Robert Rodriguez

I write the script in December. January, Josh Arnett, Marley Shelton, come down, fly Frank in. Shooting for 10 hours on my green screen. We shoot that opening sequence, incredible opening sequence 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 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. 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 when I first met him, I was trying to impress the hell out of him because I was such a big fan. I was about to go do Desperado 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 Desperado.” Now if he was just my peer, he’d say, “Oh, I did the same thing,” and I’m going to do the same thing. That would be hanging out with somebody of your I, but you want somebody who’s above that. Do you know what he said? He goes, “I bought about a Steadicam, but not to operate it. I’m going to take it apart and design a better one. Us mere mortals trying to learn how to operate the camera. He’s designing all new systems. That’s the guy you want to hang out with, not someone who’s doing what you’re doing.

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 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 and by the end, you have a result that’s better than what you sought out. 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.

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 in many sense, 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. 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. Explosions and having only one take

Has there been a time when there was one take and you only have one take to get it right?

Oh, all the time where you’re just like, or just how long it’ll take to reset and you’re just, but then you know what? You got to just work with what you got. You got to work with your results.

You get nervous or no in that moment?

Oh yeah, you’re nervous going 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 the car to implode and then we were going to throw them and marry it together. The car guy goes, “Yeah, we’re going to have three cars rigged.” “Three cars? Why you…” “Well in case one doesn’t work, and then we have a second way throwing away.” “We don’t have all night to go shoot take after take we’re doing Just give one car and if it doesn’t work, we’ll figure it out,” because 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…” In 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 happen on Dusk Till Dawn. First was, okay, you know how those explosions when somebody walks away in slow motion from an explosion, that’s become kind of even that started with Desperado Desperado’s the first, if you look at all the montages, Desperado’s first. That’s right. That’s right. That is the meme because it was an accident. It was just supposed to be, it was just two grenades, not a nuclear bomb. It throws them over the side and I just wanted some body parts or something to fly up some shrapnel. It literally says shrapnel and my effects guy was so running so ragged.

We get to there and I go, “Do you have any body parts and stuff we can throw up or something you can shoot up. “I didn’t realize it’s so high to get past that second floor.” And 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 and 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 it goes, and in slow motion, it looks great, right? I remember showing to Jim Cameron before it came out and his hand went up. He’d never seen that before, six months later Dusk Till Dawn came out. So I liked how much it looked so much that in Dusk 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. Take it another step further so I’m not just doing the same thing. Okay, that one, it’s 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 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 star? 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 perfect, great, we can move on. And the camera guy goes, 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. 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. It just reset itself. We 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. Let’s watch the dailies. Sure enough, let’s see if we can, maybe I can scratch the film right there.” No, it goes completely out focus and back in focus within a second. Now we got to res-hoot it. So we had to wait till we’re back in that location. We rigged it for two more takes just in case. So that thing that was supposed to be the one take is three takes.

The other thing that happened was the front of the Dusk 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 didn’t put like 10 times the amount of stuff. 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 first shot is that, and the set’s ruined, burned to a crisp. The neon lights blew up. So we couldn’t even, 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 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 had 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 look at the blessing you get because of there’s a 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’ve 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.

Just roll with it.

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 going to fall apart. It’s just like the movies, you come up with your plan of what you want to accomplish. That’s like your script. Then you go scout your location and figure out what your project’s going to 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 chickenshit into a chicken salad and by the end you have a result that’s better than what you saw it 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. How are you going to react to things? Well, how do you make your character react to things? You make him kind of super human. 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. Success and failure

So you write the story, the script, and then you have it collide with the chaos of reality. And in that moment when you said you see the chickenshit, you have to be able to keep your eyes open.

You have to do that.

The notice-

You have to do that.

Wait a minute, okay, stuff changed. It’s discipline. 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 I said, come talk about creativity. I go, I understand because a lot of people read my book, Reels had a crew and told me, “Ooh, 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? I was like, 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 was so perfect. I wish we had filmed it. She goes, “I learned a good lesson the hard way,” and I said, “That still sucks. I say, when you follow your instinct, if you follow your own instinct to go start a business or go make this movie, or it wasn’t someone saying, go over there and you’ll make a million dollars. 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. It didn’t make any money. When Quentin asked me, Hey, do you want to 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. We’re not going to know what each other’s making and we make it and we put it together. The hand went up right away, just instinctually. 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’ve found that anthologies never work. 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 still go by instinct.: So my instinct was to raise my hand. We go make that movie because I love short films. I made bedhead and short films and I thought, oh, here’s aw . If this works, I can make short films in anthologies and I can have the best of both worlds.