, they come out, they start talking, shoot it. It's perfect. Great. We can move on. And the camera guy comes, I don't know what happened, but just like you had a little snafu here,

he goes, we have an auto-focus on the Steadicam, I mean, we have a focus thing. It just went like this. I felt it go whack all the way out of focus and whack for a second back. Like it just reset itself. I don't know why it did that, because it's radio controlled.

And we can't tell because we're shooting film. So we're like, oh shit, we's watch the dailies, sure enough. Let's see if we can get, maybe I can scratch the film right there. No, it goes completely out of focus and back in focus within a second. Now we got to reshoot it. We had to wait till we're back in that location. We rigged it for two more takes just in case. That thing that was supposed to be the one take is three takes.

The other thing that happened was the front of the Dust Till Dawn bar. That same guy that did those explosions, he packed a bunch of explosives behind the actors. When the actors come running out of the bar at the end of the movie and there's an explosion through the door because all the vampires are blowing up. He put like 10 times. It blew out. You see it in the movie. You see this huge fireball going up. And if you watch closely, you see it already start to catch the whole place on fire. The whole front of that, which is foam, is catching on fire. And I cut just before you see that it's on fire. And that was the first shot at that bar, because we weren't going to start shooting the other stuff till night.

So the first shot is that and the set's ruined, burned to a crisp. The neon lights blew up, so we couldn't even shoot. Cheech goes, well, I guess I'm not doing my speech tonight. But right away, this is what happens. My first AD, Doug Arnikowski comes over to me and I go over to him. Guys came out with the fire hoses, the fire hoses weren't even adding any water. The thing was just scorching. The whole production design team was in

tears because they had just spent weeks building this thing and it was up in smoke and charred. I said, let's just keep shooting. Let's just keep shooting because it looks really kind of cool like this. Yeah, they're going to have to come repair it and we'll have to come back. But it's all black and charred. That's why that whole scene with George Clooney and Cheech and the building's black. We didn't go over there and touch that up. That's real flame that burned.

And it ended up looking great. So then the next week when we came back to shoot that other shot that didn't work, we came back and they repaired it and we shot all the night stuff, which is the majority of the stuff in front of it. So sometimes you got to roll with it and then look at the blessing you get because of this mistake. You probably actually got a better take by doing it later with them. And then you had this incredible look for the end of the movie that looked apocalyptic. If it had looked just clean, you would have actually seen that it was kind of a foam set. This made it look better.

So I kind of let the universe push you where you're supposed to go. You got to roll with it because you don't know what the grand plan is. You have your plan. Just know it's probably all gonna fall apart. It's just like the movies. You come up with your plan of what you wanna accomplish.

That's like your script. Then you go scout your location and figure out what your project's gonna be. And you go try to make it as bulletproof as possible. Then you go to do your project. And just like with our movies, you watch it all fall apart. You watch this thing blow up. You watch this thing not work.

Everything just falls apart in front of your face. Then that's when you roll up your sleeves and creatively figure out a way around it. You turn chicken shit into chicken salad. And by the end, you have a result that's better than what you sought out. But that's the process and that's life. And that's wash, rinse, repeat. The rest of your life, that's what everything's going to be like.

It's just like a movie. Because when you think about it, you're writing a story for a film. And you're also writing the story of your life at the same time. Like, how are you going to react to things? Well, how do you make your character react to things? You make him kind of superhuman. Why don't you just make yourself that way? You're writing your own story and you start really seeing the more you get into

storytelling that life imitates art and art limitates life, but the process is also the same. So you write the story, the script, and then you have it collide with the chaos of reality. And in that moment, when he said, you see the chicken shit, like you have to be able to keep your eyes open. You have to notice. You have to do that.

Wait a minute. Okay. Stuff change. Where's the, not to be cliche about it, but where's the silver lining of this? Where's the path to actually make something good out of this? And that's a skill, right? I call it, and it's one of my favorite stories, I was doing one of these talks,

and they said, come talk about creativity. I go, I understand, because a lot of people read my book, Rebels Had a Crew, and told me, oh, it made me be a filmmaker. But a lot of people said, it helped me start my own business, because they just see how you can go be entrepreneurial

like that and go where no one else is going. And I'm giving all this talk about this kind of positive stuff, and this one woman goes, you're real positive. But what do I tell myself when I just wasted a year and a half of my life doing something that didn't work? That's a real negative way to ask that. Can you just rephrase the question a little more positively before I even attempt to answer it? Because already her point of view is exactly what you're saying. She's not looking at all. She's just concentrating on what didn't follow her plan and not seeing the gift of

everything else that's there. So she goes, very reluctant. It's so perfect. I wish we had filmed it. She goes, I learned a good lesson the hard way. And I said, that still sucks. And I say, when you follow your instinct, like if you follow your own instinct to go start a business or go make this movie or whatever, it wasn't someone saying, go over there and you'll make a million dollars. You know, it was your instinct and you fail. Sometimes the only way across the river is to slip on the first two rocks. You fail. You have to really sift through. It's like the silver lining, but I call it sift through the ashes of your failure. And you'll find the key to your next success is in there. But if you're not looking for it, you don't find it. I'm going

to tell you one. And I tell them the four room story. I said, I made a movie called Four Rooms. I didn't make any money, right? When Quentin asked me, hey, would you wanna make a movie with me and two other filmmakers? It's an anthology, it's on New Year's Eve, it's in a hotel, you have to use the Bill Hopp.

We're not gonna know what each other's making. And we make it, we put it together. My hand went up right away just instinctually. Shane, that sounds, yeah, I'll do that. I'll go make that with you. Now, should I ask the audience? I like to throw it to the audience and her. Should I have not raised my hand that quick? Shouldn't I have done a little studying first or should I just go blind instinct or should you do instinct with some studying? Okay. Well, I could have gone and studied and I would have found that anthologies never

work. Like even when it's Coppola, Scorsese, Woody Allen, they bomb because people can't quite rip the hand. What is this? Twilight Zone? I don't want to go see that. But that's not, I still said yeah. I think I should just still go by instinct.

So my instinct was to raise my hand. We go make that movie because Because I love short films. I mean, like, bedhead and short films. And I thought, oh, here's a way. If this works, I can make short films in anthologies, and I can have the best of both worlds. And by the way, anthologies is when there's multiple. More than a multiple one story.

In one movie. Yeah, one movie. So if you did the research, you would know that very few people ever got that to work. Those always bomb. Yeah, the audience can't quite wrap their end, and it feels like the movie's starting three times, you know.

So I make that movie. It bombs. Now I could feel real bad about that, but if you really think about it, you go, well, why did I sign up for it? Did I raise my hand because I thought it was going to go be this big financial success? No, I did it to work with my friends, to do something creative, to try something. But that's still not good enough. I need to really sift through the ashes. And if I look through the ashes of that failure, I find two keys to my biggest successes in there.

While I was on the set, they said it has to be New Year's. So I thought, I'm just going to do like bedhead. I'm going to have two little kids that are running around in this room. And we have to use the bellhop as a babysitter. Well, it's New Year's, let's dress everybody in tuxedos because it's New Year's, they're all gonna go out, but the parents leave without them. When I saw Antonio and his wife, I thought, wow, they look like a really cool international spy couple. What if they were spies?

And these two little kids, one of them keeps falling asleep on the set, he's so young, they can barely tie their shoes. They don't know parents are spies, they have to go save them. Okay, there's five of those movies now, right? The other one was I really love making short films. I really want this anthology thing to work. What if it's three stories, like a three-act structure, not four? Same director, not four different directors. I'm going to try it again. Why on earth would I try it again? Well, because I had already done one and figured out how I could do it better

in that sin city. Those are by far two of my biggest successes that came directly from that failure. So I always say, follow your instinct. If it doesn't work, just go. Sometimes the only way across the river is to slip on the first two rocks. So where's the key in the ashes of the failure?

Because if I had an instinct, that means I was on the right track. I didn't get the result I want. That's because the result the ashes of the failure. Because if I had an instinct, that means I was on the right track. I didn't get the result I want. That's because the result might be something way bigger that I don't have the vision for and the universe is pushing me that way. By the way, a lot of people that look back to Four Rooms see a lot of creative genius in there. So you say it flopped.

It flopped financially. Financial. Yeah, yeah. But there's so many ways to measure success. Totally. But like I said, like I would say, well, it was successful because even Roger Reubens said, hey, you furnished my favorite room. I was like, hey, I could take that.

But now I think there's something else still there. I keep sifting and it's like, oh yeah, two big successes came from that. It's an amazing lesson to have because it makes you feel better about failure. Think of like The Thing by John Carpenter. He put that movie out the same weekend as ET. I think bombed. Critics were calling it pornography because of all the weird special effects, and audiences didn't go either.

He thought he made a great movie. It makes you question your instincts. Well, 10 years later, turns out, oh, it's a classic. So sometimes it takes the audience a while. So if you have some kind of failure on something, don't let it knock you down. Just go, maybe in 10 years they'll think it's great.

I'm just gonna commit to making a body of work, a body of work. Some will succeed, some will overperform, some will underperform. It's not your job. You just wanna be a creative person. Just create, I tell you, just create, stop thinking about movie per movie Overperform, some will underperform. It's not your job. You just wanna be a creative person. Just create, I tell you, just create.

Stop thinking about movie per movie and worrying so much about each one, or project to project if you're a business person. Just commit to making a body of work like an artist would do. And you don't know what the masterpieces are gonna be, or which, you know, someone's gonna come and say, oh, that one that bombed,

there is some really creative stuff in there. and it's not for you to decide. You just go into it. And sometimes I think it takes some time to process the failure, to make sense of it. Like, uh, at least for me, don't rush making sense of what didn't work. What lessons do I take from it? How do I sit through the ashes? As you said, It takes time. You have to sleep on it a bunch of nights.

Sometimes it's right there, and then sometimes you come back, revisit it later. Because you may not have had some information you have now that makes you look at it a lot differently. Like when I did, I just did the audio book for Rebel Without a Crew. Yeah, thank you for that, by the way. I hadn't read it since I wrote it. Yeah. So I didn't remember a lot of the details. And you actually, it's voiced by you.

I voiced it. So I was reading it real time. Yeah, I highly recommend people because you comment, you add additional comments to it. It's great. Most of the time I'm laughing. I can't believe how crazy that story is. I forgot a lot of details. And when you're younger, you know, when you're 21, 22, six months feels like six years.

I didn't realize how short that window was until I reread it and how impossible most of that is. But you see some places where a setup falls in my lap and then pays off immediately in a big way, like magic over and over again. It's clear I don't know what I'm doing. It's clear the universe is just pushing you places. So you can't fight it because I remember

I was really disappointed. And it says in the diary, I'm really bummed that I go home that Christmas not having sold it to the Spanish home video market, which was really disappointed. And it says in the diary, I'm really bummed that I go home that Christmas, not having sold it to the Spanish home video market, which was my goal. I walked home penniless and I was like, Merry Christmas, I feel like a freaking failure. Good thing I didn't sell it then.

With time, you look back and you go, wow, I got an agent the next month, he wasn't even gonna help me sell it. He said, oh, if you can get 20,000 for it, take it. I chased those people down for those contracts, Spanish market for months and they never answered me back. And then Columbia ended up buying it for like 10 times as much. And we released it and did a sequel and did another sequel. If you look back in time, good thing I didn't get My Way. My Way had this for revision and it needed to do that, which you would never know. You don't know that going

through. So just, if you don't have the answer right away or even in 10 years, go, maybe it's coming in 20 years. Don't let anything slow you down. Just keep plowing forward, committing to making your thing happen. Don't get shook up by something that you might not have an answer for. Yeah, every aspect of your journey is super inspiring. We'll talk about it. Let's go to the beginning. Sure, sure.

Because there's a few technical things that are fascinating about your beginning. So you started making films when you were very young with an old Super 8 camera and you were editing on a VCR. You see, I've met a lot of filmmakers who they start a certain way, but then they finish another way. They get to be big filmmakers and all that.

I still do it that way. Like I still, I like doing things that way. I have a new company called Brass Knuckle Films where the audience can actually participate by investing in this movie, being investors in these movies that are done the same way. They're action films like we did with Mariachi, but 10 to 30 million.

It doesn't take a lot of money to start a billion dollar franchise. John Wick only cost 20 million, the first one. Second one was 40, third one was 80, fourth one was 100 because the audience kept growing and growing. By the way, you say 20 million, like it's not a lot of money. We should mention- It's not for an action film.

Yeah. That's right. But also we should say that El Mariachi, the film on which to book rebel without a crew is $7,000 movie. So let's put it all in context. But you know, you're going to, you're going to hire bigger actors. You can get a big actor like a piano Reeves for a $20 million movie. You know, I asked Jim, I said, Jim Cameron, I said, you know, like Terminator costs 5 million and he goes, I wish we had that much.

He had less than 5 million for that. So you can start a billion dollar franchise using these methods. And with the audience investing, they get to make money on them. And that's what I'm going to say now about how I started. You see that DNA of how I give out, you know, I want people to know how I did things with Rebel Without a Crew or with these methods that I started with. You see, that's how we kept going. Hollywood spends way too much. And when you can make stuff for less, your profit margin is much better. So when I first started, I didn't have any money. So I still play like I don't have money.

So I had Super 8. My dad had a Super 8 camera, but I couldn't afford it. I shot two rolls that you had to buy the film, shoot two minutes. I shot two rolls of that. It's another same amount of money that it cost to buy it, whatever that was, 12 bucks or whatever, to develop it. You get it. There's no sound. Most of the shit's out of focus. But then my dad, who sold cookware, had a VCR, one of the first home VCRs for the market, that he would play his

sales tapes to his salesman. And it came with a camera attached, like this cable you got coming out. Imagine if that had to go into your VCR for you to even see what it's shooting. And this is old camera, manual focus, manual iris, and 12 foot cable. And I would start making movies with that instead. Now I have for $8, I have a two hour erasable tape of sound and picture. So I got into digital basically really early. I was doing, which was really frowned upon back then and continued to be all the way to when I was using it for real in the early 2000s before everyone realized, oh, that's the future.

Yeah, that's fascinating because you were rebel in that way too using data Well, cuz of the means and the democratizing of that The elite didn't like that. You could just go make a movie like that But I started practicing and it's much easier to practice when it doesn't cost any money Like if you want to be a rock star, right if you want to learn how to play guitar really well You're not gonna just jump on stage and suddenly be able to play, you have to practice to your fingers bleed. Well, the same with movies, you gotta keep telling stories and cutting them together. And you just can't afford that on film.

Nobody can with two minute roll, costing as much as a two hour tape. So I was moving all of these, doing all these movies. First, I would cut in camera. And that VCR, that old VCR had a really great pause button that they stopped making. That when you hit pause, it stopped right there. And it stopped with a clean cut. It didn't have all this color bars like the later ones had.

So I, that was my, and it had an audio dub feature where you could add another second soundtrack to it. So if I have people talking, I could hit audio dub and add sound effects. So I could have two tracks on the same one. So I, that was my filmmaking kit for a while until I needed to start doing real editing. And my dad bought a second VCR for his business because I stole his other one. And I found that if I hooked them together, I could play on one and use that pause button on the second. And this was the limitation. This is what taught me how to edit in my head is that if I shot a bunch of footage, I needed to shoot very little footage so I could find it.

Sometimes you shoot out of order. So when I cut it, I have to cut in linear order because if you push pause, it's a nice clean cut, but it only holds for five minutes. You have five minutes before the machine shuts off. So you gotta find your next shot within five minutes and do that. Otherwise, if you have to start the machine over it, we're at all these

color bars and it would be all screwed up. So I'd have to sit there and not move for like all day while I cut knowing what the next shot was. And once I had it cut, I would then add some sound effects to it. Remember because I have the audio dub function, but now if I want to add music, I take that tape, which has two tracks now, into the first deck and put it into the VCR again, one generation of loss. But I have a little cassette tape player with the music and I do a Y splitter so I can add the music. Nice.

And then, yeah, right? Just like that. That's like being resourceful with what you have. And I made a warrant winning short films that way on video. There were some festivals that would allow video, not many, but they would always win. And they were always funny as I stumbled upon Spike Kids that way. Like I wanted to make these action movies in my backyard. But when you're a teenager, you don't know anybody who can come be your action star. And if you just bring your high school buddies, well, they just look like high school kids. So I use my little brothers and sisters, because I'm one of 10, they're oldest.

They're just sitting around watching cartoons anyway. And I made them the action stars just to like learn. And I found those things would be a winning formula. They'd win every festival I'd sent them to. So Bedhead was my first time using a film camera. It was a windup film camera I got in film school. I went to film school for one semester and realized I already knew more than the film students because they taught you a whole other outdated way of doing it.

So, I thought, I'm just going to use that film camera to make a low-budget movie, a definitive film version that I can send to all film festivals of these action kids, which is a precursor to Spy Kids. Bed which is a precursor to Spy Kids. Ben did the precursor to Spy Kids. We should say that Benhead was an award winning short film that was probably a big sort of leap for you that probably opened the door to you to then make Elmer Yatch. It opened up your brain especially because those video festivals, I would win like a trip to New York and a director's chair with a video of shorts that I would put in festivals. But I knew the film festival, if I could get into film festivals,

I could send that all over the world. So I made that little short film, sent it and was winning all the festivals. And I thought, wow, I made that with a windup camera, film camera, filming just one take each shot, just no slates because because I'm the editor, and that cost 800 bucks. And it was eight minutes. I bet I can make an 80 minute movie for $8,000 if I'd use the same method. So that movie I did six months later, I was making Mariachi because it opened up my mind that I could try it in a feature. Can we actually pause on that? Because I think a bad head has a really great, really unique story shot in a really unique way. I think what I'm trying to say is like, it's very important to write, write the

right script, write the right story. So let me tell you the trick to that. Yeah. And Mariachi is the same way. And this really helped people. Like even Kevin Smith from Clerks said, wow, Robert said, when mariachi was a success, I talked about how I did it.

I said, I looked at everything I had. What do I have? We have a pit bull, we have a turtle, we've got a bus that Carlos' cousin owns. His cousin, his brother-in-law has a bar and he owns a ranch. So the bad guy lives at the ranch, the fight scene is going to be in the bar,

he's going to hit a bus at one point, the girl is going to have a dog, and a turtle is going to cross the road. It gives you all this production value, so you write backwards. For Bedhead, Avin did that with a camera. I've been shooting video all this time, and one thing I wished I could do on video and

never could was slow motion or stop motion even. When I got that crappy World War II camera they gave us in film school, I mean, I was so pissed. Like this is the camera I've been trying to get my hands on. I could have bought this for 50 bucks at a bond shop. Old Bill and Hal wind up, you couldn't even see through the lens. You were seeing through an approximation of the lens, but you could shoot slow motion. I could do reverse photography if I filmed upside down. I could do, because if I do a fast push into her, I'll never get the focus in right.

So I started with it in focus, went back, pulled backwards on a chair, and then reversed it, flipped it, and that looks like it stops on a diamond focus. The number of times I've seen you shoot backwards is incredible. Like to achieve a certain feeling, a certain experience, a certain effect, sometimes shooting in reverse

plus the sound effect layer, you can create this reality that's surreal that then results in the story that you wanted. You have to be functioning in some kind of different space-time continuum. You have to morph time. Start putting it together, right? So I've got this different camera.

Well, now I go like, I don't wanna shoot the same kind of movie if I got a camera now that can do that. I can do stop motion. So that's why there's an animated title sequence at the beginning. I go, wow, I'm a cartoonist. If I set the camera up here, I can slow it down enough.

It's not a frame by frame, but if I get it down like two frames a second, I can just tap it and it'll maybe get one frame off. So I did 300 drawings by hand for that opening title sequence. Holy shit, that was you doing it by hand. Yeah, so you watch that. And this is a throwaway title sequence,

but I really want this thing to win awards. Okay, hold on a second. How long did that take to draw? That's a lot, that's a lot of work. I drew it over, well, I was a daily cartoonist by then, so I was pretty fast, but still, that's why it's only penciled, it's not inked, but it looks great.

I mean, it's the cameras going around and all kinds of crazy stuff, but it's just all fake by paper. It took me all night to shoot it. I remember I walked into the film school the next day, you know, like all sleepy, and I told one of the fellow students, you know, wow, I was up all night doing this animated title sequence, and he went, why are you putting so much work in this?

They're not going to grade you any differently. And I was like, grades? Get an A walking in here. I'm trying to get out of this town. I'm not doing this for fucking grades. I want people to see what I can do now, and I want to see what I can do now with this. A lot of the story came from the limitations, or actually the freedoms of that camera.

I couldn't have done that story on video. When I saw, wow, okay, I can do reverse photography, I can do stop motion, she has to have special powers. Because if she has special powers okay, I can do reverse photography. I can do stop motion. She has to have special powers. Because if she has special powers, then I can utilize, I can really milk this camera for all it can get.

There's one of my shots I love the most is where she's standing there in the chair. She makes a chair come all the way up to her and it goes all the way up to her face. Now, if I did it normally, where would I even put the strings for that? Right, to pull it to her, yeah. So I start here with the camera upside down.

