Lex Fridman Podcast · 2025-04-17 · 215 min

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

Lex FridmanRobert Rodriguez

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TL;DR

Rodriguez’s core economic thesis is that constraint can be a production advantage: smaller budgets force sharper decisions, preserve creative control, and create more room for profit. He traces that logic from the $7,000 El Mariachi to Brass Knuckle Films’ proposed $10 million–$30 million action slate, contrasting it with a Hollywood system that “spends way too much.” His benchmark is the first John Wick, which he says cost $20 million before sequels scaled to $40 million, $80 million, and $100 million as the audience grew: start cheaply, then expand as demand grows.
Vertical integration is Rodriguez’s operating moat because writing, shooting, editing, sound design, music, and effects become one continuous decision loop. Knowing the final cut lets him capture only what the movie needs, shoot Bruce Willis for nine days, Brittany Murphy for one, Benicio del Toro for three, Robert De Niro for four, and Lady Gaga for half a day. His food analogy carries the economics: the script is the grocery list, filming buys the ingredients, but editing is the cooking — and handing it away can turn everything into “a fucking soufflé.”
Failure is valuable only when it is treated as embedded intellectual property rather than a verdict on the creator. Four Rooms failed financially, yet its children-in-a-hotel premise became Spy Kids and its anthology experiment taught Rodriguez how to structure Sin City; “two keys to my biggest successes” were sitting in the wreckage. His rule is to “sift through the ashes of your failure,” commit to a body of work, and let underperformers produce characters, techniques, relationships, or formats whose value may surface years later.
Brass Knuckle Films is pitched as an audience-aligned financing model, but its real underwriting edge would have to come from cost control and execution rather than action demand alone. Rodriguez says participants will be investors rather than crowdfunding donors, can make money from films that do well and their sequels, and may pitch ideas, one of which he intends to make among four films. He argues streamers will pay a premium because they need “action, action, action” and studios cannot make $20 million action films efficiently; that is the thesis, while individual film performance remains the obvious risk.
Technology matters most when it removes institutional dependencies and makes experiments cheap enough to run immediately. A reusable $8, two-hour videotape let teenage Rodriguez practice far more than two-minute film rolls; digital cameras, home editing, green screen, digital 3D, and performance capture later extended the same logic. Sin City was de-risked with a ten-hour opening-scene test before Frank Miller agreed to grant the rights if he liked the result, while Alita combined a physical city with a digitally replaced lead so the technology had to match a real world rather than hide inside an entirely synthetic one.
Rodriguez treats talent discovery and set design as parts of the same independent production system. He fought to cast Salma Hayek when the studio saw no résumé, recognized Danny Trejo’s magnetism before Machete existed, and built what he calls his own “Latin star system” because Hollywood had not created the roles or stars his scripts required. On set, operating the camera himself creates intimacy and speed: the director becomes the actor’s immediate audience, able to capture a performance before committee process dissipates it.
Deadlines, narrow filters, and visible labels convert vague creative ambition into output. Spy Kids 3-D went from a January 2003 shoot to theaters that July after a McDonald’s commitment made delay potentially cost $20 million; Rodriguez’s lesson is that a real deadline forces the ego out of the way and “opens the pipe.” The same mechanism underlies action-only Brass Knuckle Films, the Double R company he formed with his children, and his injunction to aspiring filmmakers: “Stop aspiring” and assume the identity that requires the work.
The episode’s broad founder lesson is to combine creative judgment with technical competence, keep producing through criticism, and preserve enough records to understand the path later. Spielberg’s advice was simply “You just don’t blink,” while Rodriguez’s first photo-shop employer told him that being both technical and creative would make him “unstoppable.” Rodriguez adds a long-duration feedback system — journals, home movies, and retrospective pattern recognition — because “living is reliving,” memory is unreliable, and today’s apparent failure may not reveal its purpose for ten or twenty years.

Digest · the substance, structured for research

1. A failed take can become the production value money cannot buy

Rodriguez accepts the nerves around an irreversible stunt, but not the assumption that failure requires another fully prepared attempt. His preferred posture is: get one car, take the result, and ask, “What’s the next thought?” The restriction recreates the conditions of grindhouse filmmaking and forces invention instead of insurance.
Desperado’s now-familiar heroes-walking-away-from-an-explosion image began as an accident. Rodriguez requested shrapnel, received only a fast propane fireball, slowed the camera so it would last, and told the actors to walk quickly without looking back. The oversized orange blast worked so well that James Cameron raised his hand in surprise when Rodriguez screened it for him.
From Dusk Till Dawn deliberately escalated the image: George Clooney and Quentin Tarantino would continue talking while the gas station exploded behind them. The supposedly single take was perfectly performed, but a radio-controlled focus system snapped out and back for a second; the production eventually rigged the location for two more attempts.
A separate explosion burned the bar façade before its night work had even begun. Rather than surrender the day, Rodriguez kept shooting against the genuinely blackened ruin; the accidental damage concealed the foam construction and made the ending look “apocalyptic.” His recurring move is to let reality revise the design.

2. Failure contains options, but only if the creator keeps looking

Rodriguez describes filmmaking and life as the collision between a carefully written script and uncontrollable reality. Equipment fails, sets burn, and plans collapse; then the actual creative work begins. “You turn chicken shit into chicken salad,” producing something that may be better precisely because it could not follow the original blueprint.
When an audience member complained that she had wasted 1.5 years on something that failed, Rodriguez first challenged the framing. Her revised line — “I learned a good lesson the hard way” — still sounded inadequate to him because it treated the lesson as consolation rather than an asset waiting to be extracted.
His stronger metaphor is specific: “Sift through the ashes of your failure and you’ll find the key to your next success is in there.” Following an instinct does not guarantee the expected result, but it suggests there was something worth following; sometimes “the only way across the river is to slip on the first two rocks.”
Lex preserves an important qualification: understanding a failure can take time. Rodriguez agrees that new information may make an old result legible years later; the instruction is not to manufacture instant meaning, but to keep revisiting the ashes without allowing the unanswered loss to stop the next project.

3. Four Rooms failed financially and generated two franchises’ worth of insight

Rodriguez joined Four Rooms instinctively because he liked short films, friends, and the experiment of four filmmakers building separate New Year’s Eve stories in one hotel. Research would have warned that anthologies often fail because audiences experience the movie as repeatedly restarting, but commercial probability was not why he raised his hand.
His segment put two children under a bellhop’s supervision while their formally dressed parents went out. Watching Antonio Banderas and his screen wife, Rodriguez imagined them as international spies whose children did not know their real work; that image became the seed of five Spy Kids films.
The failed anthology also exposed a structural repair: three stories directed by one filmmaker might cohere where four unrelated directors did not. Rodriguez later applied that answer to Sin City. “Why on earth would I try it again?” Because the failed version had taught him how to make the next version better.
Lex notes that Four Rooms can be judged creatively rather than financially, and Rodriguez accepts that distinction. His sharper retrospective is still economic and generative: the failure directly contained “two keys to my biggest successes,” making the initial loss part of a longer portfolio rather than an isolated project return.

4. A body of work is a better unit of judgment than one release

Rodriguez invokes John Carpenter’s The Thing, which he says bombed against E.T. and drew hostile reviews before becoming a classic roughly a decade later. Immediate reception can make an artist distrust sound instincts; delayed recognition shows why neither the creator nor the opening-weekend audience can reliably identify the enduring asset.
His answer is to “commit to making a body of work.” Some projects will overperform, some will underperform, and the artist cannot know in advance which supposedly minor or failed piece another person will later identify as the masterpiece.
Rereading Rebel Without a Crew for his self-narrated audiobook changed Rodriguez’s view of his own history. At 21 or 22, six months felt like six years; decades later, he saw how quickly unlikely setups paid off and how clearly he had been improvising rather than executing a master plan.
He once felt penniless and defeated because he failed to sell El Mariachi into the Spanish home-video market by Christmas. The missed sale proved fortunate: an agent arrived the next month, Columbia ultimately paid about ten times as much, and theatrical release and sequels followed. “Good thing I didn’t get my way.”

5. Cheap, reusable video turned practice into Rodriguez’s first advantage

Super 8 gave Rodriguez only about two silent minutes per roll, followed by another development charge and frequent disappointment from soft or unusable images. His father’s early VCR and tethered manual camera instead provided two hours of erasable sound and picture for about $8.
That cost difference democratized repetition. Rodriguez compares filmmaking with learning guitar: nobody becomes a rock star by stepping onstage without practicing “till your fingers bleed,” yet film made equivalent practice unaffordable. Reusable tape let him tell, cut, and retell stories continuously.
He initially edited in camera, using a VCR whose unusually clean pause function produced a viable cut. Audio dub supplied a second track for effects; a later cassette player and Y-splitter added music, at the price of another generation of picture loss.
When his father bought another VCR, Rodriguez linked the decks for linear editing. Pause held cleanly for only five minutes, so he had to know the next shot and locate it before the machine stopped. The limitation taught him to shoot sparingly and “edit in my head” long before professional tools arrived.

6. Bedhead converted primitive equipment into story design

As one of ten children, Rodriguez used younger siblings as action stars because teenage friends merely looked like high-school students. Those backyard films repeatedly won the few festivals accepting video, revealing the child-action formula that later became Spy Kids.
Bedhead was his first film-camera project, made after one semester of film school convinced him that its methods were already outdated. The wind-up Bell & Howell could barely be framed accurately, but it offered slow motion, reverse photography, and crude stop motion — capabilities his video setup lacked.
Rodriguez drew roughly 300 images for an animated title sequence and spent all night photographing them. A classmate asked why he was working so hard when it would not improve his grade. His answer defined the project: “I’m not doing this for fucking grades. I’m trying to get out of this town.”
The camera’s capabilities created the protagonist’s powers. Chairs, hoses, and rapid pushes could be photographed backward, upside down, or incrementally, then reversed into apparent magic. The equipment did not merely constrain the execution; it supplied the story’s governing idea.

7. Writing backward from owned assets turns scarcity into production value

Rodriguez’s practical screenwriting advice begins with inventory: “What do I have?” For El Mariachi, the list included a pit bull, turtle, bus, bar, ranch, and friends in a Mexican town. He wrote each asset into the story so objects that cost nothing appeared as deliberate production value.
Kevin Smith later cited the lesson while discussing Clerks. Rodriguez’s method rejects writing a dream script first and discovering its costs later; the assets, locations, performers, camera capabilities, and limitations become prompts that generate the film that can actually be made.
He was too frugal even to paint two mismatched guitar cases black. One cheap cardboard case appears while the mariachi walks; the heavier borrowed case appears only in inserts showing the weapons. Precise cuts make the audience perceive one continuous prop.
A coconut vendor scene produced another repair: the actor walked away without paying, and there would be no second take. Rodriguez added voice-over explaining that the town gave away free coconuts. Viewers later asked whether the custom was real — evidence that confident narration can turn an omission into world-building.

8. Index cards make the story answer concrete questions

Rodriguez carries packets of index cards because one has “made a million dollars” before. He compares them with therapy: people often possess answers but lack useful questions. “Why am I such a loser?” produces evidence for defeat; asking for three actions that could improve many lives produces a list of possibilities.
El Mariachi began with a card describing a guitar player seeking work in a bar. A similarly dressed killer then arrives carrying weapons, forcing Rodriguez to build earlier cards that establish the jailed drug lord, the hit against him, and the mistaken-identity machinery before passing the narrative baton to the musician.
The ending arrived early: the musician’s hand would be shot and the woman would die, giving the story the tragedy of a ballad and creating the loss required to transform him into the armed wanderer Rodriguez originally imagined. Other cards could remain blank until the connecting beats appeared.
Lex asks whether the character’s death can change. Rodriguez says yes, but explains that the story’s current logic demanded a “ghost,” much as Bruce Wayne’s loss drives his transformation. The cards preserve provisional decisions without pretending the whole film is already visible.