I have the strings in the back because you're not going to be looking at the back. And as it goes back, you pull it back. And then when you reverse it, it goes, and it looks so good. You can't spot the strings. If you look close, you see the strings are in the back, but your eyes are not looking at the back.

So I did stuff like that. And then just her like getting the hose. And then I just do stop motion for the hose turning on, you know, the faucet. That's why I gave her special powers. And it made the story better. So sometimes the limitations you have with equipment or location, you can use it to make, you know, take chicken shit, turn it into chicken salad. Take this camera that everyone was like, what's this? And I go, I can do so much with this. But I tell you know, take chicken shit, turn it into chicken salad. Take this camera that everyone was like, what's this? And I go, I can do so much with this. But I tell you today, I look at that camera, I can't believe I ever made a movie with that thing.

It's so ridiculously primitive. I was like, how did I even think I could get anything done with this and it even exposed? And Mariachi the same way, you have to think about it. I shot Mariachi on film with a bar of 16 millimeter camera. I didn't know how to use it. I called up a place in Dallas that rented that kind of equipment.

And I said, I have an Arri 16S here, two motor looking things. One has a 24 and one has a bunch of numbers. Oh, that's a variable speed motor. That means you can do different speed. I can shoot slow motion with this. Go, yeah, oh wow. Do you have a torque motor?

I don't know, what is that? Is there something on the side of the magazine? Like it does, yeah. Now you can just look up on YouTube and it shows you how to use it. I was doing it by phone that way. And then I went and shot the movie right then. And I didn't know if any of it was exposing

or if the film camera was working until I finished the whole movie. So imagine you have to go down to Mexico, shoot for two weeks, come back, send it off to a lab. You want to talk about being nervous. Yeah. Just hoping something exposed. And when I saw it, come back and the tape, you know, they transferred it to a tape so I could edit it. Deck to deck again. I was so relieved. Some things didn't come out, but I can cut around that. Just like, oh yeah, cause I'm doing everything like right here.

You're doing everything. Imagine if you forgot to stop down and it's open all the way and one shot is blown out. You know, I'd have stuff like that because I'm moving fast and I'm doing it. Oh, wait a minute. You shot. Oh my gosh. You the whole thing without knowing if some of the footage is damaged wrong. Without any of it.

That's why I only did one take. So my idea was this. How gangster is that? Wow. It was a test film. Right. Right. I thought it was, I thought it was going to be a test film.

Yeah. It's the only movie in history ever made where the filmmaker did not think anyone would see it and expect it and even set it up that way. I mean, why would I make an action movie for the Spanish market called basically The Guitar Player? Promises no action. No one's going to watch it. But I thought if someone actually picks it up and has the balls to watch this thing, they're going to be surprised I put a lot of action in it. It was just to learn from. I just needed to make it from as little as possible, see how much I could sell it for. If I could double my money, great, I can make another

one and just get more practice. It was just, was just so intrigued by this idea because you've heard advice about screenwriting. I heard a advice back then that I thought was ridiculous. It said, it's going to take you a long time to be a good screenwriter. So write three scripts and throw them away. The fourth script will be the good one. I was like, it's so hard to write a script. Who's going to write three full scripts knowing they throw them away? Wouldn't it be better if you write three scripts and then shoot each one and be the cameraman, be the sound guy, be everything?

Cause that way you're learning not just writing, you're learning how to make a movie. So that was my idea. I'm gonna make three of these, hide it on Spanish video, but make money back. That's like my own film school paying me, paying me to learn. So the first one I thought, let me just shoot it

one take each because my friend Carlos lives in Mexico. If we shoot two takes, most of the cost is to film. I've just doubled my budget. So let me just shoot one take. Some of it's gonna not come out, but I'm not gonna know what, I'm not gonna shoot a safety one that doubles my, let me see, some things might come out.

I expected like 70% of it to maybe be okay, but 30% of it might have to come reshoot, which is fine. I just drive back there and then I just reshoot just those shots, right? So I just went, let's shoot. We stop, we come back, then I send it off to develop because we're shooting two weeks consecutively to get film shipped back and forth from Mexico

to see if it came out. You just couldn't do it. I just had to double down on it, do it. One take every day. Every one time I was still an actor, man, I told you to run through that shot and you go, oh, let me do it again. No, one take, dude.

Just think about next time. Do what I say. I didn't think anyone was gonna see it. So you, and because you don't think anyone's gonna see it, you end up doing something remarkable, which is, well, I'm just going to make something for myself. Because if I was making a movie that was going to go to Sundance, I wouldn't have made that movie.

I would have thought, okay, I got to get serious. But because I made this movie that was just entertaining myself like Bedhead, it entertained audiences. That naivety is really important when you're starting out or at any point in your life. Be naive about what things gonna, and just do something for yourself. That taught me a very valuable lesson because I didn't want anybody to see it.

I just thought one take, one take. When I got back home, a bunch of stuff didn't come out, but I'm like, I'm not going back to Mexico. I'll figure out a way to edit around it and make the movie shorter. And that's just gonna be the movie. And then that's the one that went one Sundance. That was your first feature film. That's the one you made for $7,000. I'll just mention your friend Carlos as the star of the movie. Everything one take and.

You know, I highly recommend people go back and watch that movie. It's just an incredible movie. It's fun. And it's an action film moves really fast. The story is really interesting. So the script is really interesting. All the actors you could tell. I mean, it's a great movie. It's a great movie. It's a and it's an action film, moves really fast. The story is really interesting,

so the script is really interesting. All the actors, you could tell, they all kind of stepped up and played their own roles. They weren't actors. That's right. They were just friends of ours. Which is why, and because, and this was the magic of not having a crew,

they didn't feel like they were making a movie. It's like this, you know, we're just here. Yeah. Me with my one camera. In fact, the gal, Carlos said, I had this one girl, I forgot she's in town. Maybe she would work. Cause we tried to get a soap star and she backed out. So we got this gal over and she goes, I don't know how to act. And I said, here, let's watch. I want to show you some on Mexican TV. A telenovela was on and you see someone, you know, all over overact. I said, that's acting. I don't want you some, on Mexican TV, a telenovela was on and you see someone, ay, you know, all over Agnes.

I said, that's acting. I don't want you to do that. I want you to just talk like you're talking about. Oh, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, that, the love interest, the woman in that, that's what you're talking about? That's what you're talking about? She's amazing. She's amazing.

But, because I got a video of her, I said, I want you to just do this one line. Pretend like you're just talking to your boyfriend. And I showed her, I showed her the video. That was cool, because I couldn't show her the film because we'd have to develop it. But I showed her a video test of herself doing it. And she saw herself doing it.

She suddenly had the confidence. We went through her closet. This red dress you can wear in that. And everyone just brought their own clothes. She really had like a sexuality, a tension, like a romantic tension that was real. It was an issue. It was in part a great love story that,

I mean, as ridiculous as it is to say. Yeah. And like a dramatic love story. Yeah, the idea was that, you know, I thought a guitar player, you know, really, what I wanted to do was like Road Warrior. I said, I want a guy with a guitar case full of weapons going from town to town like Road Warrior.

But I don't have enough money for the first one to do that. That'll be the second movie I do. How will we do a Genesis story? How he became that guy? Let's do Mad Max basically, how he becomes that guy. Maybe he is a guitar player. You start writing it out. I'm going to show you my writing method.

I write on index cards and I carry one of these, a little packet of index cards. I keep one always in my bag and I smile when I run across it because I go, I've made a million dollars with one of these before. It's like this is the key to your next success, cards. Because when you go see a therapist, you're not going to them for the answers, you're going to them for the questions. You've got the answers inside, but you don't have other questions. A lot of times we ask ourselves very unempowering questions like, why am I such a loser? I can think of 10 answers right now. But if you go, what three things can I do today that'll not

just change my life, but everyone around me? Take steps to that. Take out your cards and start writing them down. You won't come up with three. You'll come up with 15. I'm like, wow, because you're asking yourself and you'll see him. So when I was doing that movie, I thought, okay, he's a guitar player for real. And he gets mixed up with the guy with a case. So how about he walks into a bar. So right down there, he walks into a bar, bar trying to get work. Bartender looks at him. We don't hire him, I just get the hell out of here.

So he leaves. After that whole scene explaining who he is and what his story is, then the shooter comes in with a guitar case full of weapons. He's also dressed in black and he shoots the place up. Now, that was a short film. That's how you start a short film, but this is a feature movie.

So shit, I gotta figure out how to tell a feature. I'm gonna need a few more cards before that. So I'm gonna need Well, who's this bad guy? How about he's in jail? I'd read a story it's a crazy story about a guy who was in jail, Mexico And he was running his drug business from the jail as protection He can walk out any time but he it was to keep have the cops be as enforcers basically so introduce that guy he's in jail making phone calls and someone puts a hit on him. So we have action right away. There's a hit on him. He kills

those guys because it's his operation. He's not in jail. All the cops are working for him. And he tells that guy on the phone, the main bad guy, I'm going to come to town. I'm going to kill all your guys and I'm going to come kill you. So then he gets in his truck and you see them bring him a guitar case full of weapons. He passes the mariachi on the way to town and now it's his story, the baton gets turned to mariachi. Mariachi is doing a voiceover, easy to shoot, we can do the voice later, we don't have to do sync sound. There was even a scene when he walks into town where we saw these coconuts, a guy cutting coconuts.

And we go, oh, let's go film over there. So we film the guy giving him a coconut with a straw in it. And he walks out and I'm like, shit man, you forgot to pay the guy. Well, let's shoot that, no, it was one take. I'll just put in the voiceover that they give away free coconuts in this town. And for years, people in other countries would go,

they really give away free coconuts? No, it's just because we forgot to show them pain, you know, little happy accidents. So now look, you're already building a movie. So it's like, now he goes in the bar, now he's mixed up and the bad guy says, find the guy with a guitar case full of weapons. Then he goes and meets the girl.

So you just start, your movie, visually, you can start seeing your movie. And I've used this for business things. I've used this for ideas, for manifesting stuff. It's brilliant. Are you doing this alone usually? Or are you brainstorming? Yeah, it's coming and it comes so fast.

It's like free association. Maybe I have the ending. Oh, I know I want his hand shot. He's gonna get his hand shot because he's a musician and those ballads are always really tragic. So the girl has to die. The girl has to die. Cause if it's, if it's going to be a tragic song for his songbook, each

movie should be like a tragedy. That's going to be over here. You know, you know, you got the ending and then your brain starts filling in the rest because you're asking yourself these prompt questions that you already have answers for from a past life, from a vision you had that you don't even know are there. This prompts it. It's kind of a puzzle that you're figuring out.

What happens if you get stuck? Like this doesn't make sense. Like some aspect of the structure doesn't make sense. You throw out cards. You leave it all there. You won't, yeah, you just start, you just start writing in the ones you do know. Yeah.

Like, okay, I know, I know at some point she's gonna betray him or he's some point she's going to betray him or he's going to think she does. She betrays him. Okay, that's in the middle somewhere. The other ones will come. Yeah, those are all like crossroads for the story. Doesn't that, like, how do you know she has to die?

Can you change your mind about that? I can, yeah. But for now I felt like if I really went, the story's telling me now what it is. I didn't know I was going to make a Genesis story. I wanted to do the road warrior guy, but the road warrior, he lost his family. So really to propel him to become a guy who has a guitar case full of weapons, he has to lose everything.

So that he needs a ghost. So this is a Genesis story of a character. Well, look, Bruce Wayne lost his parents. You can say, well, does the parents have to die? Well, no, but it's not going to propel him. It's not going to drive him like that thing. So it's just coming to me. So this is my other trick. And this is the main thing you got to learn about. If you take any way, this isn't me doing it. I totally believe it. Because when you start doing this, you go, where are these answers coming from? I'm asking the

right question, but how, how come the answers just keep coming like this? I believe because I do so many different jobs. I've learned this over the years at Merrick when it was in 2002. I was like, how is it that I'm the production designer, the composer, which I don't even know how to read or write music and I'm writing orchestral score and I'm doing the editing and I'm doing the cinematography. I haven't been trained for any of these. I never went to school for these specifically. Must be something about creativity.

So I went on Amazon, it's 2002, I look up creative books. Anything that has creativity in the title, I just ordered it. And I've got a bunch of books on creativity. And I was reading them through, one of them was like really speaking to me. Yeah, that's it. That's the process. And then it says gels and mediums. And I'm like, oh, this is a book specifically about painting, but it applies to music, editing, cinematography, writing. It's all the same. So that's when I realized that creativity is 90% of any of those jobs. The technical part of setting up the cameras, of writing a script in format, or reading or writing music, that's 10% of that. How many musicians don't read or write music and they're fantastic? It's because 90% what they do is creative. Now, I believe that that same person, even if they only do music,

could literally jump from job to job creatively and do a superior job than most technicians. There's also something to say there about learning the technical aspects of an art. You collide with the experts. What happens is, I've experienced this a lot with using cameras and so on, I don't know shit about cameras,

and you roll in and there's all the experts almost talking down to you and telling you how things are supposed to be, everything is wrong. I talked to somebody about soundproofing a room and they said, they gave me prices, they're insane, and the amount of effort is insane and this the Geometry something the dynamics of this room are all wrong

I'm like, why can't I just fucking hang up some curtains like what it seems like that kills most of the echo Like I don't I don't understand and they're like no, this is all wrong. There's corn The corners are gonna have some and I'm like fuck it. I'm just gonna try and I see what it sounds like a and B Okay, here's audio with curtains. Here's audio without curtains seems like this is fine corners are going to have some, and I'm like, fuck it. I'm just going to try and I see what it sounds like A and B. Okay. Here's audio with curtains. Here's audio without curtains. Seems like this is fine. It's a move on to the next thing.

I think that when you say creativity, some of that is being a rebel, like not listening to the experts. Yeah. Well, you're going on your creativity, which is what is that? That's like an imp. Do you consider yourself creative person? I think you play guitar, guitar, piano. Yeah. Everything. Play piano. Okay. Do you like an imp. Do you consider yourself creative person? I think you play guitar. Yeah guitar piano Yeah, everything piano. Okay, but you could be would you call yourself a creative person?

Yeah, I think so good I think that's a positive I would just anybody is just own it own it and just say I like when I do so many different jobs It sounds crazy when they would introduce me Robert. He does this blah blah blah blah blah blah And I was like I get tired just hearing that list. But when I think about it, there's really only one thing I do, and I live a creative life. When you live a creative life, that means anything that has to do with creativity,

whether it's filming, or piano, or guitar, or sculpting, you can do it. You can take it on and do it because it teaches you more about your main job. I become a better director by doing all those jobs. Because when somebody just does one job, they barely know that job. You have to do more to learn about creativity. And this is the main thing I learned was that I'm writing music, you know, for an orchestra. I'm like, how did I, I don't even know what I'm doing. Why is that coming up? I don't feel like I'm doing it. I feel like I picked up the pen. I feel like I had the idea to do the cards. But then when everything just starts coming out so quickly,

that's how fast I wrote that movie. I really feel like something else has taken over. This is what my belief is. I hear it in different realms. You ask Keith Richards, how do you come up with these riffs? He goes, I don't. They're floating around the sky and I pull them out first. Asked, Jimmy Vaughn, how do you play guitar? The soloist goes, it's like a radio.

Once you get a tune just right, you can't even believe what's coming through. So I believe, I call it the creative spirit. There's a spirit assigned to all of us that's creative that doesn't have hands. It needs you to pick up the pen, pull out the cards. And then when you start getting in the flow and you're like, whoa, it's writing, that's

that. And if you can have that mindset, you take your ego out of it and go, all I need to do is be a good conduit for this thing. Be a good pipe and it's going to come through. So you don't ever have to get hung up on that question you had. Well, what happens when you can't come up? It wasn't me to begin with. If it's not coming out, it's because I'm blocking it. And if I were to do this and I'm flowing, and if I were to say, wow, I just wrote 10 cards, I don't

know if I can write more. How did I do that? You just shut the pipe because your ego got in the way. You just clogged it because it gets pissed off that you think it's you. It's not you. It's like, dude, just open up, let me through, pick up the fucking pen. And I learned this when I was 19, when I had a daily cartoon strip. I had to draw a comic strip every day to get paid. And I would be like, I'd have to draw like one drawing, draw another drawing, then it's like,

okay, these kind of go together. It was a process, you know? And sometimes I just felt like I wish I could just envision it, sit back. I'm gonna try that method. I went home and I would sit back and just try. Sit back. I'm going to try that method. I went home and I would sit back and just try to get in my sofa, try the sofa method. I'm just going to try to picture the comic strip and then as soon as I get one and I

think it's funny, then I'll just go draw that, right? It doesn't be done in half hour. Why wait three hours? I'd sit there and sit there and sit there. My deadline would be coming up, got like 30 minutes. I'm like, oh shit, got to go sit and draw it out. And it's like, oh, okay, I got this drawing. It's kind of, oh, this kind of goes with that. If I make another drawing, I'm like, oh shit, gotta go sit and draw it out. And it's like, oh, okay, I got this drawing.

Oh, this kind of goes with that. If I make another drawing, I have my strip. That's the only way to do it. If you don't get up, the creative spirit ain't gonna come visit you if you're doing this. It needs your hands. And it's not gonna reward you for sitting there waiting for, you have to jump in and do it.

And people, when they say, oh, well, I'm not ready, how pissed off is that? It's waiting for you to feel like you're ready. It's not you. Just start doing the action and it's going to come through. The ideas will come and the answers will come because it's not you. If you can take your ego out of like, you'll be blessed with this never-ending flow of ideas because don't take ownership for it and know that if it's not coming out, it's because you're just clogging it. Because this thing's got endless ideas.

And you give that same advice for making films, which is, you know, don't plan, if you want to be a filmmaker, don't plan like the movie. Don't think about making them. We just go in and start. Yeah, I would meet a lot of people who introduce themselves as aspiring. I'm an aspiring filmmaker and I wonder how,

what would you tell an aspiring filmmaker? I'd say, stop aspiring. Because if you call yourself that, you are that. And you're always going to feel like you're not ready. And you just jump in before you're ready. You don't feel like you're ready. I didn't feel like I was ready to do mariachi until I was probably in my last few days of filming. You became ready as you went. You didn't know all that stuff. I couldn't have figured all that out in advance. When my kids worked with me on a project that we did similar, by the end they realized they did an interview with my son who after just two weeks of doing one of those projects, you're a different person. He suddenly waxing philosophical about the creative process and going, I never knew how my dad did Mariachi until we did this project together.

And I realized he didn't know either. He didn't know I was going to do it. He figured it out day by day. Every challenge that got thrown at him, he had to figure it out. And that's the biggest lesson. Most people never start. And that's the biggest thing. Don't wait till you're ready or they'll be on your tombstone. Here lies so-and-so. He was never ready. And you don't want to be that guy. Jump in. No, it's not you. You just got to be the hands. And that relieves a lot of pressure from you. Because then you don't ever have to do anything really. You just have to be the hands. Can you talk through some of the hats,

some of the many hats you wore with the El Mariachi. That's an interesting case study and you've done the same thing over and over in completely different innovative ways in all the films. But El Mariachi is such a radical leap for you. That was crazy. That was, that thing's held together with scotch tape and rubber bands because of the camera I borrowed.

You directed, you did cinematography, you did the sound. It's better to just say what I didn't do. I didn't act in front of the camera. Everything else I did. Everything else, I was the whole crew. It's just like you're doing here, except you've got sound recording right onto the cameras, right?

Or do you have it to system? Separately, but it's synced. I mean, all the modern technology. But it's synced, yeah. So I didn't have sync camera. So I had a camera that, it was not a sync camera. And the thing was it was so loud,

I would have had to blimp the shit out of it, which I didn't have a blimp. And then I would have needed a sync camera. And the thing was it was so loud, I would have had to blimp the shit out of it, which I didn't have a blimp. And then I would have needed a sound guy. Just to be clear, so if people don't understand this, you're shooting basically no sound. Because the camera sounds like this. Hrrrrrrrr. Yeah. And I shoot my edit. Cut. Yep. You know, they're still running, you know, like I'm only using this part.

And there's no slates. There's no nut. There's, there's guys holding up their fingers at the beginning of roll, like this is real seven for just a few frames. I know which real it is. And then the 10 minutes of film is just one shot after another. And I use almost every frame of those shots because I was cutting in the camera. Now, after I shoot, like, let's say, you know, tell me your name.

Lex. What's your last name? Friedman. Where do you live? Austin, Texas. I would do the whole scene. Then I would get the sound, bring the mic in close like that. Say it again.

Lex. Friedman. Austin, Texas. That'll probably sync. Now, if you were going on and on, there's a place where it'd go out of sync. I hate rubbery lips. So I would cut away to the dog or to the knife or to the girl.

And then I cut back when you were back in sync. And since these were non-actors, they say everything the same way each time. I would say they're lying just like they weren't performing it to where they didn't remember how they performed it. Before they were just talking in their own rhythm. So a lot of the times, anytime you see anyone on camera talking, they're in sync with themselves.

As soon as it cuts away, they're out of sync. It created this really fast cutting style that I probably wouldn't have had on such a low-budget movie, but it was the only way to keep things in sync. So when I would shoot two people talking, I would make sure I'd film a couple of shots of like the dog or a stuffed cat or something, just so I'd have something to cut away to to get them back in sync. That's so brilliant.

And it's, what I call it, it's just resourceful. It's just being very resourceful. You allow it to get maybe a little bit out of sync sometimes. I didn't allow it, but oh yeah, I would let it if I just didn't have a way to cut away. And I would try to sync it as best I could. But we as the audience, like, do you understand where the threshold is? Where we notice something? Yeah.

It seems like you can get away with a lot. You can get away with, I just don't, I'm just particular about that. I just don't like seeing a dub movie where it just feels canned. It makes you not believe in it anymore. So I just cut away where the lips are just way off. I just didn't want any of that. I just felt like I wanted it to just be believable and they could be really believable if they were in sync,

but I didn't shoot two takes of film or even two takes of audio, just one take. We just went to the, and what's cool is that because I just had them go through the whole scene again. So I would go ahead and record them like grabbing the bottle or any action they did, opening the suitcase. I'd have all the sound effects too. I just had to sync it by hand.

That's a lot of work for me, but I got great sound that way. Cause if I had had a sync camera, the mic would have been so far, we wouldn't have, we would have had to go get new sound effects. But because the camera's off, I could record everything close up. So there was some blessing to that.

You and Quentin Tarantino had a great conversation about a lot of topics, but one of them is how to bring out the best in the actors. Like what in that, El Mariachi, how do you bring out the best in these non-actors? And then maybe what's the thread that connects to your future work too? What really helped for those non-actors and then maybe what's the thread that connects to your future work too? What really helped for those non-actors

was that they just look across and it's me filming. They didn't feel like they're, so they're being so natural. When I think I who played the bad guy, I met him in the research hospital where I was sold my body to science. He was my bunk mate and I said, dude, you look kind of like Rudger Hauer. And then it's like, we saw another movie,

man, you look like James Spader, shit, you should be the bad guy in my movie. And it'd be cool to have you as the bad guy. He goes, but I don't speak Spanish. Well, that's okay, all right. And I'll teach you phonetically, and you're gonna wear sunglasses. And if you look close, he's holding the lines here

and he's looking at the lines like that and just smiling. So, can't believe he's getting away with this. He's smiling and he's got the sunglasses on. I read that somewhere in the pool. There's like a scene in the pool. He's like this. With the sunglasses on. Oh man. But he was doing it phonetically.

And I tell you what, he was so great that guy, right? Yeah. When we do Desperado, I brought him back. Didn't even have to do any dialogue. Watch that movie. When he shows up in the opening scene, when Desperado, he's playing the guitar and they open with the credits to tie it into the first movie, he shows up in the opening scene, when Desperado, he's playing the guitar and they open with the credits, to tie it into the first movie,

he shows up again and all he has to do is light a cigarette and you see this. He's so nervous because now there's a crew behind me. Now it's real. Before it was just me and him and it didn't feel like a real movie, so everyone gave a great performance. How do you recreate that later on a big movie? It's just building a report, making a safe zone for your actors. Quinton once told me, sometimes being, you know, we're talking about directing, you say, sometimes being a great director is just being a great audience. You know, being a great audience for the, because you're taking the place of the audience for the actor.

They try something and if you're enjoying it, they know that the audience is going to enjoy it. Or if you're, you know, makes you cry, you know, so sometimes you just, you don't have to tell them a lot sometimes. And if you do have something very specific to tell them, they usually, you know, go with it. But I always just like to see what they do. And a lot of times they just are in the zone.

Cause again, they're getting that flow too. You create the right environment. Everyone's getting this inspiration that's all tied together that you never could have directed. It's just like you just create that space where we're all going to be open to it and it's going to drop in our lap. And I'm going to point it out when it does,

because you may not feel like you know how to play this role yet. But I say not knowing is the other half of the battle and the more important part. That's the part we're going to discover. And when it happens, I'm going to point it out and it's going to be like magic. And we're just going to go, okay part we're gonna discover. And when it happens, I'm gonna point it out and it's gonna be like magic

and we're just gonna go, okay, we're accepting it and we do it. And it gets people in that kind of head space and then we're all open to it, to where the character's supposed to go, what it's supposed to sound like instead of me being very manipulative to get a certain thing. I don't know, it's just whenever it feels good.

Yeah, there's such an intimate connection between the actor and the director. I've seen some of the behind the scenes footage with you. You are just a fan enjoying the scene when it's done well. But I think there's an aspect, if I were to put myself in the headspace of the actor, they want you as the audience to earn that happiness. You know?

It's when a director approves. Yeah, well you're a performer and there's no other, it's not like a live show where you get the approval of the audience and you're like, oh wow, they like that joke. Let me do more, really the director is it. And a lot of times the director's way behind a monitor

somewhere, that's why I still like to operate the camera. So when I'm operating the camera, it's like this. We can have a hundred people here, we wouldn't know because they go away, it's just us. They just disappear when it's the camera guy is the director and we're going, let's do that again. There there's a shot in a, I'm lighting, since any of myself, there's a bad, my crew setting lights and I have a great shot of Clive Owen where he's holding down Benicio's head in the toilet.

You know, but he's just not there. It's just the closeup of him at this point. And I'm practicing my shot. I'm zooming and slowing his face. And people are still walking behind him on the green screen, setting lights. And I'm like, I'm rolling. We're ready to go. We're getting this. I can already tell.

We're already in the moment. What you're doing right now, just keep holding that look. Now, one jolt, like you're, like he's starting to fight back, but you don't even flinch. Cut. Okay. Nevermind, you guys can stop moving that shit. We already got shot. Holy shit.

Yeah, it's like that. Wow. Yeah, it's like that. Cause you're so- That's a great scene, by the way. Great, right? And it was- Holy shit. And you can feel it.

It's like, if I wait for these guys, this moment will be gone. And then another one was Mickey Rourke. He had so much freaking dialogue. He had just done this whole big dialogue scene. He had another one that said, let's go ahead and start with a wide shot where the two actors, if I'm the camera, Mickey and Elijah are here. Let's get a two shot and we'll come around on Mickey close up. We'll turn Mickey around for the closeup. Let's start with the wide thing, get used to the lines and most of it's gonna be sold in the closeup. We sit down, Mickey starts delivering the take.

I'm like, hold on, hold on a second. I brought my camera over, zoom in, just adjust that light real quick, because I'm the DP. Because if I had another director of photography, they'd be like, oh no, no, we have to relight and all this stuff. It's like, no, no, let's just do this, let's go.

He's doing it right now. And I go and that performance is just right then. And so you can feel that when you're also you're operating and you're the camera guy and you're the DP. It's like high tech guerrilla filmmaking. Yeah. We're on a green screen, but it's like all the crew needs are marching orders. Just put a light back there.

Hitting them harder. Like that's a, this is a that a 10K. It's got to be stronger. They don't need to know that I'm going to make that a lamp post later. They just need marching orders for the moment. So I can just kind of tell people do this, do this, do that. And then I know what I can accomplish with the actor and then everything else falls into place later because I'm going to put all that in later. You know, things, once you know how to do a lot of jobs like that, you can just move at the speed of thought, which is where the actors love being creatively because they, nobody knew what green screen was back then. They're like, what is this again? So I explained it as well. It's kind of like doing theater, but instead of a black curtain

behind you with a prop, it'll be a green curtain and you might just have a cup or just a steering wheel, but it's just you and the other actors just like this. Everything else will be painted in later. We're just talking, we're locked in. If we stay locked in, we'll look great when there's rain coming down and we're on a ship later. But it comes down to this, right? The more, it was so fun to do those kind of movies.

To this day, you try to be close to the action, connected with the actor that's performing. Because it's like a dance. You end up, like, remember on Dust Till Dawn, Michael Parks in the opening scene, he's talking about the two guys that are running around killing people just before he gets shot.

And I just start doing this slow zoom. I remember this take eight, start doing this slow zoom on him. And I'm like, I hope I get all the way up to where it stopped zooming when he finishes that speech. Cause there's no set way. And I don't know how he's going to say it, but you're just locked almost telepathically

and has these delivered. There's no edits. He's just going, yeah, they killed four Rangers, two hostages. It's just like, wow. And you're just so pulled in. I'm just like, oh my God. And then it stopped.

It's like I ran out of Zoom, right? As he finished that speech. So how can a director, cause there's a lot of great directors that stay in the in the bag. I know it's hard. You know, they just trust that whatever they get from their crew, they just,

you accept it. Just like, you know, you would get a take to things. There's so much intimacy for that connection. I like that intimate connection because I could not be behind a monitor, even if I had communication with my cameraman. Okay, now start zooming in. You're not going to know. You have to feel it. You have to be in there. It's like a dance. It's like trying to do a dance with a partner and you're across the room. It's like, no, you got to be there up close feeling the energy.

And it's the creative spirits whispering to your both. It's not your own idea. It's you're capturing a moment that's magic and there's true magic that happens on a set and that's what brings you back. Cause you know, I didn't direct that and they didn't act that. That came through us and we just had the cameras rolling and we captured a ghost.

It's like you said, you had the pen in hand and you were there. It's like that, it's crazy. All right, your friendship with Tarantino is just fascinating. And just the whole timeline, the history of movies and the two of you collided and met is just a fascinating part of the story.

You first met him in 1992 at the Toronto Film Festival. Can you just talk about meeting Tarantino? We both had films at the same time with first films, Guys in Black, action, violence. In fact, I had seen his movie already. My first film festival was a few months before that, the Telluride Film Festival, and Reservoir Dogs was there, but Quentin couldn't be there. He was at Sundance earlier that year, and the guy who became my agent, he saw it and said, hey, you're going to like this guy, Quentin Tarantino.

I told him about you. You're going to meet him. He's going to be in Toronto. Oh, cool, cool. Okay. And so I went ahead and saw his movie and tell you right. And I was like, Holy shit, this guy's in black again, just like the mariachis dressed in black and action. I said, Oh, we're gonna like each other. He's gonna like my movie. So then in Toronto, we met and we met first on it because I knew I was going to be doing a panel discussion with him. They asked us to do a panel discussion about violence in movies in the 90s, even though it was only 92. So we're on a panel together and that's where I met him.

And he's like, hey, you're a virgin, tell me about you. And I was like, yeah, I saw your movie Reservoir Dogs. And he goes, oh, well, you got to come to my screening and I'm going to come see yours. So he came to Mariachi and I videotaped the audience reactions because there were insane, insane reactions to it. But I have the first screen he saw Mariachi sitting next to me laughing, he's laughing and everything. He was just the best audience. I have his recording of the first time he saw Mariachi. Oh no, really?

Yeah, because I taped it. That's so cool. He's so loud because he's right next to me. Well, just like you, but even probably even more than you, he's a fan. He watches, he's a fan. He watches, he just loves movies. He loves movies. In fact, the next time I heard him laugh that way was at the

own premiere for Kill Bill. We're watching Kill Bill and he's laughing like it's somebody else's movie. He still enjoys the movie. That's so, he loves what all the actors did. And it's like, that's the kind of energy you really love. But I'll tell you what happened. I'm not a very shy person. I'm very shy. I'd have to go talk. I'm sure you probably feel you're not an orator or anything. You just have to go do it. I thought, well, man, I'm going to have to introduce my film and talk about it afterwards. I'm afraid of that. What am I going to do? I don't

remember talking in front of more than five people before. So I went to see this other movie, going to do? I don't remember talking in front of more than five people before. So I went to see this other movie and it was good and I was watching and then the director comes up at the end and he goes, yeah, well, that was my movie. And, you know, here's the writer and it's like, oh, man, I don't like the movie anymore. This guy's kind of a dick. So I cannot do that. I'm going to have to go be who they imagine made that movie. So I wrote out my whole intro. It was like a 20 minute intro because no one had ever heard of anybody making a movie for no money, much less without a crew, much less the way I did it was just very new. Nobody knew it was possible. So my whole intro was like, you'll see the Columbia logo slapped in front.

It's probably cost more than the whole movie. And then I go through, this is how I made it with a wheelchair for a Dali turtle. I rode around things I had. I mentioned the turtle, the pit bull, the bus, the ranch, all that stuff, right? So then when they see the movie, in fact, I think my wife was in the audience. She said, at Sundance, people were laughing so much at your intro. They just wanted to hear a story like this. So badly, I heard someone next to me say, I'm going to was in the audience. She said, at Sundance, people were laughing so much at your intro, they just wanted to hear a story like this. So badly, I heard someone next to me say,

I'm gonna vote for his movie. They hadn't even seen the movie yet. Just because the story was so good, they wanted that movie to be great. And when they see the turtle, big cheers. When they see the pit bull, big cheers. When they see the school bus, cheers. But then when they see how we use it

and he slams into it and falls in it, they fucking lose their minds because they know how I put it together. They know that the rubber bands and the popsicle sticks, I already set it up. And so that's why that audience, I just taped the reaction. They're so with it.

The context is so key. Like you can watch Mariachi and go, hey, yeah, this looks like a $7,000 movie. But when you know the story behind it, suddenly I was curious. I hadn't seen it in a long time. I was watching it for the 20th anniversary. We did a screening and the first few shots come up and I'm like, Oh yeah, well, it looks like a $7,000 movie. And then it keeps going. And once we're in the jail cell and the shooting's happening and I realized, oh my God, we had these blanks that only fired one shot and it would jam. So I had to show it going, use the sound effect,

cut to the other guy, cut back, have another one go. I had to do these editing tricks to make it look like, and then repeat a few frames so it goes, so it looks like a machine gun. All these stuff that I'm, starts sweating as I'm watching it going, I can't believe I made this movie with that freaking camera. I don't know how I did.

I couldn't even see. I'm there with this long lens pulling my own focus. When I finally had to do a real movie, I was operating the camera on my first real movie with a crew and I get the camera and a guy comes over and he focuses for you. That's your job. You focus. Shit.

I had to do my own focusing on the last movie. I didn't, I was so hard. You're trying to focus on a guy while you're filming. You don't know where you are. And it's just, I was, couldn't believe how much easier it is when you have a crew. It's extremely valuable to know that the pain of that, the spectrum of creativity that's allowed within that, even just the focusing, Like how focusing fucks up on all the cameras, on your cameras, what are the different artifacts

that come off, just to know the battlefield. In order to be a great general, you have to know how to be a soldier on the battlefield. Yeah, yeah, it's good to know all that stuff, but you know, it's like, at the end of the day, you could shoot something on a phone, and if you have a great story, no one's gonna even notice.

They'll be, oh, we shot that on a phone, they didn't notice. So sometimes people get caught up on, what kind of camera should I have? great story, no one's gonna even notice. They'll be, oh, we shot that on a phone, I didn't notice. So sometimes people get caught up on, what kind of camera should I have? It's like, it's not the camera. That's just the tool, that's just the pen. That's just like, yeah, you can have different paint brushes,

but you can go, I'm gonna limit my palette. I'm only gonna use a fan brush and a detail brush, and I'm gonna make a painting. Do you think that painting is gonna suffer? No, it's gonna take on an identity that you wouldn't have had if you had all the other tools. So sometimes the limitations help you because when you can do anything, it can be crippling. When

I knew I could only use those things for mariachi, it's like, all right, well, it's very simple now. Let me show you how cheap skater I was. I did not spend on anything. So when you see him walking around with a guitar case, it's a shitty cardboard one, you know, like I got from home. I had to get a heavier one to put the guns in. So we borrowed one, but it had this material ripped off the top so you could see the wood. It's just the wood on top. So it didn't match the other one because it wasn't all black. And I was too cheap to paint it black. I didn't want to spend money on paint. So you see that cardboard case, he puts it down, and when he goes to open it, I cut to the other one.

Once the wood is, watch the edits, you'll see it open. Now it's a completely different case with the guns. And when he goes to cut it, when you close it, it cuts to the other one, and he goes, oh, that's how I did that whole movie. Again, it was a practice film. I don't want to waste any money on it. I don't know if it's going to be able to, I won't be able to make five bucks from it.

Yeah, but you're one of the few great directors where both the movie's genius and the process of making it is creative genius. It's like fun to watch both, to know of both. You know what I believe. Right. It's like, it's from somewhere else. I have to say, that thing is freaking,

I didn't get in that thing is freaking, I didn't get in its way, basically, would help. And people say that, don't get in your own way. This is a little bit easier to understand. It's like, keep the pipe clear. Don't block it with your ego. Don't say, you're gonna be shocked, but don't ever say, oh shit, how do I do that?

I don't know if I can do that. You didn't do it to begin with, except that it just came through you and try to get back into that head space. Especially when you go to make a second film or a third film or follow up a success. That's when artists get really crippled because sometimes they start tiptoeing around

as an artist going like, oh shit, now it's my second film. My first one did really well. They might not like my second one so much. That's not the head space you were in when you made the first one. You weren't hesitant like that. So try to keep that very naive. And that's why I say commit to a body of work.

Because I know a lot of filmmakers get stuck on their second one and then go further because they get crippled by the success of the first one. And they start asking, oh shit, how did I do that? How can I do that again? And you get deeper and deeper in a hole you can't get out of. I think you've spoken about that filmmakers, especially early on in their journey,

critics and the audience can destroy them. Meaning it creates too much of a burden, too much just wear them down to where they're almost scared to be creative. Can you just speak to that, how to ignore the critic? I'll tell you something that my best advice ever got early on, I was so fortunate from an unlikely place because he sounded like Clint Eastwood when he said it. But I got to Desperado and had Antonio Bandera. I brought Antonio to be in it from Europe,

big action movie. And so Spielberg saw it and he said, Hey, I want you to do Zorro with Antonio. So we're working on it for a while. I was working on the pre-production. I got to work with Spielberg doing that. It ended up stalling me as there was like two studios involved and Amblin was moving or it was some weird thing where, but I got to work with him for about five months. And I started getting really nervous because it's like, oh shit, you start thinking about even movies of his that people would say, oh, you know, Temple of Doom is not as good as Raiders. Have you seen Temple of Doom? I'd get killed if I can do that movie. If I can make Zoro as good as that one, the one that people said, it's like people don't know how good they had it with that guy. But I started thinking, I even said, man, I just rewatched Temple of Doom last night. I don't know how I'm going to do this horror movie.

Like, I've just never done anything like that. You start getting, you know, afraid because you go. The second thing he said, all right, just, just, you're going to do fine. But then I started thinking, this guy at that time, you know, know the era, but this was like mid nineties, he was making the biggest, best movies of all. People would shit all over this guy. They were so jealous. Press, audience, everyone was just like, hits at him, just throwing rocks at him for everything. Spielberg?

Yeah. You can't imagine it now. You had to have been at that time. Now everyone has respect for him, but they made him run a fucking gauntlet. And they were like, drastic power, man. You can't even imagine it now, but you should have seen the climate. It freaked me out because I'm like, maybe I should just stay under the radar where I've been, you know, not poke my head out so much because this guy has a head out and they're unwarranted. You can't even fathom it now because you weren't here at that time. It was crazy. You would never even think of him that way. I'm glad it changed because back then it was just, it made people not want to be successful. And it made me be worried. Maybe I shouldn't be go making a movie that has his name on it, that's going to put my head out in a whole

different realm of filmmaking at a studio level. Even even if I make a good movie, if I make a great movie, he's making great movies and he's getting this dog shit. I don't know if I could take it, you know? So I asked him, because you don't know how resilient you can be. So I said, damn it, Pan, how do you do it? How do you, what do you do when people just

throw rocks at you all day long. He goes, oh Robert, you just don't blink. And I was like, whoa, now I see how he got through it. Just don't blink, just like, pa, pa, pa. You know what's coming? Don't blink. And to him, it's like a Clint Eastwood line, right? But it was like, you could see he was telling the truth

and you could see that's how he did it. He just avoided all criticism by just not blinking. It's like, it's designed to make you blink, and you're just not gonna blink because you're committing to a body of work. He just keeps cranking out movies. Whatever he feels like doing, he does. And that was like the most, and it never bothered me again.

I just like always kept that in mind. I tell that to my actors, I tell that to people that story has traveled. I even had some little actors who were like starting to get up and I said, remember, tell you a couple of things. Some people have told me, you're never as good as people say you are. And you're never as bad either. George Clooney told me that. He said, remember that. And then the second one, Spielberg, don't blink. Don't blink. But there has to be a kind of vision for yourself of what you're reaching for, what you're trying to do.

Again, yeah, sort of, like, I think if you told me what would be my vision for the future, just committing to a body of work, which I've just kept doing. Like, that's about as far as you can see. Do you have a sense, do you have a vision of the body of work you'll make in the next 20 years? Like, or is it just this fog?

Like, I wasn't sure because you don't always know what the view might not have the vision yet because you don't have the information yet. So if you just commit to a body of work, you'll start figuring out more reasons to keep doing that body of work. So when I turned 50, I was like, I guess I could just keep making movies. I mean, I guess that's been good for me. Yes, I guess I could just make more. I kind of done that already, but it's always fun

and it's always new. I guess I can make, but it wasn't a lot of drive, right? It's like, well, I guess I could just keep doing the body. That's not as much as I can't wait to keep doing it. I see that. But I didn't know how to get to that point. So I thought, you know what? I got to this job so early, I was in the early twenties.