9. Creativity is the shared operating system beneath many crafts

In 2002, Rodriguez questioned how he could design production, edit, photograph, and write orchestral scores without formal training or even reading music. Books about creativity revealed that painting, composing, cinematography, and writing shared the same underlying process.
His resulting split is “90%” creativity and “10%” technical craft. The exact technical ratio is his heuristic, but the conclusion is categorical: a strongly creative person can cross disciplines and sometimes outperform a narrow technician because the central problem is selection, invention, and feeling.
Rodriguez therefore describes his many credits as one job: “I live a creative life.” Painting, music, sculpture, camera work, and editing are not résumé accumulation; each strengthens the common faculty and makes him a better director.
Lex adds the rebel dimension: experts can make a simple soundproofing problem seem impossibly specialized, while curtains and an A/B recording may solve what matters. Rodriguez’s answer is to own the identity of a creative person and test reality without allowing technical authority to terminate the experiment.

10. The creator’s job is to pick up the pen, not await inspiration

Rodriguez calls inspiration the “creative spirit,” something assigned to each person that lacks hands and needs a human conduit. Keith Richards describes riffs as floating in the sky; Jimmie Vaughan compares a solo to tuning a radio. Rodriguez’s version is simpler: “Be a good pipe.”
Ego clogs that pipe. After ten productive cards, asking “How did I do that?” converts flow into self-conscious performance; Rodriguez argues that the better assumption is that the work came through him, so his responsibility is to remain open and continue moving his hands.
His daily cartoon deadline taught the lesson. Sitting on a sofa and trying to visualize the finished strip produced nothing, while drawing one panel created a second association and then the complete joke. “The creative spirit ain’t going to come visit you” while you wait motionless.
This belief is not a claim that preparation is useless. It relocates readiness into activity: start the drawing, test the camera, write the card, and let information emerge from contact with the work. If nothing arrives, Rodriguez assumes he is blocking the process rather than lacking ideas forever.

11. “Stop aspiring” turns filmmaking from status into behavior

Rodriguez’s answer to an “aspiring filmmaker” is: “Stop aspiring.” The label preserves permanent unreadiness; calling oneself a filmmaker creates an identity that must be expressed through making films, however small or provisional.
He did not feel ready for El Mariachi until its final days. Readiness was an output of confronting each day’s problem, not an entrance requirement that could have been satisfied through more planning.
His son reached the same conclusion after working beside him: Rodriguez had not secretly known how the production would succeed. He solved each obstacle as it appeared. The lesson that changed the son was precisely that his father “didn’t know either.”
Rodriguez’s proposed epitaph for indefinite preparation is brutal: “Here lies so-and-so. He was never ready.” The uncertainty does not disappear; one jumps in, trusts that the necessary competence will develop, and becomes a different person during the project.

12. El Mariachi was designed as film school that might repay its tuition

Bedhead cost about $800 for eight minutes, leading Rodriguez to estimate that the same one-take method could produce an 80-minute feature for $8,000. Six months later he was making El Mariachi, ultimately associated with its $7,000 production cost.
He rejected advice to write three scripts, discard them, and expect the fourth to be good. His alternative was to write and shoot three features while serving as camera, sound, editor, and crew; Spanish-language home video might return the money while the films trained every discipline.
Film was the major expense, so shooting a safety take would effectively double that portion of the budget. Rodriguez expected perhaps 70% of the material to work and planned to return for the missing 30%; after two consecutive weeks in Mexico, he developed everything and discovered what had actually exposed.
He ultimately refused to return, cutting around missing material and shortening the film. The “test film” that nobody was meant to see went to Sundance and became his first feature success. Its naïveté protected the playful choices a prestige-minded debut might have suppressed.

13. Unsynchronized sound created El Mariachi’s velocity

Rodriguez’s borrowed 16mm camera was too loud for synchronized dialogue and had no blimp. He filmed only the exact visual fragment he expected to use, then recorded each scene’s dialogue and actions separately at close range.
When manually synchronized speech began drifting, he cut to a dog, knife, stuffed cat, or other insert until the lips matched again. That necessity produced the film’s fast cutting style; the aesthetic was an answer to a technical defect, not an imitation of a preselected style.
Nonactors helped because they repeated lines in their natural rhythms instead of substantially changing performances. Whenever faces remain visible, Rodriguez tried to keep them synchronized; whenever the cut leaves them, the dialogue could drift without creating “rubbery lips.”
The apparent disadvantage delivered unusually strong sound effects: with the noisy camera stopped, the microphone could move close to bottles, suitcases, hands, and dialogue. Rodriguez later recognized this as a blessing because poor sound announces “low-budget movie” before viewers consciously judge the image.

14. A safe set lets nonactors and stars access the same flow

El Mariachi’s actors faced Rodriguez and one camera rather than a large crew, so the event did not feel like a professional movie. The female lead initially said she could not act; Rodriguez showed her a telenovela performance and said, in effect, do not do that — simply speak as she would to a boyfriend.
The villain was Rodriguez’s bunkmate from the medical-research hospital. He did not speak Spanish, learned lines phonetically, wore sunglasses, and sometimes held the words where he could read them. When a real crew surrounded him on Desperado, the same man visibly shook while lighting a cigarette.
Quentin Tarantino’s directing insight becomes Rodriguez’s rule: sometimes a great director is “just being a great audience.” The actor receives no live crowd, so the director’s delight, tears, or attention becomes the immediate evidence that a choice is connecting.
Rodriguez still offers precise direction when needed, but he prefers an environment where everyone can discover something neither director nor actor planned. “Not knowing is the other half of the battle,” and his job is to recognize the unexpected performance when it arrives.

15. Operating the camera collapses the distance between decision and performance

Rodriguez keeps operating because the camera turns a hundred-person set into an intimate exchange. Actor and director can say “let’s do that again” without a distant monitor, relayed instructions, or the delay that allows a live emotional state to evaporate.
On Sin City, Clive Owen was already holding Benicio del Toro’s head over a toilet while crew members moved behind the green screen. Rodriguez began rolling, zoomed into the performance, directed one restrained jolt, and finished before the technicians knew the moment had become a take.
Mickey Rourke similarly began delivering a dialogue-heavy scene while the plan still called for a wide shot. Rodriguez moved the camera, adjusted the light himself, and captured the close-up immediately; a separate cinematographer might reasonably have demanded a full relight and lost the performance.
With Michael Parks in From Dusk Till Dawn, Rodriguez’s slow zoom exhausted its range exactly as Parks finished a long speech. He describes the synchronization as a dance or telepathy: “We captured a ghost,” something that came through both participants rather than being mechanically directed.

16. Tarantino’s energy made friendship an informal creative accelerator

Rodriguez met Tarantino at the 1992 Toronto Film Festival after seeing Reservoir Dogs at Telluride. Both had first features centered on men in black, violence, and genre energy; Tarantino attended El Mariachi and laughed so loudly beside Rodriguez that his first reaction survives on the audience recording.
Rodriguez’s elaborate festival introduction explained the $7,000 budget, wheelchair dolly, turtle, pit bull, bus, and improvised construction before the screening. The context made viewers root for each ingredient, then erupt when they saw how cleverly it had been used. The production story changed the experience of the artifact.
Shy about public speaking, Rodriguez learned that the filmmaker’s presence could either enlarge or diminish the movie. He wrote a roughly 20-minute introduction and performed the person audiences imagined had made El Mariachi, turning operational transparency into part of the film’s appeal.
He and Tarantino later occupied adjacent Sony offices by chance. Rodriguez shared Desperado storyboards while Tarantino acted out Pulp Fiction scenes; lunch and proximity built a friendship in which ambitious work was exchanged before either project’s outcome was knowable.

17. Nobody, including the filmmaker, reliably recognizes a breakthrough

After finishing Pulp Fiction, Tarantino told Rodriguez it still felt like “a movie Quentin would make,” not a “real movie.” Rodriguez says he called directors associated with the screening; although he also says none of them had actually seen it, they reportedly told him it was not the breakthrough. Kathryn Bigelow was the one person Tarantino remembered as seeing something substantial.
One friend planned to explain everything wrong with the film after Cannes, only to watch it win the Palme d’Or. Rodriguez connects the episode to George Lucas showing Star Wars to skeptical director friends; in his telling, Steven Spielberg alone recognized that its naïveté could connect with children.
“When you’re being groundbreaking, you don’t know what groundbreaking is.” Rodriguez does not romanticize private certainty, because Tarantino himself doubted and James Cameron says his films initially appear far away and out of focus; work gradually brings the image closer.
Proximity still matters. Cameron’s response to Rodriguez taking a three-day Steadicam course was that he had bought one to dismantle and redesign. Rodriguez’s lesson is to stand near people “swinging way beyond you,” because their scale recalibrates what seems possible without requiring formal instruction.

18. “Don’t blink” is the defense against success becoming creative paralysis

While developing Zorro, Rodriguez watched Steven Spielberg receive extraordinary hostility despite making films Rodriguez admired. The response made him consider staying under the radar rather than attaching himself to a larger studio production and exposing his work to the same gauntlet.
Asked how he endured it, Spielberg answered: “Oh, Robert, you just don’t blink.” Rodriguez heard a Clint Eastwood line, but more importantly a truthful operating principle: criticism is designed to induce hesitation, and the durable creator keeps working through it.
George Clooney supplied the companion rule: “You’re never as good as people say you are, and you’re never as bad either.” Rodriguez repeats both lines to actors so applause and attack cannot take control of the next choice.
Success can be especially dangerous after a first film because artists start asking how they produced it, tiptoeing around expectations, and trying to recreate an unselfconscious state deliberately. Rodriguez’s portfolio answer returns: stay naïve, keep the pipe open, and let the next work be one item in a longer body.

19. Family filmmaking turned production into a compressed school for life

At 50, Rodriguez wondered whether filmmaking had exhausted its novelty and even read Jobs for Dummies to investigate alternatives. The book called filmmaking the best job while warning that 99% of film students would not attain it; he concluded he had already stumbled into the right work.
His Rebel Without a Crew series gave filmmakers with only short-film experience $7,000 and two weeks to make features with one additional person. Within the first week, participants who had doubted finishing were discussing their next films because their definition of “impossible” had collapsed.
Rodriguez made Red 11 under the same discipline, withholding equipment instruction from his son until filming began so the process could remain an honest tutorial. A missing actor and wrong location produced the daily revelation: “We figured it out.”
That experience clarified his next decade. He wanted to make movies with his children because production teaches how to react when a machine fails, an actor disappears, or reality contradicts the script. Film became “the best college because it pays you to learn,” with mentorship flowing both directions.

20. Cross-training expands the creative problem-solving surface

Between takes, Rodriguez invites actors to paint despite no formal experience. He photographs them in character, supplies canvases and colors, and later projects line drawings over their work; Lady Gaga used her fingernails, while Josh Brolin returned to set still mentally absorbed by the painting.
The exercise is not decorative downtime. Rodriguez believes painting fires a different part of the brain and demonstrates that the hand can find a solution before technical confidence arrives. The energy was strong enough that Brolin’s future wife reportedly wondered whether the group was taking drugs.
Painting with Joseph Gordon-Levitt preceded a practical breakthrough: playing cards kept sliding from a slick table, so they filmed him throwing them freely, then positioned the cards and joined the images digitally. The repaired action looked more impressive because the character appeared to place every card perfectly.
Watching painter Sebastian Krüger produced the same effect on Rodriguez. He discovered there was no secret brush or paint, copied Krüger’s midtone-first process, and began a realistic Danny Trejo portrait, completing one section of the face that same day. Proximity supplied permission, not a hidden technique.

21. A company name can become a filter that obligates production

Rodriguez formed Double R Productions with his children because their names shared those initials. The logo, shirts, and notepads were deliberate identity machinery: once the company existed, “you now have to make things for that company.”
The label helped them approach VR companies as content producers and secure a budget for The Limit, a roughly 20-minute action experience with Michelle Rodriguez and Norman Reedus. Red 11 followed under the same mark and attracted festivals willing, Rodriguez says, to pay for appearances about its production method.
We Can Be Heroes then carried the Double R logo. Rodriguez says Netflix’s internal completion and household rewatching data made it the service’s most watched and rewatched movie, because children repeatedly finished it; his children saw the result as proof that the invented company had altered behavior.
The larger mechanism is self-conformity. A card saying writer-director-editor, a company logo, or a declared role narrows attention and demands matching action. Rodriguez wants Brass Knuckle Films to apply that same filter at a broader audience scale.