I bet there's some other job out there that exists that I don't even know about. Cause I don't know other jobs. So I looked up and you don't believe it, but I literally bought jobs for dummies. Nice. It was just like, I don't even know what, I just have a basic job to read out there. Turn the page. Oh yeah, don't want that job. Don't want that job. Don't want that job. I'm just like, I don't even know what, I just have a basic job to do out there.

Turning the page, oh yeah, don't want that job, don't want that job, don't want that job. I'm just going through. And it gets to filmmaker. There's a little icon, but tighties job. This icon is a guy like this. Literally, you're looking up and it says, this is the best job ever. You get to just be creative with your friends, sit back and watch the money roll in across

the desk. And I said, but 99% of film students don't get this job, so give up that dream. So I was like, I guess I got the best job. But then I started working with my kids when we did, I had a TV show called Rebel Without a Crew, based on that, right? I found filmmakers who had only made a short film,

they hadn't made a feature. I picked this diverse group of filmmakers, gave them $7,000 and we documented them making a feature two weeks like I did. You can bring one person, like I had Carlos, the guy out of the producer and star of Bariachi, bring one person, he can be your cameraman, he can be your sound guy, whatever, but it's only that for the shoot and you'd have to do the whole thing. And I saw those guys, by the time they're like, I don't know how we're going to make this movie. By the first week of shooting, they're like, I don't know how we're gonna make this movie.

By the first week of shooting, they're already talking about their next feature. They became so confident because their idea of what impossible is drops really quick when you take it. Yeah, anyone interested in unlocking their creativities, not even just filmmaking, I highly recommend that show. And I highly recommend the kind of the follow on show, which is where you make Red 11.

Yeah, so that's the one I did. So then it came time for me to do one. So I made a movie called Red 11 based on my experiences in the medical hospital. But I'll turn it into a sci-fi thriller, just to use that so that I can use somebody getting stabbed in the eye. So I'm still gonna have more elements

to show how you can do camera tricks and stuff with no money. And at the old days, make it for less than $7,000, which I think were like $5,000. Maybe because we had a lot of actors I wanted to pay. But the movie itself can make it for nothing. But I brought my son aboard as my number one, who hadn't been working with me in a while. I mean, he wrote Sharkboy and Lavagirl when he was seven, but then he hadn't really been working on my crew. So he didn't know how to operate the sound equipment, the separate sound system and all that. I didn't show him until the day of filming

because I knew we were documenting it and it would make a better tutorial. So by getting them working on the movies together, they came to be super excited by the end of the day. I thought for sure, oh, they're gonna hate this. Even though it's only two weeks, they've got other interests. They don't wanna be filmmakers. I thought they were gonna be like,

all right, I'm outta here after one day. instead, he came to me and his brother who acted in it. He went, Dad, the actor didn't show up after the first day. The location didn't match the script at all. We asked you how we were going to solve the problems. And you're like, I don't know, figure it out. We thought, Dad stumped for once. Is he stumped finally? I don't know. Figure it out. We thought, that stumped for once. Is he stumped finally? But then by the end of the day, his eyes were all white. We figured it out. They went, oh, they don't realize this is the creative process. Every day is like that. And in life too. Every day you don't know your machine's going to not work or you're going to get a flat tire or you're fired that day. So life is very unpredictable, just like a movie set. So I realized I'm going to make them well

work on my movies now because it's teaching them about life. I'm teaching them very little about the film. It's about life lessons, about how you take on something impossible, turn chicken shit to chicken salad and make it work. And that's life. That's the process of life. So many people say, well, I'm not ready to make my projects. Like, you're not ready for life either. You're like this all day, you're dodging shit that's going on. How come art has to be perfect? It's like it should be the same.

Life and art should be the same. And I think filmmaking in general is full of unpredictable things. And in a short little microcosm too, within one project, you've got a whole blueprint for how you're gonna solve life. Because you've just done it on a creative level. I think of all the art forms, of all the art mediums, like that, it just has so many different components. A lot of components to it.

And so like, there's so many ways to fuck things up, to learn from fuck ups. But any of the disciplines, if you add those to it, like I teach my actors to paint in between takes. We'll go and I'll take a picture of them in character. I show them a canvas. I show them paint. You don't need to know how to paint. This is to show you the brush is going to know where to go. You just got to pick it up. Pick the colors you want. Doesn't matter how crazy they are, whatever is speaking to you.

You lay it down. I'll show you some of the pictures. You're not going to believe the masterworks these actors did like in a day. They just start doing it. Lady Gaga had her fingernails in there. Josh Brolin's doing his thing. Then I take a picture of them in character, do a line drawing of it. We project it on top. Mostly it's the painting coming through, their line drawing with a little bit of their eyes painted in. You're not going to believe these things. They couldn't believe it, but it teaches them that thing about that the creativity is going to come through. Even though they're already acting, they're already being creative, we're already making a movie.

Like you said, that's already a really great creative endeavor when we would sneak off and paint, you could tell it's firing a whole other part of their brain. It was funny, I think Josh Brolin's girlfriend said, Josh said, hey, my girlfriend just said, she said, his wife now, but time, are you guys doing drugs? You'd leave the set and you come back and you're all like, no, we're painting, we're painting, but that makes sense that you say that because when you get your creativity

firing it's more powerful than any drug. And we would come back and he'd be on the set going, is it bad that I'm still thinking about the painting? And they're like, no, I think it's good. I think it's all good. But you can tell it's opening a whole other part of their creative brain. So you can be doing acting in a movie

and the painting's still gonna tap. It shows how much untapped potential your creative brain has. So the more you can do, the more you're firing off. And it was so cool. Like I remember we did one with Joseph Gordon Levitt was painting. We came in and the table was like this.

And they said, we have a problem. You want them to throw the cards out, the playing cards out, but it's so slick they go sliding off the table. And we both look at it and we both got the solution at the same time. Oh, we just have them throw them wherever they go. And then we'll place them. And then digitally, it's even better that he looks like he gets them all perfectly laid out to show what a card shark is. But that's what we have to do. We can't be here all day. If we're going to worry about where they go, just go, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump. And then we'll place the cards down and everyone will pick them up and then we'll marry the two and post. You just come up with creative solutions better, easier,

because you were just solving crazy creative solutions in the other one, like what paint medium do I use? What kind of gel am I gonna use? So when you come back to your main job, which is filmmaking, you're like, oh, I can figure this out in two seconds. So it helps you create a problem solve. So that basically working with my kids made me realize,

oh, now I know exactly what I wanna do for the next 10 years. I only wanna make movies with my kids because I'm mentoring them, but they're teaching me shit because they're the age I was when I made Mariachi and Desperado. Their ideas are really sharp, so the mentoring goes both ways and it's like the greatest parenting you can do because you're building a project together and in the same boat together figuring it out. It's family time, We're checking all the boxes. So I thought my filmmaking going forward is going to be checking all the boxes in life. So I'm

not spending time with my family. We're actually giving them lessons that they can go do anything they want in life because they're going to have different interests. But now it's like going to college. And this college is like the best college because it pays you to learn. You get to do these crazy skills like my son is, you know, conducting the orchestra, the James Bond orchestra in London for the spy kids score and a score he wrote because I can't write at his level because he was always our best piano player. And they get, you get the charge out of working with them. And then, and by making a label, there's a, there's a weird phenomenon that happens. If you guys want to take your game to another level, I stumbled upon this idea. My son, that was my counterpart on that movie racer.

He was my sound guy. Like I said, came up with shark, my lava girl, when he was little, he became my writer, co-writer, co-producer. He had come to me and said, I want to do VR type movie. And I said, oh, well, let me show you, as an example of creativity and manifesting, I said, let me show you how it works. Let's make a company.

We'll make a company called Double R, Double R Productions, because we all have Double R names, all the kids. So if anyone ever wants to do anything, we can use our company. So let's make a logo, and I'll make T-shirts and notepads and stuff. Cause once you have a company, you now have to make things for that company. Just like the advice I gave to people, stop aspiring, make a business card that says writer, director, cinematographer, I did editor. Cause then now you have to conform to

that identity. So now if I create a label like double R, we're going to come up with ideas. We'll call up VR companies and say, hey, we have a company, a VR company. Would you like us to make you a film for your sell your headsets? Yeah, they gave us a budget. They're dying for content. They gave us a budget. We shot a 20-minute action movie called The Limit with Michelle Rodriguez and Norman Reedus where you're in an action movie with them. And it was killer. They made us a big double R logo, animated logo. Later that year, we did Red 11, same logo. That movie went to directors Fortnight and Cannes. Festivals were paying us to come talk about how we made that movie. That's when we're throwing the cards out because they wanted their audiences. They knew they would love that. So we could have

had a whole gig just continuing to get paid to go to the Fed. Usually you don't get paid. That's how, what a success that was. But then we had to make We Can Be Heroes. So we had to stop. But We Can Be Heroes was a Netflix movie where they asked me to make a spy kids type thing. And so I thought, oh, okay, I'll just do it with superheroes. That's there. I wrote it with my kids based on some of their personalities. It's the most watched and rewatched movie in Netflix history. Like nothing in touch it. Cause kids just keep watching it over and over because this kids with super powers,

no one's ever done that before. And they can't, they couldn't believe it. Like I'd heard anecdotally, that's how the spy kids, people said, oh, that kids watch it over and over on video, but you can't keep track of that. You can't on Netflix because their biggest thing is people completing the movie. A lot of people don't complete a movie and it still counts as a view. They may watch five minutes and change the channel. So do you complete a movie? That's really where they really value, not only to complete, but rewatch, rewatch, rewatch per household so many times and nothing can touch it. That one has a double our logo as well.

My kids are like, dad, it really worked. I was like, I know better than I thought. I didn't know that me manifesting that company was going to turn into that and we just keep making stuff. I want to do that with brass knuckle films now with the audience because it works. I said, as soon as you have a logo and a company, your brain starts coming up with all kinds of ideas and it's a filter. Like, like I said, sometimes the freedom of limitations is all freeing. When I had to do four rooms and it's like, we have to use one hotel room. Oh, well then there's going to be a dead body.

There's going to be, you can do a lot with limitations. If they said you could use the whole city, it would have been harder to come up with something. Brass Knuckle Films has a filter, only action. Action movies, because that's the stuff that there's always an appetite for. If you ask Netflix right now, what do you need more of? They'll say, action, action, action. We don't have enough action. The last regime didn't leave us enough action. We need action. They'll pay a premium for an action film that we can make at a lower cost. A $20 million action film is very cheap. Studios don't know how to make them that cheap. That's why they'll pay for an independent to go do it. And right

now that's the key is to be independent because a lot of studios that can't even greenlight anything because things are so expensive, they don't want to lose their ass, but they need action films. So let's make something that everybody needs and let's make it at a price. We'll make it in my studio because I got my own studio and I can keep all the costs down because we have all the costumes and props and sets from 25 years of filmmaking to keep the costs down. And we'll have the audience gets to invest. It's not crowdfunding or Kickstarter.

You're actually an investor. Anyone who puts money in can pitch their idea for an action film to me. And I'm going to make one of the four films in that slate from one of those ideas because I want the audience to win. I want the audience to win and be a part of it because the audience is an afterthought in Hollywood. They make a movie, they show the audience the movie, go tell your friends now so you all spend money on our movie. Where's your cut of that? So I want them to be successful. So if any of the movies in the slate do well, they make money off that one

and then sequels or anything, but they're all going to do well because everyone needs an action movie or we're going to keep the cost down. Can I actually ask you just to focus in on action? You've created a lot of epic action films. What makes for a great action film? It comes down to the character. You know, like if you think about what are the best action films. What makes for a great action film? It comes down to the character. If you think about one of the best action films, one of your favorite films, like Die Hard. He's a cop, so he's still capable, but he's not Superman. The fact that he's in over his head and you're rooting for him, that's a great character.

John Wick, he is Superman, but he's retired and now he's pissed off and he's going back into a job. You know, so it comes down to the character really being very important because the action will then have a character to it. I think Leon the professional. That's a character. I mean, that's all about character. Now that, when I say we're going to do action movies, I mean movies that are really action

first. Like there's some movies that are more dramas that have action. Where's the boundary? So John Wick is action. That's more action, but it has character in it, but it's action driven. What about like Predator?

Predator is a sci-fi action film. So that's kind of a hybrid, which I like, but sometimes it's hard for the audience to know what they're buying into. Like they focused a lot on the action in the trailer, you know, and then they felt there was some other worldly thing, which you didn't really know, but it's a great movie. So Die Hard is a good example.

It was a good example, I can think of right off where there's a character that really made the difference. Then everyone repeated that. For a while, there was under siege, all this like a regular guy who's really actually has some training on a ship now. Then on the bus, you got a cop. He's a cop, but he's not super cop.

So that's why you root for him. You know, that became an element that people repeated a lot. Uh, what about Taken? That's a great one. That's a great character who is superhuman. Yeah. Who's also retired. You know, so there's like a superhero type character in an extraordinary

circumstance, like that's now his daughter's Taken, right? And then there's ordinary people, like the Terminator. That's a great character. Not the Terminator, he's a villain, but Sarah Connor who is a waitress, doesn't think her life's going anywhere. She finds out she's the mother of the guy who's going to save the human race and she's got to train him. Suddenly she has to become someone else. Those are cool movies because it's a genesis of a character. You see a character go from waitress to revolutionary. They step up. Yeah. What about mob movies? Some of them like Godfather is really not about action.

It's not an action movie. It's a drama that has some action. Right. John Wick is a mob film in some sense. Goodfellas. There's a lot of dynamic action, but there's really not action first. That's really a character type piece. Great. Freaking amazing. And it feels like action, by the way, he does it. It's just like that. It's like fast pace, fast talking, fast moving. Like Escape from New York is one of my favorites since I was a kid. Because every movie, you'll notice this now that I tell you, even like a romantic comedy,

there's a timeline. Every movie has to have like a ticking clock. So the audience knows the story is not just going to take over a period of years. So suddenly someone in the movie around 20 or 30 minutes in will say, we've got to go find the groom before the wedding this weekend. It'll be just like that. Skafe New York has the best example of a ticking time clock because he's literally got bombs in his neck and he's got a watch that shows him. He's constantly clocking it how little time he has and he gets you so like, oh my God, is he going to make it? That's like the best use of that. No one's ever topped that ticking time clock. All the other ones seem artificial in comparison.

Aliens, we got to get off this planet now because this whole thing's going to blow up. You know, they like, there's a timeline. It's already urgent, but now there's an extra timeline on it. Yeah. This is what happens. You mean, as you're talking, you're just making me fall in love more and more with action films. I sometimes, you forget how much you love action films.

A really good action film. Yeah. In fact, like The Terminator. The original Terminator just came out in 4K. I've been watching it again. It looks better than most movies look today. And that's a $4 million movie. It looks incredible. You can see every beat of sweat in this movie. I was watching it again with somebody, a female. And there's always a point when you're watching that movie where she'll turn and say, I love this movie. A point that is, it's a point where Michael Bean tells her,

I came across time for you, Sarah. I love you, which is, I always have. You're just like, oh my God, there's a real emotional love story there that he put into Titanic, that he put into Avatar. He figured out that thing that makes those movies work. By the way, I should say that, I mean, there is an aspect of El Mirage that is a love story to me. Yeah, there was a love story.

I don't know if you see it that way, but when I just rewatched it, I was like— It's a tragic love story. I was like heartbroken that she's dead. I got heartbroken twice. Let me tell you the second time in Edwin. One, you're making that and you go, okay, this is how it has to go. But then now you're invested in this person and you go, oh my, she has to die. It's going to be really sad. In fact, the studio even, when they said they were going to remake it, good thing I put that ending on. That's the only reason they showed it to an audience. We were going to remake it. They weren't going to put that

movie out. They showed it and said, we need to show this movie to an audience because they might not like the fact that we killed a girl before we remake it. All right. They showed it to an audience. The audience liked it the way it was. So they said, we're gonna take this movie to some film festivals.

And I was like, no, not this movie. This is my practice movie. No one's supposed to see this movie. And they go, no, no, you got something. No, no, dude, if I knew anyone was gonna see this, I would have shot it completely. Give me $2,000. I'll go reshoot half of it. Just knowing people are gonna see it, I got something. No, no, dude, if I knew anyone was gonna see this, I would have shot it completely different. Give me $2,000. I'll go reshoot half of it.

Just knowing people are gonna see it, I want something. And the head of the studio was really smart. He said, you don't know what you have here. It's very something real special. Let's just take it and tell you right, see what happens. Tell you right, Toronto did great. Like I said, in one Sundance. So now we had to put it out.

But I was like, I would have said, don't show that movie. But they also questioned the ending and didn't come into play because we ended up making Desperado. The girl in Desperado doesn't die. We didn't do that. We didn't kill Salma, but that's what needed to happen to Mariachi. Quentin called me one time. People were always saying like, oh, Reservoir Dogs, he borrowed from this movie, Hong Kong action film called City on Fire, about these guys, they're all criminals and they kill each other, whatever. And he said, hey, they're showing a double feature called East Looks West and West Looks East. They're showing reservoir dogs with City on Fire, the one they say I borrowed

from. And they're showing Mariachi with a Hong Kong film called Run, where they ripped off Mariachi. Like they just took the whole story. It had two Chinese actors in Mexico with the guitar cases. They just followed it beat by beat. So we were watching it and it was like scene by scene. They just remade it without even getting the rights or anything. It was so fun to watch. So we saw Mariachi first, then we watched that one. And I'm like, what's this big brothel scene though? This isn't my movie. Oh, the bad guy. Oh, there's a scene in my movie where the bad guy has two girls in bed with him and they figured that was a whorehouse, but it was just his apartment.

So they got this whorehouse. They're reinterpreted. Yeah, and they have helicopter shots and all kinds of big thing and the action was awesome. But then, and the girl's really good. And then midway through the movie, I'm like, oh shit, she's gonna die. Cause I killed her in mine.

I don't want her to die. I like this actress, it's really great. And they have a really great love story. I hope they change that part. No, they kill her. So I felt bad twice because I sealed her fate. I sealed her fate because I have a line in Spike Kids 2. And I started thinking when you create stuff, you start thinking, I wonder if that's how our creator is. He's like, oh shit, I just kind of threw that in a memo and now that whole town's going to get wiped out. Yeah. You know, I didn't even think about the implications of that because there's a line, I was making

a character that Steve Buscemi plays in Spy Kids 2 and he's a creator. He just wanted to make a little miniature zoo for kids. And then he saw, well, what if I put some together like a lizard with a snake and it's a slizard, or you have a spider monkey, which is like literally spider legs and a monkey top. So he makes that. And then he thought, hey, why don't I make them a little bit bigger for kids that have big hands? And it got out of control and they turn into these huge creatures and now they're trying to eat them. So, he's hiding and the kids find him hiding. And he says this one line that people keep coming, it's on the internet a lot, this meme about this, why is this line, this movie? It's so wild. I thought I wanted Steve to come up to the camera and like he's just, he's lost in his own creative world. And he says,

I can't even go outside because my own creations are going to eat me. And he comes up to the camera and he goes, do you think God hides in heaven because he too lives in fear of what he created here on earth? It's like really just for a moment, this thing. And it's like, because you feel like that way when you're creating stuff, like you're creating something and then now it's taken on a life on its own and like, Oh no, now this character has to die. I didn't want that. You know, this, this domino effect of creation. And you start thinking, well, that's, must be what creation that maybe he is hiding up there because look at,

he didn't expect all this shit to happen giving us free will and all that. I mean, in this particular context that that you are the creator of this story. And it, for some reason, makes me feel good to know that you feel the pain of this character dying. Yeah, absolutely. Because like, if I'm writing it, but if it's not coming from me, I'm as surprised sometimes.

And Quentin would say that, you know, he'd say, you just get two characters talking when I'm writing my script, and then suddenly they're just talking to each other. And I was like, what does that mean? And now I know say that, you know, he'd say, you just get two characters talking when I'm writing my script and then suddenly they're just talking to each other. And I was like, what does that mean? And now I know what that means. It's like, he just gave them life and now the dialogue's coming through him.

Let me just ask you, you're the perfect person to ask about the genius of Quentin Tarantino. What makes him special as a director, as a creative mind? What do you see in him that's beautiful, that's brilliant? mind, what do you see in him that's beautiful, that's brilliant? Since I met him, he was just like this brilliant ball of energy. I walk around his house and I'll see a few sheets of paper all handwritten out. I'm like, what's that? He goes, oh, that was something I was starting to write. And I, you know, not gonna finish. I'm like, can I take these and go turn it into like

all trilogy of films? You know, like what he throws away, all this mortal men would kill for. You meet people like that. I tell people, you know, your parents say, watch out who your peers are. You know, when you're younger, that means one thing. But once you get older,

surround yourself around people who swing much farther than you. That's really true. Just by being around him and working with him, you get by osmosis, you learn stuff. And it just ups your game because they're just swing way beyond you. Jim Cameron was like that. So like, when I first met him, I was trying to impress the hell out of him, you know, because I was such a big fan and I was about to go do this burrata. And I went, Hey, I just took a three day Steadicam course because I can't afford a Steadicam operator. So I'm going to operate Steadicam myself on this burrata. Now, if he was just my peer, he'd say, Oh, I did the same thing. I'm going to do the same

thing. That would be like hanging out with somebody if you're ill, but you want somebody who's above that. Do you know what he said? He goes, I bought a Steadicam, but not to operate it. I'm gonna take it apart and design a better one. It's like us mere mortals trying to learn how to operate the camera. He's designing all new systems. That's the guy you wanna hang out with,

not someone who's doing what you're doing. So surround yourself by those kinds of people. And that's when you learn things like don't blink, you know, like somebody who's like really swinging for the fences and accomplishing so much. And Quentin was like that. So I met him at the festivals. He saw Mariachi. He loved it.