22. Brass Knuckle Films packages low-cost action as an audience investment thesis

Rodriguez proposes four action films made at his Austin studio for roughly $10 million–$30 million each, with himself producing all four and directing at least one. The facilities include accumulated sets, props, costumes, and 25 years of infrastructure intended to hold costs below studio norms.
His market claim is that buyers, especially Netflix, need “action, action, action” and will pay a premium for films independents can make near $20 million. The genre-only rule reduces the idea space: action first, a strong central character, and a budget capable of generating franchise-scale upside.
Participants are described as investors, not Kickstarter donors. Rodriguez says they can pitch action ideas directly, that one of the four films will come from those submissions, and that investors can make money if films in the slate do well, along with sequels; his stated aim is to give the audience a financial position rather than treating it as post-release marketing labor.
Rodriguez categorically predicts the films will work because demand is high and costs are controlled. The episode supplies conviction, not underwriting evidence; the operational thesis rests on his integrated studio and methods, while market appetite alone cannot determine which characters or films will connect.

23. Great action begins with a character whose predicament shapes the spectacle

Asked what defines action, Rodriguez starts with character. Die Hard works because its cop is capable but overmatched; John Wick works because its almost superhuman figure is retired, angered, and pulled back into a past life.
Taken uses a retired, highly capable father in an extraordinary personal crisis. The Terminator builds its emotional engine around Sarah Connor, a waitress who learns she must become the mother and trainer of humanity’s future savior — “a genesis of a character” from ordinary life to revolutionary purpose.
Rodriguez distinguishes action-first films from dramas containing action. The Godfather and Goodfellas are character dramas despite violence; John Wick is action-driven, while Predator is a sci-fi/action hybrid whose audience may not immediately know what it is buying into.
The action acquires personality from the protagonist. A regular cop produces different jeopardy from a retired super-assassin, and an origin story makes every escalating set piece evidence of internal transformation rather than interchangeable movement.

24. A ticking clock converts movement into urgency

Rodriguez argues that nearly every film, even a romantic comedy, introduces a deadline so the audience knows the story will not diffuse across years. The groom must be found before the weekend wedding; the planet will explode; some narrowing interval forces choices.
Escape from New York is his strongest specimen because bombs are literally implanted in the protagonist’s neck and a watch continually displays the remaining time. Other ticking clocks can feel artificial beside that physical, visible mechanism.
Aliens adds evacuation urgency to an already dangerous situation, compounding threat with a hard endpoint. The deadline is valuable not merely because events move faster, but because viewers can measure whether survival remains possible.
The original Terminator adds the emotional component action cannot replace. Rodriguez identifies the moment Kyle Reese says he crossed time for Sarah and has always loved her as the point when viewers declare, “I love this movie.” Cameron’s spectacle works because a love story sits inside the chase.

25. Creating a character means accepting consequences the writer may dislike

Rodriguez’s original El Mariachi ending shot the woman and the musician’s hand because the ballad required tragedy and the future armed wanderer needed to lose everything. When the studio considered a remake, concern over that death prompted an audience test that instead validated releasing the practice film itself.
Watching a Hong Kong film that copied El Mariachi beat for beat made Rodriguez experience the loss again. He liked its actress and hoped the remake would spare her, then realized his own structure had “sealed her fate.”
Spy Kids 2 turned that creator anxiety into Steve Buscemi’s line: “Do you think God hides in heaven because he too lives in fear of what he created here on Earth?” A miniature zoo of hybrid animals had grown beyond control; the joke carries Rodriguez’s serious sense that creation develops consequences beyond intention.
Tarantino’s description of characters beginning to talk independently eventually made sense to him. Once a writer gives them life, dialogue and consequences seem to arrive through the creator, who becomes both author and surprised witness.

26. Independence let Rodriguez manufacture the representation Hollywood lacked

Preparing Desperado, Rodriguez saw few Latino actors working because Hollywood was not creating roles that could build their résumés. His answer was not to wait for an established star system but to create one through recurring roles and independent casting choices.
He had noticed Antonio Banderas in Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! while in the medical-research hospital and sensed that his physical energy belonged in action. Banderas immediately said he wanted the opportunity, giving Rodriguez the lead for his larger El Mariachi continuation.
Rodriguez found Salma Hayek on Univision discussing difficulty finding American work because of her accent. She arrived with the humor, beauty, and energy he recognized, but the studio saw no film résumé — the circular consequence of an industry that had not offered her films.
He made Roadracers partly to provide English-language footage, then rehearsed Desperado’s wound-treatment scene with her in exact detail before a studio-mandated chemistry test. Hayek and Banderas delivered what Rodriguez had seen; only after viewing dailies on a large screen did executives fully understand the choice.

27. Danny Trejo’s magnetism became a character fifteen years before the film

Casting Desperado’s silent knife-wielding character, Rodriguez selected Trejo from a photograph before hearing him speak. He handed him the prop and said to handle it as though he slept with it; dialogue would have exposed how warm and talkative Trejo was and broken the intended menace.
In the Mexican town, locals treated Trejo’s vested figure as though he were the star despite not recognizing Banderas. Rodriguez read that reaction as screen magnetism and told Trejo in 1994 that they would someday make Machete.
The initial concept came from a story about U.S. agencies paying a Mexican federal roughly $25,000 for dangerous work. The feature stalled for about 15 years, but Rodriguez preserved the identity by naming Trejo’s Spy Kids gadget-maker Uncle Machete.
Grindhouse finally supplied a two-day fake trailer, shot with a borrowed camera requested as a “test.” Audience demand continued for five years, so Rodriguez reverse-engineered a feature around every money shot, casting around the existing images and inventing narrative reasons for shots that had originally existed without context.

28. Famous actors become affordable when the editor designs their time

Rodriguez promised Robert De Niro that the villain could be completed in four days. A hotel room across from De Niro’s room became a hospital set, allowing him to wake, cross the hall in pajamas, lie beneath a simple IV tube, and perform without trailer delays or company moves.
Lady Gaga’s touring schedule made conventional filmmaking nearly impossible, so Rodriguez offered half a day for the Machete sequel, arranging adjacent sets like a conveyor belt and including a poster shoot. The experience later led her to ask him to direct “Rain on Me.”
He used the same half-day model for her Sin City scene with Joseph Gordon-Levitt, timed around a Houston tour stop. The “Robert Rodriguez experience” is not merely moving quickly on set; it begins by restructuring scenes around the scarce participant.
The enabling knowledge is editing. Rodriguez can distinguish connective material from the irreplaceable “money,” film the star’s side without every partner present, and build continuity afterward. Conventional coverage consumes availability because crews protect options the editor may never use.

29. Editing is the economic control center of the film

Rodriguez’s analogy: the script is a grocery list, filming is shopping for the best ingredients, and editing is cooking. A different editor may take excellent ingredients and make “a fucking soufflé” that the director never intended.
On large productions, he has watched 150 or 200 crew members gather footage without anyone on set understanding how it will cut. Mismatches, missing close-ups, reshoots, and second units follow because the editor is elsewhere reporting problems after the expensive moment has passed.
His integrated results include Bruce Willis completing Sin City in nine days, Brittany Murphy appearing across three stories from one day, and Benicio del Toro finishing in three. Mickey Rourke and Rutger Hauer performed opposite Rodriguez eight months apart and appear to share a scene.
That pairing echoed an exercise from age 19, when Rodriguez cut footage from Hauer’s The Hitcher and Rourke’s black-and-white Rumble Fish into a music video that implied a shared movie. Years later, he found himself fulfilling the same visual idea in Sin City: a distant intuition becoming production technique.

30. One person seeing the whole pipeline can rescue an impossible shot in 20 minutes

Actor D.J. Cotrona proposed catching airborne bullets, loading one into a revolver, turning, cocking, and firing before landing during the From Dusk Till Dawn television series. A seven-day episode could not support competing plans from stunt, camera, editorial, and effects departments, so Rodriguez took over the sequence.
With sunset approaching, he rejected a wire-heavy plan and divided one apparent leap into three jumps. The first established Cotrona stretched toward the bullets; lying on a pad and rocking supplied the falling close-up; later jumps captured closing the cylinder, turning, cocking, and firing.
Rodriguez used the available long lens and an upside-down Steadicam rather than waiting to reconfigure equipment. He held real bullets in each light direction as references, cut that night, and instructed effects artists frame by frame so only the visually essential trajectories appeared.
The finished shot exceeds what the raw footage seems capable of containing. Rodriguez’s point is not that directors should merely demand such an effect; execution required camera, editing, animation, sound, and audience-attention knowledge in one craftsman who could “see it all the way through.”

31. Sound makes viewers perceive actions the image never showed

In Cotrona’s shot, Rodriguez removes the landing sound even after the actor touches the mattress, extending the perceived airtime by several frames. Conversely, an enlarged close sound of the hammer cocking convinces viewers they saw a visual close-up that does not exist.
“If you don’t hear it, you don’t see it,” and if the close sound is present, the mind supplies the missing image. That knowledge avoids repeated takes aimed at proving visually what sound can communicate more forcefully.
Rodriguez cut music during the leap, leaving wind in the jacket and individual bullets clinking so the audience would hold its breath. Effects artists initially added too many visible bullets; he removed them because the eye needed one clear path while sound could imply the rest.
His accumulated library mixes identities across films: Bruce Willis’s Sin City gun can blend with Antonio Banderas’s Desperado weapon. In Four Rooms, gun mechanisms supplied a hotel key’s exaggerated clicks because literal key recordings lacked the necessary “sound close-up.”

32. Deadlines and filters make the creative pipe move faster

Brass Knuckle’s action-only rule is a filter: instead of searching every genre and tone, creators must find an action-first story with a compelling character. Rodriguez argues that shrinking the target makes it easier to hit.
Spy Kids 3-D imposed a harsher filter. Shooting began in January 2003, and the stereoscopic effects required every effects shot twice; when Rodriguez requested a delay, the studio replied that moving the date could trigger a $20 million McDonald’s claim.
The film reached theaters in July, which Rodriguez calls the fastest completion of an effects movie, and became the trilogy’s biggest entry. A real deadline worked because the brain knew it was not a self-imposed deadline: there was no option except to decide.
His explanation of last-minute flow is consistent with the conduit metaphor. Deadline pressure removes the ego’s permission to wait, forcing the pen onto paper. The better long-term skill is learning to open that pipe earlier, but a credible deadline reliably exposes what concentrated action can produce.

33. Alita used physical reality to raise the bar for a digital character

Cameron originally intended Alita as preparation for Avatar, but Avatar’s tests advanced until it became the first production. Rodriguez had seen Cameron pursue technology that did not yet exist as early as a 1995 Avatar “scriptment” and watched him shoot the eventual film without knowing its final photorealism.
Rosa Salazar’s audition made Rodriguez cry, convincing him that even a fraction of her expression could animate Alita. Performance capture recorded body and face while witness cameras tracked her position; the effects team then replaced her with a smaller digital figure and reconstructed everything hidden behind her.
Rodriguez built seven physical streets at his Austin studio, with roughly 20-foot structures and digital extensions above and beyond them. Actors therefore inhabited a tangible city, and Alita had to match real surfaces, light, and performances; “if it was all done in CG,” the artists could fudge more.
He says Alita gave Wētā and Cameron’s team an intermediate training ground that helped refine the second Avatar. A sequel remains under discussion: Rodriguez and Cameron want it, have ideas for a planned trilogy, and believe Disney’s renewed use of acquired Fox properties may make the timing more favorable.

34. Cameron’s rare edge is being intensely creative and intensely technical

Rodriguez’s first photo-shop employer recognized his creative eye at 16, then warned that creative people usually depend on technicians while technicians depend on creatives. If Rodriguez learned both, the employer said, he would be “unstoppable.”
That lesson drove him to reduce his “I need” list. Every required camera operator, lighting technician, sound person, or editor places another dependency between intention and completion; doing El Mariachi alone was an extreme attempt to build enough technical fluency to act independently.
Cameron, George Lucas, and John Lasseter exemplify the combination for Rodriguez. Cameron can analytically engineer a submarine or a record-breaking film while retaining story instinct; asked whether a deep-sea descent frightened him, he answered that it did not because he designed the escape vehicle.
Their studios reflected their founders. Troublemaker accumulated intuitive, creatively promiscuous people; Cameron’s team was exacting about physics and logic. Rodriguez admired that analytical rigor, while Cameron described Rodriguez’s machine-gun leg as “unbridled filmmaking from the id” that makes sense during the moment of viewing.