We came up, we talked and he said, you're like my next film I'm writing right now. Pulp Fiction. So I thought, man, I'm going to put this guy, he's so fun. I'm going to write him in my Desperado script, which I was writing. So that was before Pulp Fiction and all that when I had cast him. I didn't know he was going to go become such a household name. I just was drawn to his energy and I'd already written him in. I met Steve Buscemi there and I was like,

I'm writing a character for Steve Buscemi. Then I went back to the Sony lot where I was working on Desperado, and Quentin and I ended up having offices right next to each other on the Sony lot. By accident, I didn't even know that. I just met him. I go back, because originally Pulp Fiction was for TriStar, because Danny DeVito was a producer and he was going to make it for TriStar. He was there writing Pulp Fiction and I was writing Desperado. I'd go show him storyboards from Desperado,

he'd come act out scenes of Pulp Fiction. And when we got to be really good friends that way, we'd go eat lunch at Versailles across the street, the Sony lot. And then Sony passed on Pulp Fiction. It's too weird, it's too long, $8 million movie or 7 million. They're like, we're going to go make the next Polly Short movie instead. We don't understand this thing. And Miramax got it. They'd just been bought by Disney. So they produced their first film was Pulp Fiction. And then that thing went to Cannes and it was a whole thing. But what I loved about his story is that when he made Pulp Fiction, he had a director screening. He showed it to some directors and I wasn't able to go. But anyway, I had dinner with him once

and it was in my journal, because I keep a journal, at 2 40 a.m. when after I dropped him off at his house, I said, oh wait, how did your movie come out? You know, Pulp Fiction, he had just finished it and he went, nah, it's still, still feels like a movie Quentin would make. Doesn't feel like a real movie. And I was like, that's fine, what do you mean?

What does it mean? It feels like one of those movies I would make, like Reservoir Dogs. It doesn't feel like a real movie. And I was trying to be the supportive friend going, oh man, he was so excited about this movie and now he's bummed about it. And I was like, well, it should be different. It should be like, he's like, I wouldn't have it. Drove off.

So I thought, oh, I guess that wasn't the one. So I went home and I called some of the directors that were at the screening and they go, yeah, this isn't the one for him. It's not. They had none of them saw it. None of them saw it. But that, I know you're like surprised. Yeah. But that happened with George Lucas too, with Star Wars. Everybody saw that movie and was like, poor George. They showed it to all his director friends. Poor George, what did he waste all this time with this for? Only Spielberg was the one who said,

it's naive and it's gonna do really good because it's naive and kids will like it. But everyone else was like, what's he doing? We're artists, we're making art films. What's he doing this garbage for? Because nobody knows. It shows no one knows anything, not even the filmmaker. When you're being groundbreaking,

you don't know what groundbreaking is. Not you or anyone around you, except maybe one or two people. So he said, there was one person, like, oh yeah, who is your Spielberg? Goes, Catherine Bigelow, without a doubt. She's the only one who said, there's something here. No one else was saying that. He said, in fact, because he remembered suddenly, he'd forgotten the story. But if it wasn't in my journal, I would have forgot it too. He goes, in fact, one of my friends, Simon said, I want to sit you down and tell you all the things that are wrong with your movie,

but I'll wait till you get back from the Cannes Film Festival. And he goes and he wins the Palme d'Or, then his friend's like, oh, what the hell though, I know, I've only made one movie myself, so nevermind. I guess we're all wrong. So even he didn't expect that at all. So that was a shock, you know, even to him.

So think about that. Yeah. That means, what do you do? Commit to a body of work. Just do that. You don't know. You don't know what's going to be a pulp fiction, what's going to be a Jackie Brown, what's going to be, you know, you don't know. And you'd like to think they know, but they don't know either. They feel it. Like I asked Jim Cameron, I said,

do you see your movie really clearly? Like, can you see it like with hyper-focus? Because it seems like that. And he goes, it's like really far, it's out of focus. And you work on it, and you work on it, it starts coming. I said, okay, good. So that's normal. I thought maybe he had laser vision or something,

but no, even him, he doesn't really know, but he feels that he can make decisions and he understands what a creative drive is and how to just keep being relentless about it. But it's not like they have all the… Proximity is huge. Proximity will change your life. Just being around those guys, they didn't teach me, hey, I'm going to teach you how to make a movie. Just being next to them, being in their world just ups your game. You're able to do things you weren't able to do before. You get ideas you didn't able to do before.

You get ideas you didn't get to do before. I'll show you one of my painting things. You're not going to believe this freaking thing. I had a painter friend in Germany, Sebastian Kruger. He gives a workshop once a year. I thought, I'm going to go there and I'll learn more about directing by watching this guy paint than I will by watching another director. Because that's just now I know how creativity works. You're going to learn lessons outside of

the box by doing that. I tried to practice before going out there. I was doing a Danny Trejo. I'll show you the before and after. You're not going to freaking believe what you see. It really tells the story of how important proximity is. So I do this painting, it's like, ah, it looks garbage. I'll show you, it looks like garbage. I can't do paintings that are just like, see, you never should say I can't because you just cut your leg off. But I couldn't at the time paint, just paintbrush into paint and then write on the canvas like that without using some kind of medium, which this guy, Sebastian Kruger would do. So first I did a digital painting of Danny Trejo, like just to get the framing and all that. And then I created, that's just like,

that's like on a Wacom tablet. But then I did it with paint and it's like, oh, it's all credit. It's too thick, the paint and it just looks, it looks, and I just gave up right away. I was trying to pre-practice, I wouldn't be a total buffoon there because I was going the next week. And I thought he's using a different brush, obviously. He's using a better paint. This stuff just is clogging up and it's crap. I'm sure when I get there. So I get there and he's doing a Mick Jagger and he starts with a mid-tone.

He starts blocking in the face with a little tiny drawing of where the face goes. He starts doing that. He starts adding some highlights. There's the photo, his reference. And I'm like, why are you concentrating so much on the cheek first? And he's like, Stefan every time. And I go, what paints are you using? And he's like, it was regular acrylic paint. What brushes do you have? Regular brushes. I'm like, how come mine doesn't look like yours? Well, let me try what he's doing. I mean, you start with a midtone.

I'm gonna do that Danny again. Start with a midtone. I'll start adding some highlights. And I did that. And everybody kept coming over going like, did you just do that? And I was like, yeah, I don't know how, but it's very cartoony still.

He's doing a very realistic Mick Jagger. Look how real that is. And you just watch it and he doesn't teach you anything. So he just starts painting. So this is the photo he had as a reference, but then this is his painting, right? And because I'm there, he's not teaching you how to paint. Through osmosis, you're like learning some of-

You're seeing that there isn't a trick. Yeah. I thought he had a trick and that's why I couldn't get any further. He's using the same brush and the same paint. Well, how come I can't do that? And you go, you do it. I go, I'm going to try and do something realistic. I've never done realistic before because I'm a cartoonist and everything.

I was cartoony and that was just easier for me because I thought I would need too much training. I did another Trejo. I started doing a realistic. I finished out just one section of his face and put the pen down because I did that. The same day. Nice. I got out of my way because seeing him get out of his own way, I think that's why sometimes people need to go to school for stuff like that because then now, well, I just did four years of school. So now I must know. Now you've given yourself permission, but you could give yourself permission right away

and it's going to come through. And drawing Danny Cario of all people is like, there's so much going on there. It's like he's so expressive. He's so expressive. I mean, you've worked with him a lot and you've, I mean, he's one of those badass humans on the screen. You've created that. Can you just talk about what it's like creating those characters?

What was exciting about Desperado is I went to go make it and there were no Latin actors working in Hollywood because no one was creating roles for them. So I thought, wow, I got to go create my own stars. We'll bring Antonio from Europe because they kind of know his name from the Motivar movies. And I saw him in Time Me Up, Time Me Down when I was in the hospital riding mariachi. We're watching TV while I was a patient. And there's a scene where he like headbutts Victoria Abliel. He just gives her a headbutt and goes like that. And I was like, whoa, I bet that guy would want to be in an action movie. He's got something inside. So I called him when we were doing Desperado and I said, would you ever consider doing an action movie. He's got something inside. So I called him when we were doing Desperado

and I said, would you ever consider doing an action? Oh man, I'd love to do action. So I said, I got a movie for you. I got a movie for you. It was sequel to Mariachi. And so Salma I found in Mexico television, you know, doing, she couldn't get work in the US because of the roles in it.

How did you find her? I mean, this is one of the greatest actors in the world. It was a crazy story. One of the best stories. I was really determined to hire a real Latin, especially Hispanic, and then she's Mexican actress to be the Mexican character. That's like as authentic as you can get. And there was no one who was getting any jobs because no one was creating any. So there was no one that had any movies under their name because there was no one.

It was a whole systemic problem, right was in 1994, 1993. I was watching a Paul Rodriguez show on Univision because I was trying to practice my Spanish because I was having to do all these Spanish interviews because Mariachi was in Spanish. That was the other part I didn't tell you. I didn't speak Spanish when I made that movie. We didn't grow up with it. So I left that part out of the Mariachi story because I thought people already didn't believe I made the movie by myself. They knew I made it in a language I didn't speak. I should have said it because it'd be even more inspiring.

Like now you have no excuse. I would wrote the English subtitles basically. I wrote the titles, what became the subtitles. And then we take it to the actors and the actor would translate it for me. And I was like- That is so inspiring. I'd be like,

Holy shit. I would try to speak Spanish and say, Vamos a recordar. Like let's record. And they'd be looking at me like, that means let's remember. The recordar doesn't mean record. That means grabar.

Now I know, back then I didn't know. So I'm watching Univision and then there's Salma as a guest. And she's big soap star down there in Mexico. And she comes out, she's beautiful, she's funny, everyone's laughing. She's Salma, everyone that we know now. And she starts talking about what I gather from what she's saying that she's having trouble finding any work in the US because of her accent. And then Parvati says, well, say something in English. And then she says, then she sounds just like she does now. And he goes, that's great. She goes, I know, I know. And I went, I think this is the girl. So I called her in my office and I videotaped our first meeting together. So I have that somewhere. And it's Salma. It's Salma. It's her with her energy, with her passion and funny. She became instant friends with my wife.

Before they walked over, your wife and I were best friends. She already was like part of the family. She's a godmother to my kids. I thought, I'm going to help you, you're going to help me. I need to have a Mexican actress in this and you're going to be phenomenal. The studio didn't see it. They were like, what? She hasn't done anything. Why don't you just hire somebody else who already has a name? So if we just give her one movie, then she'll be someone who's in a movie and then you can keep casting. So I made a whole movie with her in English called Road Racer. It was my second film for Showtime. Really cool little rebel without a cause type movie. I gave her a role in that so we'd have an example of her doing English.

I gave her a role in that so we'd have an example of her doing English. They still were like, we need a screen test. We need to have a screen test with a bunch of other actresses. So I said, sure, let's do that. So I went over to her house the night before the screen test and we worked on the scene, which is the best scene where she's operating on his arm and they've got all this chemistry. I was just directing her through it like completely down to when you pick up the water and you hand him the water, don't scream, oh, hot water. Just be like, hot water. And while he's spitting it out and it's going to be a big dramatic action with like a very light delivery. And so

we got it down to a science. The next day we show up, Antonio does a scene with all the girls who come in. He does it with her. Clearly, they've got amazing chemistry. She just nails it. He's great. He loves her too. Studio's like, okay, you can hire her. Reluctantly like that, right? But once they saw the footage come as we were shooting and they saw it on the big screen when they're watching the dailies then they were like Oh my god, then they saw it then they saw what I saw when I met her But they it sometimes you like you say what do you do when people are like, hey, why come you using these? Just know that not everyone's gonna see it. You may have the only vision Just keep going. There's an instinct that tells you to keep going that way

you'll get proved right or wrong, or maybe you're slipping on the first two rocks or whatever, but follow your instinct because everyone's going to have an opinion. It's not necessarily the right one. When you're an independent filmmaker, you can make those decisions to change people's career, that changes the world. That's why you want to remain independent.

That's why what's happening now in the industry is great because I have to make movies like the way I started, which is what I've always liked to do, which is just doing it where we create our own destiny. We go, hey, we're going to make a movie. We're going to make it for this budget so we can make it. And the story is going to be so character driven and cool. We're going to be able to get big actors to be in it because they're going to want to be in it.

So Danny Trejo, you asked me about Danny Trejo. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Okay, Danny Trejo. We're doing Desperado now. I'm casting all kinds of people. Now I have this character that I want to have a bunch of knives. He opens up his vest and he has a bunch of knives. So bring me all the coolest looking Latin actors we can find. And before he even walked in, there's a picture of him. He already looked like the guy, but he was younger. He always just played prison inmates. It was a picture of him as an inmate in a prison. I want to give him a cool role, you know, just wherever this actor is. He walks in and I see him, it's Danny Trejo. He sits down

and I had the prop knife already made. And I say, you need to have this in your hand and look like you sleep with it. Like just practice flipping it around your hand. And I gave it to him. You got the role, just start practicing with that. He gets up and walks out. He didn't have to say anything because there's no dialogue. He walks out. We get to the set and he kept saying, put me in coach, give me a line, give me a line. He's like, no, no, you're such a nice guy, you're going to blow the whole mystique. I want this guy to feel like the most evil, scary guy of all. You're such a nice guy. I didn't let him talk till dusk till dawn. But one thing I noticed was that the town we're shot in, the Mexican town, which is the same town I shot Mariachi, we went

back there because I wanted to pay back the city. So we had this big movie there. And they didn't really know Antonio because he was in European movies. Salma hadn't come to the set yet, but they saw Danny Trejo there in his vest looking like a Mexican icon. They would go like this. Everyone thought he was the star. And I just know magnetism when I see it. And I went, this guy's got something. So I went to him and I said, I got a movie we're going to do someday. This was 94. We didn't make this movie for 15 years. Machete. You're going to be machete. I had an idea for machete then. It wasn't the same story. I had seen a story. Actually, the guy from Marge sent

me this funny story. He said, hey, look at this story that the USDA and FBI sometimes would hire a Mexican federale to come do a job for 25 grand that they didn't want to get their own guys killed on. I said, that's Machete, the guy that they pay. But he's not doing it for the money. It turns out he has to get this guy that escaped Mexico, and that's the twist. So that was the original story I had. I said, we're going to do this someday. We talked about it for years and never did it.

Never had it got around to doing it. So when I did Spy Kids, I put him in Spy Kids and I said, hey, let's pay tribute to that character we never got to make and you'll be Uncle Machete. He's a gadget guy but he's got a mysterious past. But then a few years later, Quentin and I were doing Grindhouse and he'd already done Dustal Domine. I was building my own Latin star system.

Salma showed up in a bunch of my movies. Cheech shows up in every movie. Danny shows up. I brought Cheech out of retirement and put him in my movie. I needed to create my own Latin star system because all my scripts, because when you write in your own voice, you're going to write probably somebody that's Latin. You need to have a star system that matches that so that you don't have trouble casting and people are like, well, you can't hire this person. So I built up my own star system. So Danny was one of my stars. So after we're doing Grindhouse, we had to do fake trailers for Grindhouse. And I told Quentin, I know what trailer I'm going to do for the movie I never

got to make with Danny called Machete. That would be so fun. Finally get that out of her system. And doing a trailer is so fun. It's two days of shooting. Just still being that resourceful guy, we asked this company that had a digital camera we wanted to use, can you let us send it to us for a couple of days screen test? I mean, camera test. Instead of shooting a camera test, we shot the trailer. We got a free camera, shot the trailer with him. It's just the money shots, him opening his vest full of machetes, him aiming that gun, him in a waterfall with two gals. I just came up with this really funny trailer and we shot it. People were screaming at the premiere. You couldn't even hear it. They just wanted that movie so badly because there was

black exploitation in the seventies. There was never mech exploitation. It felt like this should have existed, but it didn't. It's Mexican superhero. They just never seen anything like that. Now you know. But even his mom calls him Machete. Like he just became this guy. And about 250 movies that he's been in, Machete is his most famous one. So for five years, five years, people would come up to us and say, where's Machete?

When's that movie coming out? We're like, it's not a real movie. When it looks real, we wanna see that movie. So we finally made the movie because people just asked for it. And I was adamant about being resourceful again. All the shots that are in the trailer are really great. I got to reverse engineer the trailer into a movie so that I can use that shot that's in the trailer. Like this girl in the waterfall, why would this girl be in the waterfall? I thought of a really clever way that he gets the bad guy. Her face is kind of covered by this hair.

We'll cast Lindsay Lohan there or the Senator will switch it out for Robert De Niro. Well, I just reversed engineer it. So every time there's a shot in the trailer, it's in the movie, but I shot all the footage around to lead up to it. That's another fun creative exercise is to reverse engineer something.

You just did like this on the day. You just threw a bunch of cards out basically with that trailer. And now you gotta go make a movie using all those cards. That's like a creative exercise that I thought so satisfying, so fun. Yeah, that was beautiful. You're actually known in part, maybe you can correct me,

but to do pretty unexpected, surprising, kind of interesting casting. So Robert De Niro is an example of that. And that's just a great role. The second aspect of that, I heard the story that you can just get an actor in and out in just a few days. Really fast. The Robert Rodriguez experiences, they call it.

How do you make that happen? Can you just tell the story of Robert De Niro? Well, I'm the editor, I'm the cameraman, I'm the DP. And so when I call him and say, I've got you as the villain in this whole movie, but I'm going to shoot, I swear I'm going to shoot you on four days. You come down four days. In fact, there's a scene where he's in the hospital. He's just smiling. He's having such a good time because he couldn't believe it. I said, guess what? When you wake up from your hotel room at the Stephen F.

Austin, you just crossed the hallway. That's the set. The room next to yours, we turned into the hospital set. So you're just going to come laying there in your pajamas. Really? That's the set. The room next to yours, we turned into the hospital set. So you're just gonna come laying there in your pajamas. Really? That's what you did? Yeah, we had to save time. We only have four days. So everything had to be very thought out

to be like boom, boom, boom, let's shoot the money, get him out of this. We don't have to spend a lot of money on him. Book a room in a hotel, set up to look like a hospital room. Yeah, that's our set. And it's real, you don't have to dress it. And it's just right there.

All you do is put like a little tube there, you know, like for his IV, and then you have a couple of nurses and it looks like- You're a genius. It was a Rappagenero. Resortsful. Resortsful. Next door. But I said, you're going to think about me when you're on your next Meet the Fockers movie, and you're on there for six months before they have you sitting in a trailer. I don't like to do that. So I gave Lady Gaga her first two movies because after Machete, she said publicly, she said, I saw Machete and my song Americano should have been in Machete. I thought she saw Machete.

So I called her up and I said, hey, I'm making a sequel. And I would certainly use your music. But have you ever thought about acting? Because you're an amazing performer. I think I've worked with a lot of actors who are also musicians and they're always great because I already know how to be a persona, be on stage, be in front of a bunch of people, which most actors can't do.

And she said, actually, I studied acting before I became a singer. So, well, you'll never be able to be in a movie because you know what, they don't know how to shoot people out. They want six months of your time and you're always on tour. But if you come be here, I have a part for you,

I can shoot you out in half a day. This whole section of a movie and I'll shoot your movie poster. It's incredible. She's like, okay. So she shows up. I had all the sets, like a conveyor belt right next to each other. Shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot. She's in the car. That's why she had me do her music video for Rain On Me later. She said, we should just go to Austin. Robert, put me on a grease. I was throughout that whole movie. I don't know how we did that. It was half a day. She was there half a day. I did the same for Sin City 2.

I was like, I have a set here waiting for you. If you're on tour in Houston, just driving to Austin, I'll shoot you out in half a day. You could be in a scene with Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Sure. She came down. So wait, how do you take Robert De Niro? How do you take Lady Gaga and like, solve the puzzle of all the scenes they have to be in?

How do we shoot them quickly, efficiently, conveniently? You have to edit your own movie. I have this analogy, a food analogy that works really well. Script is like your grocery list. Filming is like grocery shopping. Getting the best performances, getting the best beat, getting the best ingredients, right? Editing is like the cooking. Too much of this, not enough

that. You fucked the whole thing up. So many filmmakers do not edit. And they give it to some other guy who might look at all your ingredients and go, well, this is all great, but I'm going to go make a fucking souffle. And he makes something else. So by doing that job, I mean, I've worked on some big stuff and I realized finally after many years, because I've always job, I mean, like I've worked on some big stuff and I realized finally, after many years, because I've always edited, I realized this is why movies cost so much. It could be 150, 200 people on the crew. And I swear not one of them knows how to edit, not one. So they're getting the wrong stuff. They're having to reshoot shit. The editor is in a room somewhere useless calling after the fact. We still need to get this closeup. Or you gotta reshoot that cause it doesn't match.