35. Early digital editing gave directors back leverage over their own movies

Desperado was the only movie Rodriguez says was being edited digitally on the Sony lot at the time, and he kept the Avid in his rented living room in 1994. Sony initially resisted because no director there had edited his own studio film and executives did not want to set that precedent.
Rodriguez invoked El Mariachi as the precedent and cut Desperado’s opening scene to prove himself. Executives had mistaken his very short takes for inadequate coverage; after seeing Steve Buscemi’s finished bar story, they accepted that he had already designed the cuts while shooting.
Cameron visited, heard how an editor had resisted “Bad to the Bone” in Terminator 2, and decided to install his own system. Rodriguez says Cameron subsequently edited Titanic, won an editing Oscar, and retained the ability to create his own cuts even while collaborating with other editors.
Rodriguez still uses Avid much like the old tape decks — play, rewind, pause, cut — without mastering every shortcut. The tool has become vastly more capable than he needs; artistry comes from reaching thought speed within a familiar workflow, not exploiting every feature.

36. Sin City was de-risked with a finished scene before rights or production

After digital 3-D and green-screen work on Spy Kids 3-D, Rodriguez reopened Frank Miller’s Sin City books and realized he could preserve their graphic design rather than translate them into a conventional gritty crime film. White windows, black figures, and sparse backgrounds also created a “sliding scale” for budget.
Miller had retained the rights after bad Hollywood experiences and intentionally made the comic too raw to film. Rodriguez flew to New York with a moving-image test, then proposed assuming all risk: write from the books, shoot and finish an opening, and ask for the rights only if Miller liked the completed result.
Rodriguez wrote in December; in January, Josh Hartnett and Marley Shelton shot for roughly ten hours on his green screen while Miller watched. Rodriguez added effects, sound, music, voice-over, and fake credits, producing both a short film and the actual opening sequence.
The finished proof transformed casting. Rodriguez showed Bruce Willis the comic, played the scene, and revealed Willis’s name already embedded in the fake titles: “You’re in the credits. You have to do it now.” Willis joined, and production began by March.

37. Sin City’s visual fidelity was the product, not surface decoration

Rodriguez told Miller, “I just want the comic to move.” Another adaptation might retain plot while replacing the drawings with familiar neo-noir photography, but Rodriguez believed the visual was “half of it” and that literal fidelity would make the film feel unprecedented.
He invited Miller to co-direct because the comic artist had already directed performances, compositions, lighting, and rhythm with a pen. Rodriguez treated the panels as storyboards, scanned them, added sound and guide voices, and constructed timing before actors entered the finished world.
Practical tricks served impossible graphic images. Fluorescent tape and light could make glasses glow in darkness while digital extraction allowed Rodriguez to place lights close to actors, then remove fixtures and backgrounds afterward.
Operating outside Los Angeles mattered. George Lucas told Rodriguez that Austin and Marin County encouraged innovation because distance from Hollywood’s consensus made unconventional digital, stereoscopic, and green-screen methods feel available. “It can’t be impossible if I did it,” Rodriguez says; often he simply kept walking without accepting the stated boundary.

38. Identity is the lever Rodriguez uses when desire repeatedly fails

Lex hesitates before calling himself creative, and Rodriguez treats that hesitation as the real obstacle. Declaring “I’m a creative person” does not claim perfection; imperfect work is what ordinary people recognize, while doubt itself is evidence of the sensitivity associated with making art.
Rodriguez’s physical example began with chronic back problems and a hatred of exercise. Trainers created compliance without affinity until a smoker’s struggle reminded him that “a smoker who’s not smoking” still expects relapse; the identity must become “nonsmoker,” not temporarily abstinent smoker.
In 2012, Rodriguez replaced “I hate working out” with “I’m an athlete.” He says the opposite-day declaration eliminated his trainer, changed his schedule and eating, and ended the internal negotiation because he began asking what an athlete naturally does.
He presses Lex similarly on music: saying “I can’t play live” is “chopping off your leg at the start of the race.” The goal is not certainty of success but identity-backed trust that one can solve the next problem, survive a bad performance, sift the failure, and continue.

39. Journaling converts a fleeting life into analyzable experience

Rodriguez’s phrase is “living is reliving.” A moment passes too quickly for the mind to preserve it reliably; video, photographs, and journals later restore details, relationships, and emotions that bare memory has reduced to a vague file photo.
He keeps one journal file per year and finds that anything older than roughly 15 years reads like someone else’s life. The record preserved Tarantino’s 2:40 a.m. doubt about Pulp Fiction, the origin of an expensive guitar Rodriguez thought he had bought, and clusters of events whose importance appeared only retrospectively.
A photograph alone is insufficient because years later its context disappears. The journal explains who was present, what happened, and why it mattered; together, image and writing allow Rodriguez to reconstruct patterns and sometimes identify an inflection point that felt ordinary on the day.
Recording also feeds creation. Rodriguez tapes his talks because teaching opens the same pipe as writing; listeners return with expanded versions of his lessons, as D.J. Cotrona did after finishing a stalled screenplay in three days, and their transformation sends new methods back to him.

40. Memory’s fragility makes the finite story more precious

Rodriguez’s mother resisted a 75th-birthday celebration because nothing could top her 65th, an event he himself barely remembered despite organizing travel and gifting her a car. He recovered the tape, cut ten minutes, and the family experienced the forgotten celebration again through younger faces and children.
Even low-resolution VHS functions like virtual reality beside memory. His children lean toward the screen, rediscover rooms, and recover sounds and jokes; the primitive image matters less than its power to re-enter an otherwise inaccessible moment.
Rodriguez imagines death as waking from a vivid dream: one briefly remembers being a filmmaker with five children, then the life fades while consciousness moves elsewhere, perhaps absurdly “to be a fish.” A dying character might plead, “Don’t let me wake up,” knowing the dream will vanish.
Asked for life’s meaning, Rodriguez says he does not know, then describes discussing Vedic astrology with his children and his belief that they are distinct souls who may have made a pact in a past life to gather together. His practical faith is that people are nudged by relationships, chance remarks, and identities they are meant to inhabit: listen to the signs, keep the pipe open, record the journey, and, whatever is thrown at the work, “don’t blink.”

Speaker 1

#465

I write the script in December. In January, Josh Hartnett and Marley Shelton come down, and we fly Frank Miller in. We're 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: the visual is half of it.

I want it to look just like this, because it would be the boldest movie anyone's seen. That's how it reads when I read the book: if this was moving, it would be the most phenomenal movie.

Just by being around him and working with him, you learn stuff by osmosis, and it just ups your game because they're swinging way beyond you. James Cameron was like that. 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 this, and I went, “Hey, I just took a 3-day Steadicam course because I can't afford a Steadicam operator, so I'm going to operate Steadicam myself on this bar.”

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 like hanging out with somebody of your ilk. 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 going to take it apart and design a better one.”

Us mere mortals are 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 her. 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.

That way, she had to fit into that world and be as real as that. Because if it was all done in CG, then 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. 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.

Lex Fridman

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

Speaker 1

Oh, all the time. You know how long it'll take to reset, and then you have to work with what you got. You have to work with your result.

Lex Fridman

Do you get nervous, or no?

Speaker 1

In that moment? Oh, yeah. You're nervous, going, “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. I've gotten used to doing things in one take and living with it. It didn't bother me.

In 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 were going to throw him and marry it together, right?

The stunt and car guy goes, “Yeah, we're going to have 3 cars rigged.”

“3 cars? Why?”

“Well, in case one doesn't work, then we have a second one, and a third.”

“We don't have all night to shoot take after take. We're doing just one—just get one car, and if it doesn't work, we'll figure it out, because sometimes you don't have time to do it again. It's such a long setup.”

So I go, “No, I'm good with just going with one. 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 2 things that happened on From Dusk Till Dawn. First was, you know how, in those explosions, somebody walks away in slow motion from an explosion? That's become kind of a thing. That started with Desperado.

Lex Fridman

Desperado was the first. If you look at all the montages, it's Desperado.

Speaker 1

That's right. That is the meme because it was an accident. It was just supposed to be 2 grenades, not a nuclear bomb. He throws them over the side. I just wanted some body parts or something to fly up—some shrapnel.

I literally said “shrapnel,” and my effects guy was so ragged, running so ragged. We get there, and I go, “Do you have any body parts and 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.”

“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 don't know how big this fireball is going to be, but just walk really fast and 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 James Cameron before it came out, and his hand went up like, “You've never seen that before,” you know. 6 months later, From Dusk Till Dawn came out.

I liked how it looked so much that in From Dusk Till Dawn I did it again. Those movies came out within 6 months of each other. That's why it turned into a thing, because people saw it.

I thought, how about for the opening of George Clooney and Quentin walking out of the gas station, 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 was 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, and then when they're farther away and it's safer, then we'll do the big fireballs.”

You're nervous because if one of them trips up a line, the pressure's on them. It's not just you who's nervous. You're nervous for them. They're the ones who have to walk out, do that whole speech, get in the car, and drive away. What if the car doesn't start? 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.

The camera guy goes, “I don't know what happened, but you had a little snafu here.” He goes, “We have autofocus on the Steadicam. You know, we have a focus thing.”

It just went like this. I felt it go whack, all the way out of focus, and whack back for a second. 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. 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 of focus and back in focus within a second.

Now we've got to reshoot it. So we have to wait till we're back in that location. We rigged it for 2 more takes just in case. So that thing that was supposed to be the one take is 3 takes.

The other thing that happened was the front of the From Dusk Till Dawn bar. That same guy who did those explosions packed a bunch of explosives behind the actors when they came 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 the amount of stuff. It blew out. You see it in the movie. You see this huge fireball going up. If you watch closely, you see it already start to catch the whole place on fire. The whole front of that was just foam catching on fire, and I cut just before you see that it's on fire.

That was the first shot at that bar because we weren't going to start shooting the other stuff until night.

#465

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.” Right away, this is what happens: my first AD, Doug Arniokoski, comes over to me, and I go over to him.

The guys came out with the fire hoses, but 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 cool like this.”

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 is black. We didn’t go over there and touch that up. That was real flame that burned it, and it ended up looking great.

So then, the next week, when we came back to shoot that other shot that didn’t work, they had repaired it, and we shot all the night stuff, which is the majority of the stuff in front of it. Sometimes you have to roll with it and look at the blessing you get because of 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 have actually seen that it was a foam set. This made it look better.

So I kind of let the universe push me where I’m supposed to go. Just roll with it. You have 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 is going to be, and you 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.

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 for 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 superhuman. Why don’t you just make yourself that way? You’re writing your own story.

The more you get into storytelling, you start really seeing that life imitates art and art imitates life, but the process is also the same. You write the story, the script, and then you have it collide with the chaos of reality. In that moment, that’s where you see the chicken shit. You have to be able to keep your eyes open. You have to notice and say, “Wait a minute. Stuff changed. Where’s—not to be cliché about it—where’s the silver lining of this? Where’s the path to actually make something good out of this?”

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.” A lot of people read my book, Rebel Without a Crew, and told me, “It made me want to be a filmmaker.” But a lot of people said it helped them start their own business because they saw how you can go be entrepreneurial like that and go where no one else is going.

I’m giving this whole 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 1.5 years 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?” Her point of view is exactly what you’re saying. She’s not looking at it at all. She’s just concentrating on what didn’t follow her plan and not seeing the gift of everything else that’s there.

She goes, very reluctantly—it was so perfect, I wish we had filmed it—“I learned a good lesson the hard way.” I said, “That still sucks.” When you follow your instinct—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 $1,000,000.” It was your instinct, and you fail.

Sometimes the only way across the river is to slip on the first 2 rocks. You fail. You have to really sift through the ashes of your failure. I call it the silver lining, but the key to your next success is in there. 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 Rooms story. I said, “I made a movie called Four Rooms. It didn’t make any money, right?” When Quentin asked me, “Hey, do you want to make a movie with me and 2 other filmmakers? It’s an anthology. It’s on New Year’s Eve. It’s in a hotel. You have to use the bellhop. We’re not going to know what each other’s making,” we made it. My hand went up right away, instinctively: “Shit, 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 ask, “Should I have not raised my hand that quickly? Shouldn’t I have done a little studying first, or should I just go by blind instinct, or should you do instinct with some studying?” I could have gone and studied, and I would have found that anthologies never work. Even when it’s Coppola, Scorsese, or Woody Allen, they bomb because people can’t quite wrap their heads around it. What is it? The Twilight Zone? I don’t want to go see that.

But that didn’t matter. 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 other 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.”

By the way, an anthology is when there are multiple stories—more than 1 story—in 1 movie. So if you did the research, you would know that very few people ever got that to work. The audience can’t quite wrap their heads around it, and then it feels like the movie’s starting 3 times.

So I make that movie, and it bombs. Now, I could feel real bad about that, but if you really think about it, you go, “Why did I sign up for it? Did I raise my hand because I thought it was going to 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. If I look through the ashes of that failure, I find 2 keys to my biggest successes in there.

While I was on the set, they said it had to be New Year’s. So I thought, “I’m just going to do like Bedhead. I’m going to have 2 little kids running around in this room, and we have to use the bellhop as a babysitter.” Well, it’s New Year’s, so let’s dress everybody in tuxedos because it’s New Year’s. They’re all going to 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 2 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 their parents are spies? They have to go save them.” There are 5 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 3 stories, not 4, with the same director—not 4 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, and that’s Sin City.

Those are by far 2 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 2 rocks.

So where’s the key in that—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 wanted. 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 who look back on Four Rooms see a lot of creative genius in there. So you say it flopped. It flopped financially, but there are so many ways to measure. Like I said, I would say, “Well, it was successful because even Roger said, ‘Hey, you furnished my favorite room.’” I was like, “Hey, I could take that.”

But now that I think about it, there’s something else still there. I keep sifting, and it’s like, “Oh, yeah. 2 big successes came from that.” It’s an amazing lesson to have because it makes you feel better about failure.

Think of The Thing by John Carpenter. You put that movie out the same weekend as E.T. That thing 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, so it makes you question your instincts.

Well, 10 years later, it turns out, “Oh, it’s a classic.” 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 going to commit to making a body of work. Some will succeed. Some will overperform. Some will underperform. It's not your job. You just want to be a creative person. Just create.

I told you: just create. Stop thinking about movie by 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. You don't know what the masterpieces are going to be, or which one someone's going to come and say, “Oh, that one that bombed—there is some really creative stuff in there.” It's not for you to decide. You just go and do it.

Sometimes I think it takes some time to process the failure, to make sense of it. At least for me, don't rush making sense of what didn't work. What lessons do I take from it? How do I sift through the ashes, as you said?

Lex Fridman

Yeah.

#465

It takes time. You have to sleep on it a bunch. Sometimes it's right there, and sometimes you come back and revisit it later, because you might not have had some information that you have now that makes you look at it a lot differently.

When I did the audiobook for Rebel Without a Crew, which I thank you for, by the way, I hadn't read it since I wrote it, so I didn't remember a lot of the details.

Lex Fridman

And you actually—it's voiced by you.

#465

I voiced it, so I was reading it in real time.

Lex Fridman

Yeah. I highly recommend people listen to it because you comment and add additional commentary to it. It's great.

#465

Most of the time, I'm laughing because I can't believe how crazy that story is. I forgot a lot of details, and when you're younger—when you're 21 or 22—6 months feels like 6 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.

I remember I was really disappointed. 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 go, “Wow, I got an agent the next month.” He wasn't even going to help me sell it. He said, “If you can get $20,000 for it, take it.” I chased those people down for those contracts in the Spanish market for months, and they never answered me back. Then Columbia ended up buying it for about 10 times as much. We re-released it, 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 vision, and it needed to do that, which you would never know going through it. 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.

Lex Fridman

Yeah. Every aspect of your journey is super inspiring. We'll talk about it. Let's go to the beginning. There are a few technical things that are fascinating about your beginning. You started making films when you were very young, with an old Super 8 camera, and you were editing on a VCR.

#465

I still do it that way. I like doing things that way. I have a new company called Brass Knuckle Films, where the audience can actually participate by investing—by being investors in these movies that are done the same way. They're action films like we did with El Mariachi, but for $10 million 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. The second one was $40 million. The third one was $80 million. The fourth one was $100 million, because the audience kept growing and growing. You can get a big actor like Keanu Reeves for a $20 million movie.

I asked James Cameron, I said, “Terminator cost $5 million.” 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.

What I'm going to say now about how I started—you see that DNA in how I do things. I want people to know how I did things with Rebel Without a Crew and with these methods that I started with. 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.

When I first started, I didn't have any money, so I still play like I don't have money. I had Super 8. My dad had a Super 8 camera, but I couldn't afford to use it much. I shot 2 rolls. You had to buy the film, shoot 2 minutes, and then it cost the same amount to develop it as it did to buy it—whatever that was, $12 or whatever. Most of the footage was out of focus, and there was no sound.

But then my dad, who sold cookware, had a VCR—one of the first home VCRs on the market—which he would use to play his sales tapes to his salesmen. It came with a camera attached by a cable like this one you have coming out. Imagine if that had to go into your VCR for you to even see what it was shooting. It was an old camera with manual focus, manual iris, and a 12-foot cable.

I started making movies with that instead. Now, for $8, I had a 2-hour erasable tape with sound and picture. I got into digital really early. What I was doing was really frowned upon back then, and continued to be frowned upon all the way until I was using it for real in the early 2000s, before everyone realized, “Oh, that's the future.”

Lex Fridman

Yeah. That's fascinating, because you were a rebel in that way too, using digital video.

#465

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. If you want to be a rock star, if you want to learn how to play guitar really well, you're not going to just jump onstage and suddenly be able to play. You have to practice until your fingers bleed.

The same is true with movies. You have to keep telling stories and cutting them together, and you just can't afford that on film. Nobody can, with a 2-minute roll costing as much as a 2-hour tape. So I was making all these movies.

First, I would cut in camera. That old VCR had a really great pause button. They stopped making that; when you hit pause, it stopped right there with a clean cut. It didn't have all these color bars like the later ones had. It also had an audio-dub feature where you could add a second soundtrack to it.

If I had people talking, I could hit audio dub and add sound effects, so I could have 2 tracks on the same tape. That was my filmmaking kit for a while, until I needed to start doing real editing.

My dad bought a second VCR for his business because I stole his other one. I found that if I hooked them together, I could play on one and use that pause button on the second. This was the limitation that taught me how to edit in my head: 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, but when I cut it, I had to cut in linear order. If you pushed pause, it was a nice, clean cut, but it only held for 5 minutes. You had 5 minutes before the machine shut off, so you had to find your next shot within 5 minutes and do that. Otherwise, if you had to start the machine over, it would add all these color bars and everything would be screwed up.

I'd have to sit there and not move for all day while I cut, knowing what the next shot was. Once I had it cut, I would then add some sound effects to it, because I had the audio-dub function. But if I wanted to add music, I would take that tape, which now had 2 tracks, into the first deck and put it into the VCR again—one generation of loss.

I had a little cassette tape player with the music, and I used a Y-splitter so I could add the music.

Lex Fridman

Yeah.

#465

I made award-winning short films that way on video. There were some festivals that would allow video—not many—but they would always win.

What's funny is, I stumbled upon Spy Kids that way. 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. If you just bring your high school buddies, they look like high school kids.

So I used my little brothers and sisters, because I'm one of 10 and the third oldest. They were just sitting around watching cartoons anyway, and I made them the action stars just to learn. I found that those things were a winning formula. They'd win every festival I'd send them to.

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 1 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 the film festivals—of these action kids,” which was a precursor to Spy Kids.

Lex Fridman

Bedhead is a precursor to Spy Kids. We should say that Bedhead was an award-winning short film that was probably a big leap for you, and probably opened the door for you to then make El Mariachi.

#465

Because at those video festivals, I would win a trip to New York and a director's chair with the video shorts that I would put in festivals. But I knew that 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 it was winning all the festivals.

I thought, “Wow, I made that with a wind-up film camera, filming just one take for each shot, with no slates because I'm the editor. That cost $800, and it was 8 minutes. I bet I can make an 80-minute movie for $8,000 if I use the same method.” So 6 months later, I was making El Mariachi, because it opened my mind to the fact that I could try it in a feature.

Lex Fridman

Can we actually pause on that? I think Bedhead has a really great, really unique story, shot in a really unique way. What I'm trying to say is that it's very important to write the right script. Write the right story.

#465

Let me tell you the trick to that. El Mariachi is the same way, and this really helped people. Even Kevin Smith from Clerks said, “Wow, Robert, when El 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's cousin owns. His cousin's brother has a brother-in-law who 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 backward.

For Bedhead, I even did that with a camera. I'd been shooting video all this time, and one thing I wished I could do on video, but never could, was slow motion or even stop motion. When I got that crappy World War II camera they gave us in film school, I was so pissed. I thought, “This is the camera I've been trying to get my hands on? I could have bought this for $50 at a pawn shop.”

It was an old Bell & Howell wind-up camera. You couldn't even see through the lens. You were seeing through an approximation of the lens. But you could shoot slow motion, and I could do reverse photography. If I filmed upside down, I could do it, because if I did a fast push into her, I'd never get the focus right.

I started with it in focus, went back, pulled backward on a chair, and then reversed it and flipped it. Now it looks like it stops on a dime in focus.

Lex Fridman

The number of times I've seen you shoot backward is incredible—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, which then results in the story that you wanted. You have to be functioning in some kind of different space-time continuum.

#465

So I've got this different camera. What now? I don't want to shoot the same kind of movie if I've got a camera that can do that. I can do stop motion.

That's why there's an animated title sequence at the beginning. I thought, “Wow, I'm a cartoonist. If I set the camera up here, I can slow it down enough. It's not frame by frame, but if I get it down to 2 frames a second, I can just tap it and it'll maybe get 1 frame off.” So I did 300 drawings by hand for that opening title sequence.

Lex Fridman

Holy shit. That was you doing it by hand?

#465

Yeah. So you watch that, and this is a throwaway title sequence, but I really wanted this thing to win awards.

Lex Fridman

Hold on a second. How long did it take to draw that? That's a lot of work.

#465

Remember, I drew it. I was a daily cartoonist by then, so I was pretty fast. Still, that's why it's only penciled; it's not inked. But it looks great. The camera is going around and all kinds of crazy stuff, but it's all faked with paper.

It took me all night to shoot it. I remember I walked into the film school the next day, all sleepy, and told one of the fellow students, “I was up all night doing this animated title sequence.” He said, “Why are you putting so much work into this? They're not going to grade you any differently.”

I was like, “Grades? You 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 realized, “Wow, okay, I can do reverse photography, I can do stop motion,” I thought she has to have special powers. If she has special powers, then I can utilize the camera. I can really milk this camera for all it can get.

One of the shots I love the most is where she's standing there, and she makes a chair come all the way up to her. 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 the chair?

Lex Fridman

Yeah.

Speaker 1

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. 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 closely, you see the strings are in the back, but your eye isn't looking there. I did stuff like that, and then with her getting the hose, I just did stop motion for the hose turning on—the faucet.

That's why I gave her special powers, and it made the story better. Sometimes the limitations you have with equipment or location, you can use them to make something. Take chicken shit and 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, I look at that camera and I can't believe I ever made a movie with that thing. It's so ridiculously primitive. I'm just like, “How did I even think I could get anything done with this?” And it even exposed. El Mariachi was the same way.

I shot El Mariachi on film with a Bolex 16mm camera. I didn't know how to use it. I called up a place in Dallas that rented that kind of equipment and said, “I have an Arri 16S here. It has 2 motor-looking things. One has a 24, and one has a bunch of numbers.”

They said, “Oh, that's a variable-speed motor. That means you can do different speeds.”

I thought, “I can shoot slow motion with this. Wow. Do you have a torque motor?”

They asked, “I don't know. What is that? Is there something on the side of the magazine?”

You can just look it up on YouTube now, and it shows you how to do it. I was doing it by phone that way, and then I went and shot the movie right then.

I didn't know if any of it was exposing or if the film camera was working until I finished the whole movie. Imagine having to go down to Mexico, shoot for 2 weeks, come back, and send it off to a lab. You want to talk about being nervous? I was just hoping something had exposed.

When I saw it come back on tape—they transferred it to tape so I could edit it deck to deck again—I was so relieved. Some things didn't come out, but I could cut around that. It's like, “Oh, yeah, because I'm doing everything.”

Imagine if you forgot to stop down and it was open all the way, and 1 shot was blown out. I'd have stuff like that because I was moving fast and doing it all myself.