Cause no one knows editing. So if you just know that, you're already miles ahead of 99% of Hollywood. But that's just how I learned by accident. So I kind of stumbled upon it. But, and I realized that's what the problem is. Cause across the board, I'm watching them going, that's not gonna match. You guys are just spending money, sending crews out,

shooting stuff for this. It's just, it's a clusterfuck. Let me show you. And that's how it's in city. Bruce Willis, nine days. Brittany Murphy's in all three stories, one day. Benicio Latorre, three days. It's just like, you're just shooting their stuff. Mickey Rourke is in a sequence with Rudger Hauer. We shot eight months apart. I didn't have Rudger Hauer until I was doing Sharkbone Lavagirl. So I just shot Mickey acting with me and then I shot Rudger acting with me and then I just cut them together. What's weird is like editing exercises are like, I used to do these editing exercises where I would do my VCRs together and I would cut my movies, but sometimes I would just cut a music video. And I cut a music video once because I was a big fan of Rudger Hauer and a big fan of Mickey Rourke.

So I said, I want to make it look like they're in a movie together. So I cut this music video together. And so it shows like lightning on Rudger in The Hitcher and then lightning on Mickey from Rumblefish. But Rumblefish is black and white. So I made the whole thing black and white. I was like 19. I was 19 years old when I did that. And then years later, I'm making Sin City. I shot Mickey not knowing who the other actor was going to be until I cast him eight months later and it was Rudger. I'm cutting them together to look like they're in the same movie and it's in black and white. I'm like, I've done this before. Oh my God, I found that old video. It's like, oh my God, I already made a movie of them in black and white. That's some weird shit, right? That's the magic of creativity. It's like, oh my God, I already made a movie of them in black and white. That's weird shit, right? That's the magic of creativity. It's like sometimes when you have a vision, it's not clear,

but it's coming to you from the future. So you got to just follow the voice. No matter what anyone says about your curtains, just follow the voice you got in your head because you don't know and you're not smart enough to know. And you don't need to know, you just need to do, you just need to be the hands. So this is like what you can do with no time or money. When you know all those jobs, it's the benefit of knowing those jobs. Like I said, the more you know those jobs, the more you know your main job, which is being creative, but on the day thinking on your feet. So I'm going to show you this, this test.

Okay. So for DUSTLED on the TV series, I would always shoot the first episode and the last episode of like a seven or eight episode season. There was three seasons. By the time we got to the third season, I was doing a lead-off, so I couldn't do the big finale episode. And my actor who plays the George Clooney character, DJ Catrona, he's somebody who fucking wanted to be a writer, was writing. He wrote Fight and Flight. It's this movie that's going to come out with Josh Arnett. That's his. He wrote it. After doing this, he was like, man, hearing you talk, you know what?

I got, this is what I love about, you inspire people. The feedback loop inspires you back. He said, man, hearing your talk for Red 11 and the cards and I've got a script that's partially written. I'm just going to go crank it out in three days. I'm going to cut off the phone in three days. I'm going to finish that thing in three fucking days." Then he came back and he said, I finished the script and I read it. I go, you read it in three days?

I go, well, I wrote something before, but I just kept thinking I wasn't ready. Then you told me to think about not being ready and you said that, it really resonated. I went and I finished it in three days. I go, man, I'm going to do that. I'm going to go do the DJ method. I called the DJ method. I have a bunch of half-baked ideas that I'm just going to go turn off the phone and finish the thing in three days.

I'll fix it later, but those three days, it's going to be pure pipe. It's just going to be coming through because you're just going to be picking up the pen. So anyway, he came to me with this idea. He said, oh man, I was hoping you'd do the last episode of Dust Till Dawn, because I had this great idea for a scene, we're in a zombie town, Western town. We have those guns where you have to pull the trigger,

you know, the hammer back before you can fire. So I thought, what if I have a gun that's empty and I got bullets in the other hand, and I bump into a zombie, the bullets go flying. I jump and I catch all the bullets and shoot the guy before I hit the ground. Okay, that's kind of like a real cool, like Desperado type thing, but dude, it's just a seven day shoot for these episodes.

Every one of the crew will have a different idea on how to do that. Stunt guy will put you on wires because you have to do all that action or the DP isn't even operating the camera. It's a camera guy. The director doesn't know how to shoot. He's not operating the camera. It's a camera guy. The director doesn't know how to shoot. He's not operating the camera. Your editor is in a room somewhere. VFX guys aren't there.

You're not going to be able to ask them how to do it. But I am my own VFX. I came up with how we did all the shots in Sin City and all the spiking. We need one guy to come do it. I'll come do it for you. I'll come do it because I'm already going to be there because I have to shoot a second unit fight scene for the other actor who wanted a cool fight scene. So I was already doing that. When it comes to your scene, we'll switch places because it's got to be done quick because you've got to shoot it in 20 minutes because you've got a ton

of other shit you've got to shoot and you'll just never get it. You won't even get it in a film schedule, in a regular movie schedule. It's just too crazy. You need somebody with a vision to do the whole thing. So this is what it would look like if you were on the set. I'm going to show you the footage and I'm going to show you the scene. I have to show it to you a couple of times because you're not going to believe what you're about to see. So if you were on the set, this is what it would look like. So I get there. They said, we're ready for that scene. So I get over there to the set and I go, okay, where are you coming out of? He goes, this building. Where are you getting the bullets from? That body.

Okay, bring that body closer. Okay, stunt guy, bring a pad over. I wanna see you just jump and start to twist as if you're turning. I just wanna see how much air time you can get to get any action done before you hit the pad. He starts to jump, he's barely starts jumping. He's already hitting the pad.

So I was like, okay, that ain't gonna work. You get out of here. DJ, you're gonna do it. I have no idea how I'm gonna do this. I hadn't thought about it before, but now you're there. This is so awesome. And now the options are very limited. You're very limited, look at the sun.

You're gonna see the sun not move. You see, that's the point where the sun starts getting lost. I have to shoot this in 20 minutes. You're gonna do three jumps and I'm gonna cut it to look like one jump. All the bullets are gonna miss. Only one's gonna go in. So here, three jumps and I'm going to cut it to look like one jump. All the bullets are going to miss. The only one's going to go in.

So here, just follow what I'm saying because we don't have time. What cameras do we have? What's on the A camera? A long lens. Oh yeah, that's my camera. I'll upgrade that. What's on the B camera? Steady cam. Leave it on steady cam. No chance. No time to convert it. At one point, I want to lower it. So just flip it upside down. We'll flop it later. Give me the main camera. Okay. DJ, start running towards that bullets and grab it and pretend like it gets shot out of your hand. I shoot it in slow motion, but I'm showing you how it would look on the set.

Okay, now the bullets are flying. I'm gonna add those digitally. I'm gonna hold the bullets up to the light in each angle so that they know what it's supposed to look like so they can match that. Otherwise it'll look phony. Now, first jump.

I just want you to commit to just jumping out and just look at the barrel. Just look at the barrel on your hands when you're jumping, because that'll look like you're looking at the bullets. And just don't even think about that you're gonna catch a bullet. Don't think about that you're gonna start turning. Just stretch your body out, get a really graphic look,

look how cool that looks. And then the side view, it's shot this at the same time. You can already tell, it's gonna look like bullets are missing, right? Okay, now I need this part though. I need the part where he's catching the bullet. This little window there, how am I gonna do that?

With a lens that long, it's going to be all out of focus. It's not going to be slow motion enough. He even knows me and he's like, what the hell am I doing? Just lay on the pad and rock up and down. And as you're coming down, that'll look like you're falling as I'm zooming in because I'm operating the camera and I'm cutting this in my head. And I'm saying, just do it again. He's like, what is it?

Rock up and then as you go down, it's going to look like you're falling. Well done. You've caught a bullet. One went in. Now, second jump. When you do the next jump, as if we just passed those other moments, you've caught a bullet already. So now you're going to snap it closed and start your turn. It's all you'll get before you hit the pad. Snap, turn. So like this is, I want the cameras to feel like they're dropping with them. That'll give you more of the sensation. So let's actually lower that steady cam shot, flip it upside down and get a low angle.

See, I look at the sun's right there, hasn't gone behind the building yet. That, and then my camera, I lowered my camera down and I got that. Good angle, good angle. Right, okay, now, last jump. I bury a thin, I said, just bear me, bring me a thin mattress because I want him to do all the stunts. I don't want a stunt guy because he does this himself. He just did it in three jumps. But the audience will know they'll just be like,

we believe that this guy can do anything. I want you just to finish by turning and cocking the hammer back and firing before you hit the ground. I'll give you two takes for that. Almost gets it there. Then we do a second take. Boom. Now, that other one was probably a little better, even though you don't really see it. I've got to go do everything though. I got to cut it. I got to add the sound effects myself. I got to put the music in myself because music guys would just end up filling it with music and ruin it. Sound effects guys would just fill it full of sound effects and ruin it. I want all the sound to drop out. So as he's jumping, all you hear is the wind in his jacket, the clinking of the bullets as they're bouncing off. So you have this breathless moment, no music, cut the music. And that moment you cut it so that you're like, I wonder

if he's going to make it. Right? So I go home, I cut it. Before I even have the visual effects in, I just cut it that night because I cut my own sound effects. I cut my sound effects in. You can already tell it's going to work. You can already see, even with the bullets not there, you can tell by the sound where they're going to be. It's going to work. I call them up and say, dude, this is going to work great. So then I go to the effects guys and I go, okay, there's the bullet in this frame. And the next frame is here because I used to animate and the next frame it's there. Then it hits the barrel and then it starts bouncing this way.

I want it that clear so we can follow that a bullet was supposed to go in and that it bounced way over there. And then this bullet bounced way over there and then they send it back and a bunch of bullets come down. No guys, listen to what I say. I'm going to show you again. I'm going to draw it to you again. Just the sound will play like there's multiple bullets flying. I don't need to see all those bullets or the eye's not going to know where to you again. Just the sound will play like there's multiple bullets flying.

I don't need to see all those bullets or the eyes not going to know where to go. So then they got it right. Brilliant. And then check this Wow. Wow. Well done. You didn't even see that in a feature film, much less a TV show. Well done. Just as a director. Well done. Oh, thank you. Here, just one more time.

Show you something you didn't notice both times. That's amazing. Just those decisions coming together perfectly. Just really well done. And like this, you got minutes. Just moving the camera like you decided to do really worked really well, the balancing of the mattress, whatever. And it's not like you have this whole plan figured out ahead. You're literally in the moment.

It's coming through you. But you're seeing it though, right? I'm seeing it because I've done it enough. That's why you really want to learn all those jobs because it comes to a moment like this when the shit's fucking hitting the fan, you got to know how to pull it out. You could have gotten all those people together

and they never would have figured that out. You had one person that had to see it all the way through. You're seeing the bullet, how it's going to go in the results. I've done enough times to know that if you don't do it just right, you're going to lose the image. You're not going to know where to follow and you go in the result. I've done enough times to know that if you don't do it just right, you're gonna lose the image. You're not gonna know where to follow and you'll miss the point.

And also, yeah, I love that you're thinking about where the eyes of the audience will go. And that's like, I feel like too many people might think about some more general concept of a scene versus like the audience wears their eyes. Well, you're drawing it through sound, through picture. I'm going to show you. If you notice without the sound, you don't really see him click that thing back. The sound is so essential here.

Watch this. You don't really- Right. I thought I saw it. You think you saw it, but you hear it. So you feel like seeing it. But watch, it's actually, he's already finished. You don't really see him do it, you know, but you swear you saw it in a close up because the sound is in a close up. Now here's another thing you didn't notice. He hits this ground in the first shot. Watch. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. You didn't notice it because I didn't play the sound there. So if you don't hear it, you don't see it. And if you don't see it, but you play a sound, you hear it and you see it in your mind, right? So check that out now with the sound on and you'll see both those parts play completely different now.

Now you hear it. I know you can get away with that because I know editing and I thought I'm going to play this down. I can go ahead and milk that shot as long as I want. I'll make him be in the air longer, even though he's actually touching the ground by not playing the sound. And that comes from, you said directing, but it's not directing. People can direct and say, this is what I want. But to actually execute it, you need to be a craftsman. And to be a craftsman, you have to learn all those crafts. And not just with the visuals, but with the sound. With the sound too, sound is so important.

Sound is after picture. And if you cut sound, you realize how important sound is. I would learn so much by doing those movies like Desperado action movies where you go, wow, the sound, I can add an extra sound effect of an extra punch he didn't even throw. And it sounds like he's beating the shit out of this guy and you only need to see one or two hits and you can hear five. You know where you can push your limits because you've done it, you've done it and you've

got the experience. It's so amazing that you can use sound to make a person believe they saw something that wasn't actually there on the screen. Yeah, your brain fills it in. That's crazy. And that's why that's so important because if you don't know that,'t actually there on the screen. Yeah, your brain fills it in. That's crazy. And that's why that's so important because if you don't know that, you'll be on the set shooting 10 takes of that because you're like, no, I didn't see him click it back. And then see him click it back. That's really needed. I can do that with sound.

Let's just go. Let's just keep moving. And when you say sound close-up, what does that mean? So all the other sound dropped away and all you hear is like the sound, like the mic's right on that thing so that you hear it so big in your ear that you swear it was in close up too, but just the sound was close up. How do you, sorry, just to give an insight into like that process of sound design,

are you like listening to the sound and just like experiencing the feeling that creates. And then you're like, that's just right. I'm lane and post a lot. So I have a whole library of sound effects from all my movies. So I can pull up like the gun sound we created for Bruce Willis and Sin City and use that and mix it with Antonio's gun from Desperado. You know, I remember in four rooms, there's a scene where the bellhop

goes into the hotel room, jams his key into it and clicks it. I used all gun sounds for the sound of the key instead of key sounds because it wasn't sound close enough. So if you listen to it, you hear all these sounds from gun to do the key. It's like that conveys the sound better. I'll use different kinds of sounds that just have impact and put it somewhere like when he hits the ground. So I like playing with all that in posts when I'm editing because it makes my editing job easier. Sometimes it's like, oh, the sound is covering me. I don't need to keep trying to massage this.

The sound is actually selling it. And so I keep those sound effects into the final movie. So it's just all part of the necessary. It's like being a chef, you're there cooking and you're going like, I know the recipe says this, but I think it really could use jalapenos and some extra pepper and maybe a little more salt. And then it needs an acid of some kind.

So I'm gonna add some lemon juice. Yeah, you made me realize, I'm not sure where I saw that, but you were talking about making sort of almost like home films for fun. And I think you mentioned how exciting you can make a very mundane scene by just adding sound. Yeah. I think there was like a little kid for this car. You have one of those little zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz the cars, but then I replace it with real car sounds. And it just sounds, your brain links the reality of the real thing.

It's crazy. You realize how unimportant the visual is and how important the sound is actually. Sound is everything. That's what I was really lucky in Mariachi that my camera didn't work for sound because then I got really good sound that I would have gotten with a shitty mic out of frame because that's the first telltale sign of a low budget movie is bad sound. Bad sound right away. You can already hear all this hiss and all this mic was too far and you're like low budget movie. Before your eyes even tell you the sound gives it away. Isn't that amazing? The audio is first. Sound is first really,

even though it's a visual medium. That's so crazy. Just on the, what's the plan with the four action films? Like what are the next steps? I'll probably direct more than one because there's already several that I wanna do, but I'm gonna direct at least one, but I'm producing all three, all four there at my studio. It does draw you in. It draws you in and it makes you go now think of ideas

you never would have thought of for, mainly because it has a filter. Well, now I don't have to think of all these ideas. I actually have, like me on that set, there's only very few things I can actually come up with that are just action driven first, but they have a great character. You'll get to it a lot faster with a filter. That's the beauty of a filter is that now you've just shrunk your target and now you can hit that target. People are coming up with ideas because now they've got proximity and they've got a reason

to come up with the idea. They've got a deadline, which is the best thing you can do, is have a deadline. Because when you have a deadline, you can freaking move mountains. I had a spy kids in the theater every year, three years in a row, not being pre-planned. Every year there was a spike is. Now, the third one was the biggest one, biggest cast, mostly green screen, video game, and the first digital 3D movie ever. So getting visual effects companies to make that, we realized, oh, I shot it with two cameras. That means each effect shot has to be done twice from a different angle. So I went to the studio midway through that and said, there's not going to be a movie in the theaters in time. You're going to have to push the date back. And they said, okay, we've never heard you panic. We'll

push the date back for you. They called back 10 minutes later. I was like, oh, thank God, because it's really complicated. I didn't know it was going to be this complicated, but I wanted a challenge. And they said said McDonald's will sue us for $20 million if we move the date. You have to have a movie in the theater. We started shooting that movie in January of 2003. It was in 3D in theaters by July. That's the fastest any effects movie has ever been done because you had no choice. So Deadline makes you do things and make decisions really

quickly. And it was the biggest of the three. Deadlines are good. And it's hard for us to self-impose a deadline sometimes because we know it's a bullshit deadline and your brain knows it's bullshit. But why do deadlines work? Because when the deadline's coming up, what do you do? You start to put the pen to the paper and it starts just flowing. You have no choice. You have to get out of the way and open the pipe. 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, because 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 we close the funding in May. But we didn't say when still.. I think that gives them a sense

of a deadline like, shit, it might be May 1st or it may be May 2nd, so we better get my idea going. I think it works in your favor because then you come up with stuff. 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.

I have to ask you about Alita. So you've done so many incredibly innovative projects. This is one of them. It turned out to be this visual masterpiece. There's a bunch of complexity, beautiful complexity about it in, it turned out to be this visual masterpiece. There's a bunch of complexity, beautiful complexity about it in that it started out as a film that James Cameron was supposed to make. And then you started to collaborate with him on it.

And these two, I would say brilliant directors, but with different styles like you were talking about. And so, plus there's the complexity of, for people who haven't seen it, you're putting this artificial creation, this beautiful, photorealistic, artificial creation of a human being into a real world. So you have to capture the performance,

not just the motion, but the performance of this actor, put them into this, with the power of technology, into the real world, so convey all the emotion, the richness of the human face. Can you just speak to the process of bringing that world to life? Sure. I mean, why? And I never would have attempted it.

It wasn't Jim is Jim has, has figured a lot of 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 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. I was reading it going like, this is a great story. He was like, I don't know how the fuck he's going to do this. It's impossible. He'd just done Terminator 2 a few years before. That was the thing to the art. So, Alita 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. I remember visiting him on the set. 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 till 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 is 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 seeing 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

weather 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, avatars 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. Well, here the Troublemaker studio? Yeah. That's where it was?

Yeah. It was shot here. 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 just shoot it all the time for Mexico or South America or Europe or whatever. It's seven streets and we added digitally above, but the

ceilings are 20 feet high. You got to come see, you don't believe that it's here. It's unbelievable. Where is it in North of Austin? It's where the old airport was. So it's like on 51st street, you know, 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, you know 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.

It'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. Can you actually educate me on the WETA process? Is this like a performance capture technology? Yeah, we 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. We have witness cameras around everywhere to pick up where she is. 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. It's like a bunch of technical things you do. But the idea is to whatever performance she gives, she's such a great actress, is to capture all of that. Because then this character that doesn't even exist

will feel very emotional and you have to be tied to it. You have to feel its heart. And she was the heartbeat of it. So she's acting with all this? Acting with all that, but it just disappears. She's not even, it's like it's not even there. Like we don't notice this this year. It's like that.

She just performed through it. What was some interesting, unique, challenging things about you directing her performance in this kind of world? I just knew she had to be her. It was gonna be just so easy with her. She's just so great. Everything was just so real

and everything was just like she's that character. She becomes that character who's seen this world for the first time. No special effects gonna help you with that if the performance isn't there. So it was all about getting the performance and casting the right actors. That's why you get Christoph Waltz there and you get Jennifer Connelly. These masters are all on the set. you've got an amazing cast of people. And that's really the heart of it, so that the technology goes away. How hard is it to get the actors to

act when the full world is not around you? We put so much of the world around them. When you see the city, we put a blue screen way in the back to just make the city keep going. But we built the sets there, the town, we built the real set so everything was very tangible and real. And that way she had to fit into that world and be as real as that. Because if it was all done in CG, well, then now you can fudge everything. But if you put her in a real environment, that's a real challenge. And that really helps them in Avatar because that whole place is created in Avatar. You could get away with a lot, but they wanted to commit to that

kind of detail. And on the next Avatar, that's why it just feels like you're really there. It's just stunning. And you get there by having something to work on like this to take the technology to the next level. So it was cool to be able to help, knowing this should be helpful to him in his process and not just distracting him. But then also he liked that his artist had something else to work on besides just Avatar to just work on something different to freshen up their perspective on things and methodology. And so yeah, that was a really exciting movie to work on. And that we got to shoot it here, a Jim Cameron movie here in Austin, that was the best, having him here. And that my whole crew who's worked with me 25, 30 years, everyone had an extra spring in their step.

They're like, wow, we're working on a Jim Cameron movie. I mean, that's just like a high bar of achievement for everybody, you know, working on it. Since we talked about a few other directors, can you speak to the genius of James Cameron? Like what makes him special? You talked about some of the difference in your approach and his. He's created some of the difference in your approach in his.