Lex Fridman

Wait a minute. You shot the whole thing without knowing if any of the footage was damaged?

#465

Wrong. Without knowing if any of it was exposed. That's why I only did 1 take.

So my idea was this. How gangster is that?

Lex Fridman

Well, it was a test film.

Speaker 1

Right, right. I thought it was going to be a test film. It's the only movie in history ever made where the filmmaker did not think anyone would see it, and expected it and even set it up that way.

Why would I make an action movie for the Spanish market called El Mariachi, basically The Guitar Player? It 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 was just to learn from. I needed to make it for as little as possible and see how much I could sell it for. If I could double my money, great. I could make another one and just get more practice.

I was intrigued by this idea because you've heard advice about screenwriting. I heard 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 3 scripts and throw them away. The 4th script will be a good one.”

I was like, “It's so hard to write a script. Who's going to write 3 full scripts knowing they'll throw them away? Wouldn't it be better if you write 3 scripts and then shoot each one and be the cameraman, be the sound guy, be everything? Because that way you're learning not just writing; you're learning how to make a movie.”

That was my idea. I was going to make 3 of these, hide them on Spanish video, but make my money back. That's like my own film school paying me to learn.

So for the first one, I thought, “Let me just shoot 1 take each,” because my friend Carlos lives in Mexico. If we shoot 2 takes, most of the cost is the film. I've just doubled my budget. So let me just shoot 1 take.

Some of it isn't going to come out, but I'm not going to know what. I'm not going to shoot a safety one. That doubles my budget. Let me see. Some things might come out.

I expected 70% of it to be okay, but 30% I might have to come back and reshoot, which is fine. I just drive back there and reshoot those shots, right? So I just went, “Let's shoot.”

We stop, we come back, and then I send it off to develop because we're shooting 2 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 and do one take for everything.

I remember one time I was telling the 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 going to see it. And because you don't think anyone's going to see it, you end up doing something remarkable, which is, “Well, I'm just going to make something for myself.” 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've got to get serious.”

But because I made this movie that was just entertaining myself, like Bedhead, it entertained audiences. So that naivety is really important when you're starting out or at any point in your life. Be naive about what things are going to be, 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. That's just going to be the movie.” And that's the one that went to Sundance.

Lex Fridman

That was your first feature film. That's the one you made for $7,000. You mentioned your friend Carlos as the star of the movie. Everything was one take.

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. It 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.

#465

They were just friends of ours, which is why—and this was the magic of not having a crew—they didn't feel like they were making a movie. It was like, “We're just here.” Me with my one camera.

In fact, Carlos said, “This one girl, I forgot she's in town. Maybe she would work.” We tried to get a soap star, and she backed out, so we got this gal over. She goes, “But I don't know how to act.” And I said, “Here, let's watch. I want to show you something on Mexican TV.” A telenovela was on, and you see someone overacting. I said, “That's acting. I don't want you to do that. I want you to just talk like you're talking.”

Lex Fridman

Wait—the love interest, the woman in that, that's what you're talking about? She's amazing.

#465

But I got a video of her, so I said, “I want you to just do this one line. Pretend like you're just talking to your boyfriend.” I showed her the video. That was cool because I couldn't show her the film—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 that.” Everyone just brought their own clothes. She really had a sexuality, a tension, a romantic tension that was real.

That was, in part, a great love story, as ridiculous as it is to say.

Lex Fridman

Yeah.

Lex Fridman

And in part, a dramatic love story.

#465

Yeah.

The idea was that originally what I wanted to do was The Road Warrior. I said, “I want a guy with a guitar case full of weapons going from town to town, like The 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 about we do a genesis story—how he became that guy? So let's do Mad Max, basically, how he becomes that guy.

So maybe he is a guitar player. Then you start writing it out. I was 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 $1,000,000 with one of these before.” It's like, this is the key to your next success: cards.

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. What you don't have are the 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 3 things can I do today that will not just change my life but everyone around me?” Take steps toward that. Take out your cards and start writing them down. You won't come up with 3. You'll come up with 15. You're like, “Wow,” because you're asking yourself and you'll see them.

So when I was doing that movie, I thought, “Okay, he's a guitar player for real, and he gets mixed up with a guy with a case.” So how about he walks into a bar? I write down: He walks into a bar, trying to get work. The bartender looks at him: “We don't hire mariachi. Just get the hell out of here.”

So he leaves. After that whole scene explaining who he is and what his story is, the shooter comes in with a guitar case full of weapons. He's also dressed in black, and he shoots the place up. Now, if that was a short film, that's how you'd start a short film. But this is a feature movie, so, shit, I've got to figure out how to tell a feature. I'm going to need a few more cards before that.

Who's this bad guy? How about he's in jail? I read a crazy story about a guy who was in jail in Mexico, and he was running his drug business from jail. He was in jail as protection; he could walk out anytime, but it was to have the cops be his enforcers, basically.

So introduce that guy. He's in jail, making phone calls, and someone puts a hit on him. 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.

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 the mariachi.

The mariachi's doing a voice-over. It's easy to shoot. We can do the voice later. We don't have to sync sound.

There was even a scene when he walks into town where we saw this guy cutting coconuts. We said, “Oh, let's go film over there.” So we filmed the guy giving him a coconut with a straw in it, and he walks out, and we went, “Shit, man. You forgot to pay the guy. Well, let's shoot that.”

No, there's one take. I'll just put in the voice-over that they give away free coconuts in this town. For years, people in other countries would go, “They really give away free coconuts?” No, it's because we forgot to show him paying. Little happy accidents.

So now, look, you're already building a movie. 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. You just start your movie visually. You can start seeing your movie.

I've used this for business things. I've used this for ideas, for manifesting stuff. It's brilliant.

Lex Fridman

Are you doing this alone usually, or are you brainstorming with somebody?

#465

It comes so fast. It's like free association. Maybe I have the ending. “Oh, I know. I want his hand shot.” He's going to get his hand shot because he's a musician, and those ballads are always really tragic. So the girl has to die, because 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. Now you've 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.

Lex Fridman

What happens if you get stuck? Like, this doesn't make sense. Some aspect of the structure doesn't make sense.

#465

You leave that there. You just start writing the ones you do know. I know at 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.

Lex Fridman

Those are all crossroads to the story, aren't they? How do you know she has to die? Can you change your mind about that?

#465

I can, yeah, but for now, I felt like the story was telling me 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 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 then he needs a ghost. This is a genesis story of a character.

Look, Bruce Wayne lost his parents. You could say, “Well, do the parents have to die?” Well, no, but it's not going to propel him like that. It's not going to drive him like that thing. It just kept coming to me.

So this is my other trick, and this is the main thing you've got to learn about: if you take anything away from this, it isn't me doing it. I totally believe that, because when you start doing this, you go, “Where are these answers coming from? I'm asking the right question, but why? How come the answers just keep coming like this?”

I believe that because I do so many different jobs. I've learned this over the years. 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 an 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. It must be something about creativity. So, I went on Amazon. It was 2002. I looked up creative books—anything that had “creativity” in the title—and ordered it. I got a bunch of books on creativity and read through them.

One of them was really speaking to me. “Yeah, that’s it. That’s the process.” 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, and writing. It’s all the same.”

That’s when I realized that creativity is 90% of any of those jobs. The technical part of setting up the cameras, writing a script in format, or reading and writing music—that’s 10% of it. How many musicians don’t read or write music and are still fantastic? It’s because 90% of what they do is creative.

I believe that same person, even if they only do music, could literally jump from job to job using creativity and do a superior job compared to most technicians.

Lex Fridman

And 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 then you roll in and all the experts are 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 gave me prices that were insane. The amount of effort was insane. They said the acoustics of this room were all wrong, and I’m like, “Why can’t I just fucking hang up some curtains? It seems like that kills most of the echo. I don’t understand.” They’re like, “No, this is all wrong.” I’m like, “Fuck it. I’m just going to try it and see what it sounds like.”

A and B. Okay, here’s the audio with curtains. Here’s the audio without. It seems like this is fine, so I 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.

#465

Yeah. You’re going on your creativity, but what is that? Do you consider yourself a creative person? I think you play guitar.

Lex Fridman

Yeah. Guitar, piano.

#465

Yeah, you play piano. But would you call yourself a creative person?

Lex Fridman

Yeah, I think so.

#465

Good. You should. I think that’s a positive. I would just suggest to anybody: own it. Own it and just say, “When I do so many different jobs…”

When they would introduce me—“Hey, Robert, he does this, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah”—I would get tired just hearing that list. But when I think about it, there’s really only one thing I do: I live a creative life.

When you live a creative life, that means anything that has to do with creativity—whether it’s filming, piano, 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. When somebody just does one job, they barely know that job. You have to do more to learn about creativity.

This is the main thing I learned: I’m writing music for an orchestra, and I’m like, “How did I? I don’t even know what I’m doing. Why is that coming out? 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—like, that’s how fast I wrote that movie—I go, “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.” I asked Jimmie Vaughan, “How do you play guitar, those solos?” He goes, “It’s like a radio. Once you get it tuned just right, you can’t even believe what’s coming through.”

I believe—I call it the creative spirit—that 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 a flow and you’re like, “Whoa, it’s writing,” that’s it.

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.” You don’t ever have to get hung up on that question: “What happens when you can’t come up with anything?” It wasn’t me to begin with. If it’s not coming out, it’s because I’m blocking it.

If I were flowing and said, “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.”

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. I would have to draw one drawing, draw another drawing, and then say, “Okay, these kind of go together.” It was a process. Sometimes I just felt like, “I wish I could envision it. I could sit back and try to picture the comic strip.”

I went home and sat back on my sofa. I tried the sofa method: “I’m just going to try to picture the comic strip. As soon as I get one that I think is funny, I’ll just go draw that, right? Done. I’ll be done in a half hour. Why waste 3 hours?”

I’d sit there and sit there and sit there. My deadline would be coming up. I’d have about 30 minutes left, and I’d be like, “Oh shit, I’ve got to go sit and draw it out.” It was like, “Oh, okay, I’ve 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 going to come visit you while you’re doing this. It needs your hands, and it’s not going to reward you for sitting there waiting for it. You have to jump in and do it. People say, “Oh, well, I’m not ready.” How pissed off is that spirit now? 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 it, you’ll be blessed with this never-ending flow of ideas. Don’t take ownership of it, and know that if it’s not coming out, you’re just clogging it, because this thing’s got endless ideas.

Lex Fridman

And you give that same advice for making films, which is: don’t plan the movie. If you want to be a filmmaker, don’t think about making the movie. Just go in and start.

I would meet a lot of people who introduce themselves as aspiring: “I’m an aspiring filmmaker.” And I wonder, what would you tell an aspiring filmmaker?

#465

I’d say, “Stop aspiring,” because if you call yourself that, you are that. You’re always going to feel like you’re not ready. You just jump in before you’re ready. You don’t feel like you’re ready until—

I didn’t feel like I was ready to do El 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 similar project, by the end they did an interview with my son. After just 2 weeks of doing one of those projects, you’re a different person. He was suddenly waxing philosophical about the creative process, saying, “I never knew how my dad did El Mariachi until we did this project together.”

He realized I didn’t know either. I didn’t know how I was going to do it. I figured it out day by day. Every challenge that got thrown at me, I had to figure it out.

That’s the biggest lesson. Most people never start. Don’t wait until you’re ready, or that’ll be on your tombstone: “Here lies so-and-so. He was never ready.” You don’t want to be that guy. Jump in.

No, it’s not you. You just have to be the hands. 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.

Lex Fridman

Can you talk through some of the hats—the many hats—you wore with 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.

#465

That was crazy. That thing’s held together with Scotch tape and rubber bands because of the camera I borrowed.

Lex Fridman

You directed. You did the cinematography. You did the sound.

#465

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.

Lex Fridman

Yeah. It’s just like you’re doing here, except you’ve got sound recording right onto the cameras, right? Or do you have it as a separate system?

#465

Separately, but it’s synced. I didn’t have a sync camera.

Yep. I had a camera that was not a sync camera. The thing was so loud, I would have had to blimp the shit out of it, which I didn’t have a blimp for. Then I would have needed a sound guy.

Lex Fridman

Just to be clear, so people understand this: you’re shooting basically no sound because the camera sounds like this. It sounds like all your money is going away.

#465

First of all, I would go, “Action.” He’d start running. I’d shoot my edit. “Cut.” They’re still running. I’m only using this part, and there’s no slates, nothing.

There were guys holding up their fingers at the beginning of the roll—like, this is reel 7—for just a few frames so I knew which reel it was. Then that 10 minutes of film was just one shot after another, and I used almost every frame of those shots because I was cutting in the camera.

Now, after I shoot—let’s say, “Tell me your name, Lex.”

What’s your last name?

Lex Fridman

Fridman.

#465

Where do you live?

Lex Fridman

Austin, Texas.

#465

I would do the whole scene and get the sound. I’d bring the mic in close like that and say, “Say it again.”

Lex Fridman

Lex Fridman, Austin, Texas.

#465

That’ll probably sync. If you were going on and on, there’s a place where it would go out of sync. I hate rubbery lips, so I would cut away to the dog, the knife, or the girl. Then I’d cut back when you were back in sync.

Since these were non-actors, they said everything the same way each time. They would say their lines as if they weren’t performing, so they didn’t remember how they had performed them before. They were just talking in their own rhythm. A lot of the time, 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 in such a low-budget movie, but it was the only way to keep things in sync. When I would shoot 2 people talking, I’d make sure I filmed a couple of shots of the dog or a stuffed cat, just so I’d have something to cut away to and get them back in sync.

Lex Fridman

That’s so brilliant.

#465

I call it just being resourceful. It’s just being very resourceful. You allow it to get maybe a little bit out of sync sometimes.

Lex Fridman

Yeah.

#465

I didn’t allow it, but I would let it if I just didn’t have a way to cut away. I would try to sync it as best I could.

Lex Fridman

But as the audience, do you understand where the threshold is, where we notice something? It seems like you can get away with a lot.

#465

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

I didn’t shoot 2 takes of film or even 2 takes of audio—just 1 take. We went through the whole scene, and what was cool was that I had them go through the whole scene again. I would record them 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. If I had had a sync camera, the mic would have been so far away that we would have had to go get new sound effects. But because the camera was off, I could record everything close up. There was some blessing to that.

Lex Fridman

You and Quentin Tarantino had a great conversation about a lot of topics, but one of them was how to bring out the best in the actors. What is that magic? How do you bring out the best in these non-actors, and what’s the thread that connects to your future work?

#465

What really helped with those non-actors was that they just looked across at me filming. They didn’t feel like they were being watched by a whole crew, so they were very natural.

The guy who played the bad guy, I met him in the research hospital where I sold my body to science. He was my bunkmate. I said, “Dude, you look kind of like Rutger Hauer.” Then we saw another movie and I said, “Man, you look like James Spader. You should be the bad guy in my movie. It’d be cool to have you as the bad guy.”

He goes, “But I don’t speak Spanish.”

“Well, that’s okay. I’ll teach it to you phonetically, and you’re going to wear sunglasses.”

If you look closely, he’s holding the lines here and looking at the lines like that, just smiling. You can’t believe he’s getting away with this. He’s smiling and he’s got the sunglasses on.

Lex Fridman

I read that somewhere. In the pool—there’s a scene in the pool.

#465

In the pool, he’s like this with the sunglasses on.

Lex Fridman

Oh, man.

#465

But he was doing it phonetically, and I’ll tell you what, he was so great, that guy.

When we did Desperado, I brought him back. He didn’t even have to do any dialogue. Watch that movie when he shows up in the opening scene of Desperado. He’s playing the guitar in the opening, 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.

Lex Fridman

Yeah.

#465

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.

Lex Fridman

How do you recreate that later on a big movie?

#465

It’s just building a rapport and making a safe zone for your actors. Quentin once told me, when we were talking about directing, that sometimes being a great director is just being a great audience.

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. If it makes you cry, they know that, too. Sometimes you don’t have to tell them a lot. If you do have something very specific to tell them, they usually go with it.

I always just like to see what they do. A lot of times they’re in the zone because, again, they’re getting that flow, too. You create the right environment, and everyone’s getting this inspiration that’s all tied together—something you never could have directed.

You just create that space where we’re all going to be open to it, and it’s going to drop in our lap. 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. When it happens, I’m going to point it out, and it’s going to be like magic. We’re just going to say, “Okay, we’re accepting it,” and we do it.

It gets people in that kind of headspace, and then we’re all open to where the character is supposed to go and 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 whatever feels good.

Lex Fridman

There’s such an intimate connection between the actor and the director. I’ve seen some of the behind-the-scenes footage with you.

#465

Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman

You’re 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. When a director approves—

#465

Well, you’re a performer, and there’s no other approval. It’s not like a live show where you get the approval of the audience and you’re like, “Wow, they liked that joke. Let me do more.”

Really, the director is it. A lot of times the director’s way behind a monitor somewhere. That’s why I still like to operate the camera, because when I’m operating the camera, it’s like this. We could have 100 people here and we wouldn’t know, because they go away. It’s just us. They disappear.

When the camera guy is the director, we’re going, “Let’s do that again. Let’s do that again.”

There’s a shot in Sin City where I’m guiding Clive and myself through it. I have my crew setting lights, and I have this great shot of Clive, where he’s holding Benicio’s head down in the toilet. Benicio isn’t there; it’s just a close-up of him at this point.

I’m practicing my shot, zooming slowly into his face, and people are still walking behind him on the green screen, setting lights. I’m like, “I’m rolling. We’re ready to go. We’re getting this. What you’re doing right now, just keep holding that. Now, 1 jolt, like you’re starting to fight back, but you don’t even flinch. Cut.”

“Okay, never mind. You guys can stop moving that shit. We already got it.”

Lex Fridman

Holy shit. It’s like that.

#465

Wow.

Lex Fridman

It’s like that because you’re so—

#465

That’s a great scene, by the way.

Lex Fridman

Great.

#465

Right. It can feel like if I wait for these guys, this moment will be gone.

Another one was Mickey Rourke. He had so much dialogue. He had just done this whole big dialogue scene, and he had another one. I said, “Let’s go ahead and start with a wide shot where the 2 actors are here. If I’m the camera, Mickey and Elijah are here. Let’s get a 2-shot, and we’ll come around on Mickey for a close-up. We’ll turn Mickey around for the close-up. Let’s start with the wide shot and get used to the lines, and most of it’s going to be sold in a close-up.”

We sit down, and 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. 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 that performance is just right then. You can feel that when you’re operating and you’re the camera guy and the DP.

It’s high-tech guerrilla filmmaking. We’re on a green screen, but all the crew needs are marching orders. “Put a light back there, hitting them harder. This is a 5K—make that a 10K. It’s got to be stronger.”

They don’t need to know that I’m going to make that a lamppost later. They just need marching orders for the moment. I can tell people, “Do this, do this, do that,” and then I know what I can accomplish with the actor. Everything else falls into place later because I’m going to put all that in later.

Once you know how to do a lot of jobs like that, you can move at the speed of thought, which is where the actors love being creatively, because nobody knew what green screen was back then. They’re like, “What is this again?”

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. You might just have a cup or a steering wheel, but it’s just you and the other actors, like this.”

And 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? It was so fun to do those kinds of movies. To this day, I try to be close to the action, connected with the actor, because it's like a dance.

Remember, on From Dusk Till Dawn, Michael Parks, in the opening scene, is talking about the 2 guys who are running around killing people just before he gets shot. I just started doing this slow zoom, and I'm like, “I hope I get all the way up to where it stops zooming when he finishes that speech,” because there's no set way, and I don't know how he's going to say it. But you're just locked in, almost telepathically.

As he's delivering it, there are no edits. He's just going, “Yeah, they killed 4 Rangers, 2 hostages.” You're so pulled in. I'm just like, “Oh my God.” And then it stopped. I ran out of zoom right as he finished that speech.

Lex Fridman

So how can a director—because there are a lot of great directors that stay in the back, you know? They just trust whatever they get from their crew. They just accept it, just like you would get a take. 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.

#465

It's like a dance. It's like trying to do a dance with a partner while you're across the room. You have to be there, up close, feeling the energy. It's the creative spirits whispering to you both. It's not your own idea. You're capturing a moment that's magic, and there's true magic that happens on a set.

That's what brings you back, because you know I didn't direct that, and they didn't act that. It came through us, and we just had the cameras rolling and captured a ghost.

Lex Fridman

It's crazy. It's crazy. All right, your friendship with Quentin Tarantino is just fascinating, and the whole timeline of the history of movies—that the 2 of you collided and met—is a fascinating part of the story. You first met him in 1992 at the Toronto Film Festival. Can you just talk about meeting Tarantino?

#465

Yeah, we both had films at the same time—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 saw it.

He 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. So I went ahead and saw his movie at Telluride, and I was like, “Holy shit, this guy's in black again, just like El Mariachi—dressed in black and action.” I said, “We're going to like each other's movies. He's going to like my movie when he sees it.”

Then in Toronto we met. We met first 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 were on a panel together, and that's where I met him.

He's like, “Hey, your agent told me about you.” And I was like, “Yeah, and I saw your movie, Reservoir Dogs.” And he goes, “Oh, you have to come to my screening, and I'm going to come see yours.”

He came to El Mariachi, and I videotaped the audience reactions because they were insane—insane reactions to it. I have the first screening he saw of El 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 El Mariachi.

Lex Fridman

Oh no, really?

Speaker 1

Yeah, because I taped it all, and he's so loud because he's right next to me.

Well, just like you, but probably even more than you. 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 his 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. He loves what the actors did, and that's the kind of energy you really love.

But I'll tell you what happened. I'm a very shy person—very shy. I'd have to go talk. I'm sure you probably feel like you're not an actor 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 afterward. I'm afraid of that. What am I going to do? I've never talked in front of more than 5 people before.”

So I went to see this other movie, and it was good. I was watching, and then the director comes up at the end. He goes, “Yeah, well, that was my movie, and here's the writer.” And I'm 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. 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. It was just very new. Nobody knew it was possible.

My whole intro was like, “You'll see the Columbia logo slapped in front. It probably cost more than the whole movie.” Then I go through, “This is how I made it—with a wheelchair for a dolly, a turtle.” I wrote around things I had. I mentioned the turtle, the pit bull, the bus, the ranch, all that stuff.

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 my intro. They just wanted to hear a story like this so badly. I heard someone next to me say, “I'm going to 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.

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 freaking lose their minds because they know how I put it together. They know the rubber bands and the Popsicle sticks because I already set it up. That's why that audience—I just taped the reaction. They're so with it.

Lex Fridman

The context is so key. You can watch *El Mariachi* and go, “Hey, yeah, this looks like a $7,000 movie,” but if you know the story behind it, suddenly—

Speaker 1

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 came up, and I'm like, “Oh, yeah. Well, it looks like a $7,000 movie.”

Then it keeps going, and once we're in the jail cell and the shooting's happening, I realize, “Oh my God, we had these blanks that only fired 1 shot, and they 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 a machine gun, then repeat a few frames so it looked like a machine gun.

All this stuff—I'm starting to sweat 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 it.” 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 in my first real movie with a crew. I get the camera, and a guy comes over and focuses for you. That's your job—you focus. Shit, I had to do my own focusing on the last movie. I didn't know it was so hard. You're trying to focus on a guy while you're filming. You don't know where you are. I couldn't believe how much easier it is when you have a crew.

Lex Fridman

But it's extremely valuable to know the pain of that, the spectrum of creativity that's allowed within that. Even just the focusing—how focusing fucks up on older cameras and on newer cameras, what are the different artifacts that come up, just to know the battlefield.

Speaker 1

Yeah. In order to be a great general, you have to know how to be a soldier on the battlefield.

Lex Fridman

Yeah, yeah. It's good to know all that stuff.

Speaker 1

But at the end of the day, you could shoot something on a phone, and if you have a great story, no one's going to even notice. They'll be, “Oh, we shot that on a phone. I didn't notice.” Sometimes people get caught up on, “What kind of camera should I have?” It's not the camera. That's just the tool. That's just the pen.

You can have different paintbrushes, but you can go, “I'm going to limit my palette. I'm only going to use a fan brush and a detail brush, and I'm going to make a painting.” Do you think that painting is going to suffer? No. It's going to take on an identity that you wouldn't have had if you had all the other tools.