He's created some of the most special movies ever also. What's behind that? What would you say is interesting about the way his creative mind works? I think any of those guys, George Lucas, you know him, you know John Lasseter when he did Pixar. It's a mix of, and I got really lucky. My first job was a Photoshop because my dad had a friend who owned a Photoshop.

He said, your summer job. I was 16. Go work for my friend Mario. I got a Mario's Photoshop. I'm developing pictures. I think you develop photos from film. He said, here, take this camera home. Give me one of those cameras. Take this camera home and some film. I need you to learn how to use the camera so you can help me sell the cameras. So I went home and I have a bunch of siblings. So like, when the star's a bedhead, taking all these pictures of everybody, I take it back and he looks at the pictures

when he develops, he's like, whoa, these are really creative. You're a creative person. So when sometimes people tell you something that you can't unhear,. He goes, that's a gift. What you need to know now, now you need to become technical. Because most creative people need technicians,

and technicians always need creative people because they're not usually the same. You're born with creativity. It's against your nature to be technical, but you can learn if you apply yourself. If you're both technical and creative, you'll be unstoppable. I was like, stop, wow. Here, I want you to learn zone photography, And if you're both technical and creative, you'll be unstoppable.

And I was like, stop, wow. So here I want you to learn zone photography, I want you to learn the technical part of it. So that's why I didn't take a crew in Mariachi, because I knew if I'm just a creative person and I need a crew to go actually technically make the movie, I'll always need something. And when you want to really change your

life, you want to get your I need list down to little as possible. Because if you're like, well, I want to shoot my movie, but I need a cameraman and I need somebody who knows how to lie to your, your, I need list keeps growing. That's further and further and further you will be from what you need to accomplish. So I kind of went down there without any help. Remember that script analogy where the guy said, throw away three scripts? I said, no, I'm going to write three scripts and then shoot each one so I get better at each one of those jobs so I can learn to be technical. My technical capability was so little. I'm literally calling the guy on the phone. How do I use this camera? That's how little I knew about it, but I knew by

doing the job I would learn. By being both, that's really the key. So Jim Cameron is like that. Jim Cameron, when you think of those guys, George Lucas, very technical and very creative. John Lasseter, very technical, but very creative. Pixar. Jim Cameron, very technical, very creative. Putting those two things together is really what sets you apart from other technicians and other creative people. It's very, very powerful. A lot of creative people, again, it's against their nature to be technical. They don't want to do it.

Make yourself do it. Read the manuals. Take the lessons. It frees you up because then you can go do like I just showed you in that demo. You're able to now be a technical person and creative and then you're unstoppable. He's one of the best at it. and he just knows how to craft a story. He's very analytical as well. We bounce off each other in a funny way. He goes, man, he came down to visit my studio before he did Alita, and he went, you only surround yourself with people who are like you.

You exude creativity from every pore, and so does everyone at your studio. I go, yeah, I didn't hire them that way on purpose, but I think if you're not that way, you kind of don't belong there and you kind of leave. Then I went to his studio, and there are a bunch of Jim Camerons there. They're like, oh my God. They're all very technical. You can't get all fuzzy with the logic or the... You can't get all fuzzy with the logic, or you can't get really creative with the physics or anything, they're like, no, that's not how it would work. It would be like, and they're just, wow, super great at what they do, bar is sky high,

and they're all like that, because yeah, if you're not like that, you can't hang with those guys. You can't hang with him very long. I heard a story where the guitar case being a rocket launcher, where to you, you create this real world where everything is possible. The magic feels real.

And for James Cameron, he has to know how a guitar case would work that would actually be able to double as a rocket launcher. When I show him the trailer for Grindhouse and he sees the machine gun laying and all that, he just goes, whoa! That's unbridled filmmaking from the id. It makes sense only the second you're watching it, not a second after, but the second you're watching it and you believe it. But he's really interesting in that he's so prolific. I walked

into his writing studio and it'd be like on one of the tables. Like, do you have those papers there? Imagine them that thick, that thick, that thick, all script, script, script. What are these? He goes, this is a whole space opera version of this movie. We're not making that one. It's like he's just cranking out all this stuff. It's like, again, can I take this and go make this, please? Yeah, we bounced off each other because I loved his analytical part of his brain. I'm not that analytical. I'm just kind of like, hey, I'm really creative feeling. I'm like, woo, I'll go this way and then woo, I'll go that way. And he likes that about me. But I like, I want to be able to think about things too much. You think about things like, what makes a movie a billion dollar hit? What are the elements that you need? And I'm going to

analyze that and I'm going to make sure my movie does that." He engineers a submarine that can break the world record. He engineers a movie that can break the world record. He has that engineering mind, but the creative part, that's very rare. That's very rare and he's capitalized on both. He had this submarine model like this big on his desk, the one that he broke the world record for going and just seeing it and knowing he even had kids and stuff and wife. And I'm like, weren't you afraid going down there with you know, something could happen? He's like, no, I wasn't afraid. Like, why not? Because I designed

this scape vehicle. Yeah, if it was any other bozo, I'd be afraid. But he designed this scape vehicle. That kind of confidence, that's him. He just knows if some other Bozo had designed this game vehicle, I would be afraid. But total confidence, because he did it. The confidence of extreme competence is brilliant. Just to get you excited about how creative this stuff is. So, Desperado was the only movie on the Sony lot

being edited digitally. Not only was I editing on a computer, I was editing in my house, which in 1994 was just unheard of. So I'm there in my house and they made me cut in LA because at first I told the studio, I want to edit Desperado myself because it's important that I edit it. They go, no, you can't. Why not? We never had a director edit his own movie here. So we don't want to set a precedent. Okay. So they thought it would give you too much power. So this is the power of precedent. I said, well, you bought Mariachi and I edited that. So I said, okay, but you're going to have to edit in LA so we can watch you because we don't think you know what you're doing. We saw the footage

and the shots are really short. It's too short. I was like, shots are too short. Oh, cause I was shooting my cuts. You know, like they're used to seeing footage. Antonio walks into the bar and it's going to be a dialogue scene. They expect the whole thing done from a wide shot. I would shoot the wide shot. He walks in, cut, move the camera.

Let's get over here. Cause we wanted to, cause I'm not going to use it for the rest of the scene. I know we're going to get into coverage cause I've already cut it. So I was like, huh, that's interesting. So I cut the first scene. If you've ever seen Desperado,

the first scene is the best scene. Stephen Semmy's telling a story, he's talking about the myth of the mariachi, he's doing it, it's crazy. It's crazy. So then they come over, I say, hey, come see my first scene. So they come over to my house, they watch it.

Okay, you know what you're doing, they leave. But I was cutting Desperado in my house that I rented there and then we shot Dust Till Dawn at the same time. So I was cutting Desperado four rooms and Dust Till Dawn myself. I'm the editor. I don't have an editing team other than the ones who import it into the machine. So Del Toro came over, Soderbergh came over. Can I borrow it for Schizophilus? Then no one had heard of somebody having an Avid in their living room. Jim comes over and he goes, I hear you have an Avid in your living room. And I go, yeah, come check it out. I just like, I roll out of bed. It's like, sounds unremarkable because this is what you do right now,

but back in 94, it was unheard of. I'm cutting three movies at the same time myself. I roll out of bed. I come here, I can cut Desperado, I can cut Dustalante. He went, that's it. I hate working with editors. You know, when I was doing Terminator 2, they wouldn't even let me put the bad to the bone song in Terminator 2, because they didn't think it would work. And I had to sneak into the edit room at night on the weekend to cut it in, and show them the next day. It's like, that's your own movie. You can't give that kind of power to people.

He said, I hate working with editors. I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna tear down a wall in my house. I'm gonna put it in an avid, I'm gonna cut my next movie. And he did, he got an Oscar for editing Titanic, he had two other editors, but now no one ever took him for a ride like that again.

He edits on every movie, he has other editors, but he can go do his own cuts. When he shows me like footage, he's showing me himself on his own machine. And it's like, again, it gives you all those tools to be able to really find your vision that you're looking for, because you can't always explain it to somebody

because you don't always know yourself. It's part of, you kind of come up with it as you do the process. It's just a small tangent about the different software and the technologies involved. So you mentioned Avid as Premiere Pro. Premiere was still in its early stages then. I think Soderbergh looked at it and it said,

yeah, I can't afford an Avid for this movie. I'm gonna go do it. So I think he started cutting on Premiere, but I'm sure it's all better now. I just have always used an Avid because I just always ran it back to the same production. I think I've just, I don't have to buy a new one, but there's lots of good,

I've heard about all kinds of systems. I just use the same one. I guess that's the question I have for you. It's just interesting for people. It's very interesting to me, just the details, use Avid. Like what do you like, multiple monitors, one monitor? I have a couple of monitors and then I'm one big monitor to watch it if I'm watching the like, multiple monitors, one monitor? I have a couple monitors,

and then I'm one big monitor to watch it if I'm watching the scene back because the monitors are still a little wacky. I mean, if I were to design my own system, I'd probably design it differently. But I'm literally, I've worked on that thing since 94. I still don't know all the shortcuts and all this shit. I still use it like my tape deck, play, rewind, pause,

and I can cut so fast with that. Just, I don't use the mouse for shortcuts. I'm just like, ba-dum. So you found your way, preferred way, the workflow of using it, and now you can sort of let go of the technical and then be creative. Yeah, just be creative.

It's just a tool. It's just a tool, and it's like, it doesn't matter which system it is. It's like, if you can get it to work for you, great. Like, there's a lot of problems I have with it that I know are probably fixed on another system, but that they'll have a whole other set of problems. So it's like, well, why bother with that?

There's limitations I think that it has that would need to be fixed, but not for what I'm doing. I mean, I can still do what I need. It feels like part of the artistry is, every system has limitations and you learn how to work around those limitations. I mean, that's every single thing. My first VCRs, like those things were,

I was always known for taking what little basic equipment and milking the shit out of it. What it could, pushing the boundaries of what it can do. And now it's flipped. Now you're working on a program and you can spend 10 years on this thing and you're scratching the surface of what it's capable of. It's totally flipped the other way.

I'm not milking anything anymore. I'm barely getting the smallest of what it's capable of. It's totally flipped the other way. I'm not milking anything anymore. I'm barely getting the smallest capability of it because I would have to spend a lot of time to figure out all the stuff that it can possibly do. And I'm sure it's all great, fantastic stuff, but what a different world than when I grew up where it was like, okay, let me splice these two sound things together and it was so hard to get it to do. People would be like, you got that movie

out of that equipment? Where now it's the other way around. You know, it's like, all this equipment is great. So when people come to me and say, oh, God, well, I've only got this camera. I was like, that camera's 10 times better than anything I had for my first 15 years of filmmaking. So you have no complaints.

This is like, you can just start now and just start making stuff. I have a lot of friends who are huge fans of your movies. So one of them asked me that I absolutely must ask you, do you know if there's a sequel of Alita coming? We're working on it. We're definitely working on it. Jim and I both want to make it. That's usually when we meet, we talk about it.

I gave him something to read. He's a little busy with his Avatar movie, but I'm going to see him again soon and we'll see where it's at. But we would love to make another one. We have ideas on how to do it because it was always built to be a trilogy. And he sees that there's a lot of love for it. It was just weird because it was a Fox movie and then got bought by Disney. So they weren't really making Fox movies because they had enough work with their Disney movies.

But now they're starting to make some Fox movies. Like they did Deadpool, and some Fox movies are starting to get made. So time might be right for us to come back and do an Alita. No, I hope you do soon. But it is, I mean, you do so many different kinds of movies. That's a whole different kind of puzzle, right? Oh yeah.

No, but it's not a bad one. It's a good one, it's a cool different kind of puzzle, right? Yeah, but it's not a bad one. It's a good one, it's a cool one. It's one of the few, like usually I make kids, family kids movies, or R rated action horror movies. And that was the first time I got to do a PG-13 movie, which was kind of like, it had a lot of action, but it was for families could watch it too.

It was kind of like the best of all worlds. Have to ask you about Sin City, one of my favorite films of all time. It was a visually stunning world. What are some maybe interesting detailed aspects about you creating that world? This is why you just got to follow your nose and go do something. Jim and I were both into 3D early on. Like I visited his set for the Terminator 3D ride.

Dust till Dawn, I wanted to be 3D. Actually, when they got to the bar, if you watched from that point on, everything's kind of set up for 3D. Everything was shooting into the camera and all this, but the cameras they had for 3D and film were those old shitty ones that were so bad that I went, okay, we can't do it. But I really wanted people to have to put on glasses when they got into the bar and it was going to turn into a 3D different movie. I got to do that on Spy Kids 3D.

So when I did Spy Kids 3D, I thought, oh, if I get Jim's cameras that he's done for these underwater 3D documentaries, I can make the first digital 3D film for theaters. And so I did, and it seemed like the easiest way was to utilize that when you put on the glasses when you go into a game world. So there's a green screen, and we shot all the actors on green screen for all the game stuff. And we can do a lot of 3D stuff coming at kids' faces when they're reaching. My 3D is not like the kind they have

in theaters where it's very polite. Mine's like theme park 3D. Where kids are doing like that, trying to grab. That's why it was such a big hit. Nobody does 3D like that. But I wanted that. I want shit falling in people's laps. So you remember, so you go, okay, this is why I'm wearing the glasses. I'm wondering why. And when I went to go make my next movie, so this is how crazy this was. We shot Spy Kids 3. Remember actually how fast they came out. That was in the summer of 2003. A few months later, Once Upon a Time Mexico came out. Two number one movies, both were finishing trilogies of mine. And each one starred Antonio, Danny Trejo, Cheech Marin. When I was editing those at the same time,

you'd be like, whoa, one movie they're killing people and the other ones are like with the kids going like, hey, family. So it was really, you know, fun. It was fun to, it's easier to do very different things than to do like two action movies or two family movies at the same time. But I was like, okay, what's my next movie going to be? Oh shit, how crazy is this? Okay. So Antonio is on the set. I'm going to shoot him out in half a day for Spike is 3D, because he's only in the last scenes on the green screen. Shoot him till lunch. Okay. Now go away, put on your Desperado outfit because we owed some shots for Once Upon a Time Mexico on the green screen. He finished two trilogies in the same day. That's got to be a first if ever, no one's

ever finished two trilogies in the same day. And it's just kismet. It's just how it happened to happen that day was just luck or the universe or whatever. But I needed to make something new now. So I was looking through my bookshelves of inspiration and I picked up my Sin City books, which I've had. I used to be a cartoonist and I always loved how he drew that. Every time I'd see a different edition, I'd buy it, go home and go,

oh, I already have this. I got like three copies of this already. And he would just always grab me by the throat. 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, 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 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. One spot in 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. It looks just like the comic, but it's moving. So I call a comic book artist friend of mine,

Mike Allred, and I said, do you have Frank Miller's number? And he goes, yeah, I do. Okay, I'm gonna call him up. So I call up Frank Miller. Hey, this is Rob Rodriguez. I have a test I'm gonna show you for Sin City. I'm gonna 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 didn't have a flight. I fly up there, have my laptop just like this. Yeah, that's good. 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 then you gotta 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 gonna go back and draw a comic that's so raw that can never be made into a movie. So Chris, 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. He's all excited for about two seconds.

Then he goes, oh no, then we got to write a script and the studio is going to have notes. All that shit he's been through before. It's not like that. I have a whole different setup. I got my own studio in Austin. This is how studio is going to 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 going to be. If you like this idea,

you're not going to 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. You 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. You give me the rights then. If you don't like it, keep it. It's a short film to show your friends. Let's be really cool." So he's like, all right. There's nothing on him to do. It's all in me. I write the script in December, January, Josh Arnett, Marlee Shelton come down, fly Frank in. Shooting for 10 hours on my green screen. We shoot that opening sequence. Incredible opening sequence. Record his 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. Marty 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, I want to do this movie. He's already, I tell you Frank, I used to be a cartoonist. It's the same thing. You're already a director. You're, 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 that it's the visual is half of it. I want it to look just like this the comic to move. Any other studio would just go make it look like any gritty crime movie and they would miss the point that 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 films. You should come direct that one. Shit, you should direct all of them with me because I'm really copying it right out of 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 him 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 going to 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. That's like when you just let it flow, you're just riding the wave. You're not doing any of that. So that's what's by staying in that like urgent, there's always the deadlines are just pushing you to create stuff.

And 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 Lava Girl 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 crazy?

Yeah, like sometimes we'd be shooting with the kids and then 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 editing. 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 going to move. And you were like, wow. So now we have a template with the real drawings and the lighting on how we're going to do it. It was funny because I can do pretty good in Bruce Willis because I know him for so long. If you're doing his voiceover and he would hear my guide voice for the timing and be'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. First of all, why haven't films like that been made? 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 photograph, but it's there, and you're seeing it, 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

tape to glow in the dark like in the comics with still in the shadow? And I realized, oh, use fluorescent tape and a fluorescent light. That way I can keep it, we can still key it. Like 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, so funny it 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 lighting on everybody. Cool edge lights. You could have an edge light back here, an edge light back here, a fill light here. You're not going to erase them. I just take him out. Can you educate me and people curious about this? What is the power of light when you're telling a story, when you're creating a feeling and experience, like what's the artistry of that? 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, cause it's there. So things like that were a lot of the tricks I tried first, cause 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, who, 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 are 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 Sin City to check out the first thing I was gonna show at Comic-Con. He said, now this will really show people what digital is capable of.

This really shows how avant-g guard you can get with that shit that you could never have done that on film. 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 people say don't use those curtains as I'm going to work. Just blow past those guys. Go innovate your own thing because sometimes not knowing is better.

Being too naive to... Don't you know you shouldn't have been able to make that movie that way? People would say like, how did you make a movie at Marist for $7,000? It's impossible. 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, you've talked about like a big part of your approach to filmmaking to life is manifesting. Manifesting the reality you want. In fact, I should sort of comment. I'd love to ask you about manifesting with

You asked me at the beginning of this conversation. Do you consider yourself a creative person? I should just sort of reflect on that because I was very uncomfortable answering that yeah I noticed a little bit and I was like I'm gonna free you up so that you're never uncomfortable again It's scary to say that about about yourself. There's a lot of there's a lot of people who go. Well, you're never uncomfortable again. It's scary to say that about yourself. 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?

Artists isn't necessarily the guy with the French mustache and the funny hat, that's not necessarily an artist. Artists are regular people. And regular people relate to art that's imperfect. If you can make art that's perfect, don't want to 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 there's a fear of creating shitty things. You know, I've, I've created a lot of really shitty things in my life and it always feels like that's really important to do. 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. 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. I know you all want to give me 80, but I want to be a hero and come in at 50 because one, it'll make it better. And then two, you'll make three of them instead of just one. I don't want to just go spend the farm. How many filmmakers will do that? Don't try to get as much money as they can. But when you're spending less, it's a win-win situation. And you have more creative freedom, so they're gonna leave you alone.

You can do whatever you want. So I like the creative limitations that come from less money. That's why I like brass knuckle films. Like we're gonna make them for less so that they are better. Not to make them shitty. So many people have come up to me and said, you know what part I love in your movie? And they'll tell me some scene. And I'm like,

oh, well, that's because we ran out of sun. And we had to do that jump with just him jumping on a pad three times or whatever it is. It's something that you fumbled together. And that's what they're drawn to. They're drawn to that imperfect thing. And so I wouldn't judge it because somebody's, you know, if you called your movie shitty, that's like John Carpenter saying, yeah, nobody liked the thing and it's a shitty movie and everyone hated it. So it must not be good. And then 10 years later, it's a masterpiece. So don't judge it because if you, words we use on ourselves are very powerful. So if you say, well, you know, I'm kind of an artist sometimes and

I make a lot of shitty stuff. Well, that's going to be your lot in life. You know, I'm pretty good shape for a director. It's not because I'm operating the camera, because I work out, right? But I always hated working out. I was not into sports. I was a filmmaker. I was a cartoonist. In high school, I was really tall. They would say, come work, come be in our team. We need, it's a small school, we need you. And I'm like, I don't know how to play any of these things. I'm an artist. There's a line in the faculty that was my line

to my coaches when they would say, you gotta come run with everybody. I would say, I don't think a person should run unless he's being chased. I get that to the Elijah Wood character because that's the guy I identified with. He's there with this camera and that was me. So I hated it. And then because I was a cartoonist, drawing like this for hours, four hours, my back would go out, like out for a month. It would just go out from

being so tall and crunched over. And then when I started making movies, operating the camera and doing steadicam, every year would go out to where I would need cortisone shots to get up again if I'm filming or just be out for a month. And on Spy Kids 2, Riccardo Montalban had bad back surgery that went wrong and he was in a wheelchair. So he's in a wheelchair and I'm in a walker. And he's like, I'm 84, what's your excuse? And I was like, I don't know. I just was operating steady. He goes, you have to work out, Robert. You have to work out. I was like, yeah, okay. I know, I know.

And so then I thought, okay, next year I'm working with Stallone, I'll ask Stallone, I'll ask Stallone, how do you get in shape? Because I need to get in shape. My back's always going out. He goes, get the trainer. Anyone who you ever saw in Hollywood got in shape? They had a trainer. I said, even you?

Anybody go, I need a trainer. He has a trainer. I said, no, I need a trainer. I can't train. He said, well, shit, if you can't even train on your own, then what do us mortal men have? So I got a trainer and guess what happened? Hated it.

I would feel sick when he's coming over because I hate working out. And then some years of doing that, I just, I can't stand it. But I know it's good for my health. So the desire's there. So if you can't accomplish something in your life, it's not a lack of desire. Like if you want to be more creative, it's not a lack of desire. It's a lack of identity. The fact that you're comfortable about saying creative,

it's because there's a lack of identity there. You have lots of desire. You've got to get the identity up and then suddenly you're making shit. So a friend of mine from Mexico, she comes over, I have to stop smoking. My doctor said I have to stop smoking for my health. So a friend of mine from Mexico, she comes over, I have to stop smoking, my doctor said I have to stop smoking for my health, so I'm not smoking right now. So I've been smoking since I was eight years old. So well, you're gonna go back to smoking

because you just told me your identity is a smoker. So right now you're a smoker who's not smoking. What's gonna happen eventually? You have to say, I'm a nonsmoker. You know, like just that lesson I've forgotten. You have to say, I'm a nonsmoker say I'm a nonsmoker. You know, like just that lesson I've forgotten. You have to say I'm a nonsmoker, I'm a nonsmoker. So what does a nonsmoker do? If you believe you're a nonsmoker, you hate smoke.

Start choking to the smell of smoke. Okay, I'll try that. She walks off and I go, shit, I forgot about my own. I wonder where in my life I could apply that. Working out, of course, my God, I hate working out. No wonder I am so miserable. I'll tell my trainer working out, of course. My God, I hate working out. No wonder I am so miserable. I'll tell my trainer and anyone who will listen.

I can't stand working out. I don't understand sports. So that day I said, I'm an athlete. I'm an athlete. That's the last thing I would ever call myself all through my entire life. This was 2012. I'm an athlete.

By the next day, not only did my life completely change, and it's easier if it's opposite day. If you're just doing it by degrees, that's bullshit. You got to go complete opposite. Because if there's a doughnut, if you say, well, I'm going to only half of it, you got to go, no, I'm going to get an apple. Opposite day is much easier. Not only did I change my life working out, I didn't ever needed a trainer. I have not had a trainer since all those years. Because I'm an athlete, I'll just do it.

What does an athlete do? An athlete loves working out. An athlete will make time to work out, and they'll eat right. I would never be the person that would call themselves an athlete. But that's how much you can change your life by changing your identity. So if you want to be more creative, you've already got that in your desire.

You've got enough of that. You don't need more desire. You need more identity. So you got to say, I'm a creative person with a straight face. So when I say, hey, are you a creative person? You go, yeah. Because then if you say that, what do you do? You're gonna do more creative stuff because that's what a creative person does. It doesn't make sense to me how manifesting works, but it does seem to work. Like basically visualizing a path towards a certain kind of future.

I guess everything around you, everything within you kind of makes way for that, makes way for the possibility of that. It's weird. It's weird, but it's kind of a nice to know that you can do that. But you have to just have that conviction and just say, start with a label. Yeah, the R. Start with a label. The double R or the label you just gave yourself. Like I changed my label. My label was, I hate working out. I'm an athlete.

I'm an athlete. I'm not a non-athlete anymore. I'm changing my label. And you get so inspired because now you know what to do. Because you can't help but conform to your identity. You're always gonna conform to your identity. So just change your identity, and you'll change your life. But it's not that hard. I didn't have to go get hypnotized or anything. It was literally, I just told myself,

if I could do that, go from a guy who doesn't wanna work out, hates it, hates it. I had the desire. I was already hiring the guy. I lacked the identity. As soon as I had the desire, I was already hiring the guy. I lacked the identity. As soon as I changed my identity, boom. Well, one of the things for me like that

is probably music, just playing guitar. Are you a musician? Yeah, I'm a musician. Hey, look at you, you paused. I would definitely not, I mean, I'm going along with it now, but if we're honestly, if we're just in normal culture. You wouldn't have said that.

I wouldn't have said that. But I heard you rip on fucking guitar. And I've heard you play kind of amazing in all different kinds of contexts. I should be like freaking Santana by now because I've had a guitar in my hands since I was a kid, but since I'm not a full-time musician, I don't get to play it that often.

So I'm not as good as I should be, but when you apply yourself to just rehearse for a couple of shows, you book some shows. Look at this. This is me just playing our first arena show opening for George Lopez. That was crazy to be on the stages where you're heroes, that you saw them, and now you're seeing what their point of view was. You need to get on stage. You get on stage once and you'll see that it's not as bad as you think. You're not terrified because you're playing pretty complicated things. I've seen you play live.

Yeah, and I mess up a bunch of times, but you don't want to focus on that. You just go like, okay, I got it through. Because when you're up there, it's not that you're like screaming nervous, but your hands just won't work anymore. Something will happen, but that happens to everybody. If you really watch even the best

in their live performances, watch really close. And you see they screw up a couple of things, but you just want to know, because they just go right through it. It's about the live performance and that's how you know it's real. So I think if you can really just lean into it more, really work on the identity part because you've got the desire. You want to play guitar, but as soon as you say, yeah, but I can't play live. You just chopped off your leg at the start of the race. You say, I don't know, you just chopped off your other leg. You're doing this to yourself. You're literally doing this to yourself. I mean, just you, I mean, anybody who pauses,

who hesitates, you don't have to have doubts. Why would you have a doubt? Because you know the process now. It's like, if I don't know how to do something, I know how to figure it out. I didn't know how I was going to do that scene with him jumping and flipping. I didn't know that. But do I have doubt that I'm going to go in there and be able to do it? If you say that you do, now you're a doubtful person. That's how powerful that is. But if you say, no, I don't have any doubt because I know I'm going to figure it out when I get there, somehow it'll fall on my lap. I trust the process. You don't have to, you don't have to know. So if you trust the process that you'll figure it out.

But here's the thing, like sometimes you fail and there's audience. Yeah. Then you get four rooms. Yeah. Yeah. And then what happens? Right. Don't blink.

Is the don't blink. And then you go sift through the failure. Yeah, exactly. You go, wait a minute. What did I get out of that? Yeah, I've done that a bunch. It is great. Look, What's the worst that can happen? You go on a stage and you bum. It's not going to be the first stage. And it's one of those you can talk about so that when you do the next one and it all, sometimes they all go right. I've had a couple of shows. We did,

we did a couple of shows where we had video cameras set up for the second day. Listen, let's not film the first day because we're gonna be just finding our feet. Let's film the second day. First day, it was fucking flawless. Flawless, because no cameras, it's like you just go. Second day, we weren't as into it as we had just done it. It felt like the second take, you know, it just didn't have the magic.

And that's the one that's recorded. And we're like, oh, kicking ourselves, we didn't film both nights. We didn't film both nights. We should have filmed both nights. I love how much of a mess this human existence life is. Yeah. You've talked about the importance of journaling because living is reliving.

I love that phrase. I came up with that cause it's like, wow, I see so many people who get it after you for like filming a concert and they go, live in the moment. I'm like, dude, it's like, wow, I see so many people who get after you for like filming a concert. And they go, live in the moment. I'm like, dude, counterintuitive. The moment goes by like this. Yeah. We're not going to remember any of this. The fact that we taped it, thank God, because later on it's going to be a file photo of me remembering you, three pound me computer.

All I'm going to have is a file photo of you maybe in a suit and you picturing me in maybe a black t-shirt and the metadata narrative is going to say, had a great talk about, if we remember, creativity. Your brain doesn't remember. But when I pull up old home movies, like a show my kids that I just found and they're like, they don't remember it. I don't remember filming it. And it's like new adventures of, it becomes iconic and it sticks in her head.

And all their jokes are based on old things that we used to do and say. So living is reliving. So keeping a journal is very important because I found that anything that passed 15 years, it's like I'm reading someone else's journal. I'm like, I didn't even know that's where I got that guitar. I thought I bought that guitar. It was given to me. It's like a $10,000 Santana. It was given to me my birthday by the studio that I made that movie. How could I not remember that? It's like a $10,000 Santana. It was given to me my birthday by the studio that I made that movie. How could I not remember that? It's like crazy what you don't remember. And it's the brain is very,

it's not a very reliable computer. It's made out of fricking butter. That's a really profound idea that so much of our life is lived through replaying our memories. And then watching stuff is one of the ways to sort of refresh, give some more texture and detail through replaying our memories. And then watching stuff is one of the ways to sort of refresh, give some more texture and details. Makes it iconic.

It makes it iconic in your life and part of your life. Otherwise it just went by, it went by. Like I'll ask people, we just had a really, what did we do last week? What did we do last Wednesday? And they're like, I can tell you because I wrote it down, what am I gonna remember? And then when you see, When you go through your journal, I go back and I find,

wow, life-changing thing happened Friday. Another life-changing thing I didn't know at the time until now I know that that really happened Saturday. And another big freaking thing happened on Sunday. They come in threes sometimes. You start being able to predict the future a little bit because you see the patterns. And it's pretty wild to do that. And I've talked to people, big group of people, 500 people. How many people hear journal? Two hands, three hands. I couldn't believe it. It's like, man, you guys, if there's anything I'm going to part on you, is journal. Your life is way more interesting than you think because it's not going to feel like anything while it's going by, but in retrospect, you look back. Like I can just go through,

I keep a journal one file per year. So I started a new one in 2025. If I'm going to look up, like I'm going to do a director's chair episode. I look up Michael Mann, Michael Mann, Michael Mann, all the conversations we had since 94 that I wrote down, and it's like, oh my God, I can't believe we said that. That's how I knew about that thing with Quinton. I had forgotten about that story with Quinton saying, ah, Pulp Fiction. I had forgotten

that because from the moment I asked him that question to the success at Cannes was very quick. It was a lost moment in time where I had it recorded down to the time, down to the hour when I asked him that question, he thought it wasn't, he didn't think that was the one for him. Yeah, and there's a, I don't know, when it's private journaling, there's an honesty, there's an innocence about like the dreams you have about the future, the conceptions you have about the future.

I mean, that's what, this thing is a journal. It's just a journal, and it's like- But the profundity comes out of it, right? It's crazy, yeah, you didn't, and so much I figured. But the profanity comes out of it. It's crazy. Yeah, you didn't, and so much I figured out then. I'm talking like a professor by the end of that. Like people come up to me and they're asking me all these questions

about stuff I wrote in there. And I'm like, I wrote that in that book? Shit, I was smart back then. What happened? I don't remember half of that. But I think that it's the same thing. When you go to teach someone, your mouth opens and stuff comes

out. I'm always taping myself when I go to give a talk because that's also the pipe working. Someone else is talking to you sometimes. That's why I've always liked to share information because the feedback loop is insane. Me, inspiring Deji DJ to go write, he writes the script in three days, comes back, tells me, now I'm doing that method. And it's like, wow, people come back with their version. And I love telling my kids stuff that I learned that I wish I could tell myself, but I can't take a time machine. The closest thing is telling your kid because then they can take that information and process. So many times they've come back and said, wow, dad, that lesson you taught us about this has really become big in our minds.

Yeah, what was that? And they tell me, I'm like, I never told you that. They say, yeah, you told us, well, I told you maybe 10% of that. All the rest you added. Oh yeah, well, we embellished it. But like they turned it into something else and it's like, wow, that's so cool.

But yeah, that thing about reliving, like that was one of my favorite ones. My mom turning 75 and not wanting to do anything for her 75th birthday. I said, why not? She goes, the whole family's going to be, you have 10 kids. They're all going to want to do something for your 75th birthday. Nothing can top my 65th. I was like, what are we doing on your 65th? I didn't even remember even. I'm the one who orchestrated it all. She goes, oh, you flew everyone in from all over the country. You gave me a car. I got to have a journal of that. I'm the one who orchestrated it all. She goes, oh, you flew everyone in from all over the country. You gave me a car. I got to have a journal of that. I'm sure I have video. I go back 10 years. I see what tape I had it on. Find the tape, pop the tape in. Forgot about all this stuff.

So I cut together a 10-minute version of it, showed it at her 75th birthday. Just watching the old one, everybody was like, oh my God, look how young everybody was, look how small the nieces and nephews were. She starts bawling as soon as she gets the key, the gift of the key in the video because she realizes now what it's going to mean that she's going to get this car. So it's like, wow, let's just play the old tapes. We don't even have to do anything anymore. We banked so much amazing stuff that we've all forgotten that my kids just love watching their old home movies. They hardly remember any of it,

but even a VHS to them is virtual reality. Because compared to our memories, it is virtual reality. They're like leaning into the screen to see what's around the corner and they're remembering the place and the sounds. And they say, oh, we left the living room. It's like we're there. It's like, wow. I was always afraid they would see this old footage and go, ah, this is dog shit. What kind of camera was that? This is the limitations of – you put up one of those files on your screen, it's like this big on your laptop now. That's how low-res shit was back then. But that didn't matter. It's like,

compared to our memories, that stuff, living is reliving. Like pull up that, shoot as much as you can, take as many pictures, but write the journal because you'll have a picture. I swear you're not going to know what it's from. Even 10 years from now, you won't know what that picture's from. You read the diary, you go, oh, that's what that is. Oh my God, you can piece together all these things that are important to you or that become more important with time actually. And you know what's important later compared to what's happening at the time.

To add on top of that, so journaling is a kind of raw or like home films is a raw projection of what's going on in the moment. I think it's also really powerful because I've done that, is to do a high effort description of where your life is for you, just for yourself. So sometimes journaling is like low effort. Yeah, sometimes it's just, I just wanna mark that,

you know, we had this conversation, I had to go do something at five, I did that, met somebody that, I know last night I met somebody that's gonna be life changing, I'm gonna write a little bit more on that, cause I could just, now I know, but I'm gonna just record it so later if I look it up. So one of the cool things you could do is, you know, like for example, somebody, Jamie Mr. Beast does these videos, which are great. I think it's a great exercise to do for

yourself, which is a video he records for himself that he doesn't look at to be published 20 years from now. This is a message to myself 20 years from now. Here's where I hope you end up. You're basically a younger version of yourself speaking to an older version. And then you get, you know, time flies. And like, you get to a point where it's like, holy shit, it has been 10 years, it has been 20 years. You get to listen to a younger version of yourself.

Like, it would have been hilarious if you shot videos like that to yourself. Because it was just like, the incredible journey your career has been on I just to think about that like the Delta the difference between What your dreams were where you ended up? Usually you outdo yourself in many ways Sometimes your life goes in a totally different trajectory. That's

And the result is kind of funny and it's a it's a nice It's a nice illustration of the non-linearity of life. I would film stuff like that with my kids. I couldn't do it, but I would film my kid saying, hey, turn to the camera now and say, hey, Rebel, it's me Rebel. I'm gonna Rebel in the future. So you have shots all like that. Yeah, and then they show them like that 10 years later

and they're like, whoa. Just to see it talking to them and saying, and I would do this thing where I would film them watching it and then pan off so that 10 years later I could get, hey, Rebel, him reacting, pan off to the new Rebel watching it. It's just like keeps going. So I have one like that where it just keeps panning and they're watching themselves within the movie, within the movie, within the movie. It's like an ongoing project. You know, it's just so fun to just play with memory and make you realize how fast time moves and to go, they go like, I kind of remember that, but I don't remember being that tiny. I had that memory, just like wild, how time moves.

And it makes them feel much more precious about how quick time moves and how important every little moment is because you see the fragility of it too. Does it make you sad, break your heart that the number of memories we get to create is finite, that this life ends, eventually the story is over? I had this theory, I'm going to put this in a movie. I don't think I've ever seen this before.

Because I woke up from a dream and it was like, trying to remember it. You're like, so real. If you don't write it down right away, it kind of fades away. But while you're dreaming it, it's really real. It's's like, you can almost see the walls. By the time I went to go tell somebody, it's like, shit, I forgot most of it. But I wonder if that's what it's like when you wake up in your consciousness after you die. You wake up in your next consciousness,

getting ready to move into whatever your next body is. And you're like, wow, I was a filmmaker? I had five kids? And, oh well, I'm going to be a fish now. It's like a dream. It's like that gone that way. And it's like, that's what past lives are. They're like distant memories, like a dream that's faded away. That's why you barely feel remnants of it. Do I feel sad about that? When I tell people, they flip out when I tell them that. Like I said, I want a character to be like that. Like he's dying. He's like, I don't want to forget this dream.

I don't want to forget. Don't let me wake up. Don't let me wake up. But you forget, especially the moment you try to tell somebody. You tell the next fish over. Yeah, the next fish. There'll be a fish next.

But yeah, yeah. It feels like, I don't know what's sad about it, but then it just makes you even more double down to be precious about the life you're in now. What do you think is the meaning of this whole thing of life? Why are we here? I really feel like my kids and I were just talking about this last night. We were just blown away.

We did this Asterian astrology. I think it was the oldest form of astrology. It just nails each person. And it's like, yeah, because when you have a kid, you realize right away, this isn't my kid, this is not my, I'm just in charge of him. It's a completely different soul. He's a different soul that ended up in my hands. There's physical characteristics that get passed on because of just how biology works. Even sometimes posture and movement is the same. But the actual person is somebody else. And all the kids, I have five kids

and I have nine brothers and sisters, they're all different. And you realize we made a pact in the past life to gather together because every time it's like so good you were born in this family because you were given free reign to go find who you were born in this family because you were given free rein to go find who you're really supposed to be and you find out everyone is doing what they were supposed to be doing. But what's cool, almost like this clarity you get by just saying it, they now know that they were always supposed to be like this creative person. And now they can double down on it because they know that's who they were supposed to

be. They don't have to have any doubt anymore. They don't have to wonder, well, am I supposed to be more business-minded or can I be creative? Isn't that some kind of frivolous? Is that a real job? Can I do that? Now they realize, no, you're supposed to be doing that for these, these, these, these reasons. And now they can double down. You can skip all that and just decide, I feel like I want to be that person. So I'm just going to declare I am that person. And as soon as you say it, you are that. And tomorrow, your activities will conform to that. That's how

powerful that decision is. So when you walk out of here, it's going to be with a complete commitment. I'm a technical and creative person. I'm my first boss. I'm unstoppable. Because my boss told me that and he was right. I became technical and creative and you're just unstoppable. You can just keep going and just go, I'm unstoppable. That's me. You're going to use your powers for bad, but you've just changed your life by just declaring that. And I'm also a creative person who lives his life creatively. I'm going to find creative ways to use that technology. If somebody says, you're not the same kind of art as I was expecting, that's their own opinion. Don't blink. Just keep going. All these things that you've learned that people were supposed to tell you along the way, they're telling you for a reason. Anytime you got pushed, like if you go back to your life at your really critical moments in your life, where you went that way instead of that way, there was probably

somebody there who said something to you that kind of pushed you. There was one guy when I was in high school, it was like senior year, I wrote a paper and I wasn't a great writer at all. I wrote a paper for a Latin American Studies class, gave it to the teacher. And he said, wow, you're going to be rich and famous in four years, based on what I read. He goes, really? Flight home like 17 or 18. Four years later, I did mariachi. And I went to him later at a reunion. And I said, you called it. you said I was going to be, why did you say that? And he's like, I said that? It looked like he would never say that to somebody.

You'd think he would own it and say, oh yeah, I knew and I told you. No, he was like, he looked like he didn't even know who I was. He was like asking, I feel like he never would have said that in a million years. So again, sometimes things come out of our mouth that's not us, that comes through us. So if you think of it that way, why are we here?

We're here for a reason. We're gonna get nudged along, listen to the signs, own who you're supposed to be, because you are that person. Don't let your human doubt get in the way. That's like the guy closing the pipe. Oh, I don't know if I'm really creative. I don't know if I'm really a businessman.

And you're just closing the pipe. You're not gonna let it flow. Just be a good pipe. Just say, I just wanna be a good pipe, Just say, I just want to be a good pipe, clean, open. And then that's when the magic happens. And no matter what, don't blink. Don't blink. No matter how many, that dude was getting so much shit thrown at him. I wish you knew that time period because then you would go like, yeah, that's right.

It's incredible. It was unbelievable. I can't even convey. There was no internet and stuff back then. This was like literal press reviews, public. It was like, why are they targeting this guy? You know, they just did not like, he just had unprecedented success and was a really great guy and was making amazing shit. So it was the triple threat of make people jealous. You know, pissed off.

Well, he's one of the great artists of all time. So are you. It's a huge honor to talk to you. Thank you for everything you're doing. make people jealous, you know, pissed off. Well, he's one of the great artists of all time. So are you. It's a huge honor to talk to you. Thank you for everything you're doing in the world, for creating the world and for inspiring millions of people to also be creators in the world and for your new project that's bringing people in.

Robert, as I told you, I'm a huge fan. I appreciate that. It's a huge honor to talk to you, brother. So great talking with you, great questions. You're gonna change your life. Thank you, brother. So great talking with you, great questions. You ain't gonna change your life. Thank you, brother. Million dollars. Yeah, right there.

Thank you for listening to this conversation with Robert Rodriguez. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Alfred Hitchcock. In feature films, the director is God. In documentary films, God is the director.

Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time. ["The Star-Spangled Banner"]