Sometimes the limitations help you, because when you can do anything, it can be crippling. When I knew I could only use those things from *El Mariachi*, it was like, “All right, well, it's very simple. Now let me show you how cheap I was.”

I did not spend money on anything. When you see him walking around with a guitar case, it's a shitty cardboard one, 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 was just the wood on top.

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. When he goes to open it, I cut to the other one once the wood is—

Lex Fridman

Yeah.

Speaker 1

Watch the edits: you'll see it open. Now it's a completely different case with the guns. When he goes to close it, it cuts to the other one, and he goes up. That's how I did that whole movie.

Again, it was a practice film. I didn't want to waste any money on it. I didn't know if I'd be able to make 5 bucks from it.

Lex Fridman

But there, you're one of the few great directors where both the movie is genius and the process of making it is creative genius. It's fun to watch both, to know about both. You know what I believe, right? It's like it comes from somewhere else.

Speaker 1

I didn't get in its way. This basically is what helps. People say, "Don't get in your own way." This is a little bit easier to understand: keep the pipe clear. Don't block it with your ego. Don't say you're going to 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.

Accept that it just came through you and try to get back into that headspace. 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. Sometimes they start tiptoeing around as an artist, going, "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 headspace you were in when you made the first one. You weren't hesitant like that.

So try to keep that very naive. 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 don't go further. They get crippled by the success of the first one and start asking, "Oh shit, how did I do that? How can I do that again?" You get deeper and deeper in a hole you can't get out of.

Lex Fridman

I think you've spoken about how critics and the audience can destroy filmmakers, especially early on in their journey. It creates too much of a burden, and just wears them down to where they're almost scared to be creative. Can you speak to that? How do you ignore the critic?

Speaker 1

I'll tell you something: the best advice I ever got early on. I was so fortunate—it came from an unlikely place. He sounded like Clint Eastwood when he said it.

I did *Desperado*, and it had Antonio Banderas. I brought Antonio in from Europe to be in it. It was a big action movie. Spielberg saw it and said, "Hey, I want you to do *Zorro* with Antonio." So we were working on it for a while. I was working on the pre-production and got to work with Spielberg doing that.

It ended up stalling because there were, like, 2 studios involved, and Amblin was moving. It was some weird thing, but I got to work with him for about 5 months. I started getting really nervous because 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 have killed to do that movie. If I could make *Zorro* as good as that one—the one people said wasn't as good as *Raiders*—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 *Zorro* movie. I've never done anything like that." You start getting afraid, because the second thing he said was, "Oh, just—you're going to do fine."

At that time, you wouldn't know the era, but this was the mid-'90s. He was making the biggest, best movies of all. People would shit all over this guy. They would throw so much at him. They were so jealous. The press, the audience—everyone was just taking hits at him, throwing rocks at him for everything. Spielberg.

Lex Fridman

Yeah. You can't even imagine it now.

Speaker 1

But you should have seen the climate. It freaked me out, because I'm thinking, "Maybe I should just stay under the radar where I've been, not poke my head out so much." This guy had his head out, and the attacks were unwarranted. You can't even fathom it now because you weren't there at that time. It was crazy. You would never even think of him that way.

I'm glad it changed, because back then it made people not want to be successful. It made me worried, like maybe I shouldn't be 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. If I make even a good movie—if I make a great movie—he's making great movies and he's getting this dogshit. I don't know if I could take it.

So I asked him, because you don't know how resilient you can be. I said, "Man, how do you do it? How do you deal with it when people just throw rocks at you all day long?"

He goes, "Oh, Robert, you just don't blink."

I was like, "Whoa. Now I see how he got through it. Just don't blink." It was like a Clint Eastwood line, right? But you could see he was telling the truth, and you could see that's how he did it. He just avoided all criticism by not blinking.

It's designed to make you blink, and you're just not going to blink because you're committing to a body of work. He just keeps cranking out movies. Whatever he feels like doing, he does. That was the most powerful thing, and it never bothered me again. I always kept that in mind.

I tell that to my actors. I tell that to people, and the story has traveled. I even had some young actors who were starting to get noticed. I said, "Remember 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. I remember that.

The second one is Spielberg: "Don't blink." Don't blink.

Lex Fridman

But there has to be a kind of vision for yourself—what you're reaching for, what you're trying to do.

#465

Yeah, sort of. I think if you told me what my vision for the future would be, it would be just committing to a body of work, which I've just kept doing. That's about as far as you can see.

Lex Fridman

Do you have a sense—do you have a vision of the body of work you'll make in the next 20 years, or is it just this?

#465

I wasn't sure, because you don't always know what the vision is. You might not have the vision yet because you don't have the information yet. If you just commit to a body of work, you'll start figuring out more reasons to keep doing that body of work.

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. I guess I could just make more. I've kind of done that already, but it's always fun and it's always new, and I guess I could make more."

But it wasn't a lot of drive, right? It's like, well, I guess I could just keep doing the podcast, you know. That's not as much as, "I can't wait to keep doing another season." But I didn't know how to get to that point.

So I thought, you know what? I got this job so early. I think I was in my early 20s. I bet there's some other job out there that exists that I don't even know about, because I don't know other jobs.

So I looked it up. You don't believe it, but I literally bought Jobs for Dummies. It was just like, I didn't even know what basic jobs were out there. I'm 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 beside each job. This icon is a guy like this. Literally, you can look it up. It says, "This is the best job ever. You get to just be creative with your friends, sit back, 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, "Oh, 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. 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 in 2 weeks, like I did.

You can bring 1 person, like I had Carlos Gallardo, the producer and star of El Mariachi. Bring 1 person. They can be your cameraman, or your sound guy, or whatever, but it's only that 1 person for the shoot, and you'd have to do the whole thing.

I saw those guys. By the time they were saying, "I don't know how we're going to make this movie," by the first week of shooting, they were already talking about their next feature. They became so confident because their idea of what impossible is drops really quickly when you take—

Lex Fridman

Anyone interested in unlocking their creativity—not even just filmmaking—I highly recommend that show, and I highly recommend the follow-on show, which is where you make Red 11.

#465

Yes. That's the one I did. 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 turned it into a sci-fi thriller so that I could use things like somebody getting stabbed in the eye.

I was still going to have more elements to show how you can do camera tricks and stuff with no money. The whole aim was to make it for less than $7,000, which I think we were at around $5,000, mainly because I had a lot of actors I wanted to pay. But the movie itself, you can make it for nothing.

I brought my son aboard as my number one, who hadn't been working with me in a while. I mean, he wrote The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D when he was 7, 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 them until the day of filming because I knew we were documenting it, which would make a better tutorial. By getting them to work on the movies together, they came to me super excited by the end of the day. I thought for sure they were going to hate this, even though it was only 2 weeks. They had other interests; they didn’t want to be filmmakers. I thought they were going to be like, “All right, I’m out of here,” after 1 day.

But instead, my son came to me. His brother, who acted in it, and my dad—the actor—didn’t show up after the 1st day. The location didn’t match the script at all. We asked you how we were going to solve the problems, and you were like, “I don’t know. Figure it out.” We thought that stumped him for once. We thought, “He’s stumped finally.” But by the end of the day, his eyes were all wide. “We figured it out.” I 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 is going to not work, or you’re going to get a flat tire, or you’re going to get fired that day. Life is very unpredictable, just like a movie set. So I realized I’m going to make them all work on my movies now because it’s teaching them about life. I’m teaching them very little about filmmaking; it’s about life lessons, about how you take on something impossible, turn chicken shit into chicken salad, and make it work. That’s the thing. That’s life. That’s the process of life.

So many people say, “Well, I’m not ready to make my project.” It’s like, “You’re not ready for life either. You’re dodging shit that’s going on all day. How come art has to be perfect?” It should be the same. Life and art should be the same. I think filmmaking in general is full of unpredictable things—a short little microcosm, too. Within 1 project, you’ve got a whole blueprint for how you’re going to 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. There are so many ways to fuck things up and learn from fucking up. 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 have to pick it up, pick the colors you want. It 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 in a day. They just start doing it. Lady Gaga had her fingernails in there. Josh Brolin was doing his thing. Then I take a picture of them in character, do a line drawing of it, and 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 the creativity is going to come through. Even though they’re already acting, they’re already being creative, and 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 was firing a whole other part of their brain.

It was funny. I think Josh Brolin’s girlfriend said—she’s his wife now—“Josh, are you guys doing drugs? You leave the set and come back, and you’re all like…” And I go, “No, we’re painting. We’re painting.” But that makes sense, that you say creativity firing is more powerful than any drug. We would come back, and he’d be on the set going, “Is it bad that I’m still thinking about the painting?” And I was like, “No, I think it’s good. I think it’s all good.”

You can tell it’s opening a whole other part of the creative brain. You can be doing acting in a movie, and the painting is still going to tap into it. It shows how much untapped potential your creative brain has. So the more you can do, the more you’re firing off.

I remember we did one with Joseph Gordon-Levitt. He was painting. We came in, and the table was like this. They said, “We have a problem. You want him to throw the playing cards out, but it’s so slick they go sliding off the table.” We both looked at it, and we both got the solution at the same time. “Oh, just have him throw them wherever they go, and then we’ll place them. Digitally, it’s even better: he looks like he gets them all perfectly laid out to show what a card shark he is.”

That’s what we have to do because we’re not going to be here all day. If we’re going to worry about where they go, just go, “Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom,” and then we’ll place the cards down. Everyone will pick them up, and then we’ll marry the 2 in post. You just come up with creative solutions more easily because you were solving crazy creative solutions in the other one, like, “What paint medium do I use? What kind of gel am I going to use?” When you come back to your main job, which is filmmaking, you’re like, “Oh, I can figure this out in 2 seconds.” It helps you creatively problem-solve.

Working with my kids made me realize, “Oh, now I know exactly what I want to do for the next 10 years.” I only want to 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 *El Mariachi* and *Desperado*, and their ideas are really sharp. The mentoring goes both ways, and it’s the greatest parenting you can do because you’re building a project together, in the same boat together, figuring it out. It’s family time. You’re checking all the boxes.

I thought my filmmaking going forward was going to be checking all the boxes in life. I’m not spending time away from my family; we’re actually giving them lessons that they can use to do anything they want in life because they’re going to have different interests. Now, it’s kind of like going to college, and this college is the best college because it pays you to learn. You get to do these crazy skills.

My son was conducting the James Bond orchestra in London for the *Spy Kids* score, a score he wrote, because I can’t write at his level. He was always our best piano player. You get the charge out of working with them. By making a label, there’s a weird phenomenon that happens if you want to take your game to another level. I stumbled upon this idea.

My son who was my counterpart on that movie, Racer, was my sound guy. Like I said, he came up with *Sharkboy and Lavagirl* when he was little. He became my writer, co-writer, and co-producer. He came to me and said, “I want to do a VR-type movie.” I said, “Let me show you an example of creativity and manifesting. Let me show you how it works.”

Let’s make a company. We’ll make a company called Double R Productions because we all have double-R names—all the kids. If anyone ever wants to do anything, we can use our company. Let’s make a logo, and I’ll make T-shirts and notepads and stuff because once you have a company, you now have to make things for that company.

It’s just like the advice I gave to people: stop aspiring. Make a business card that says “writer, director, cinematographer.” I added “editor” because now you have to conform to that identity. 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 VR company. Would you like us to make you a film for your headsets?”

They gave us a budget. They were dying for content. 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 animated logo.

Later that year, we did *Red 11*, with the same logo. That movie went to Directors’ Fortnight and the Cannes festivals, which were paying us to come talk about how we made that movie. That’s when we were doing the cards, throwing the cards out, because they wanted their audiences to see it. They knew they would love that.

We could have had a whole gig just continuing to get paid to go to the festivals. Usually, you pay to go to festivals; you don’t get paid. That’s what a success that was. But then we had to make *We Can Be Heroes*, so we had to stop.

*We Can Be Heroes* was a Netflix movie where they asked me to make a *Spy Kids*-type thing. I thought, “Oh, okay. I’ll just do it with superheroes.” I wrote it with my kids and based it on some of their personalities. It’s the most watched and rewatched movie in Netflix history. Nothing had touched it because kids just keep watching it over and over. It’s kids with superpowers. No one had ever done that before, and they couldn’t believe it.

I’d heard anecdotally that’s how the *Spy Kids* movies were. People said, “Kids watch it over and over on video.” But you can’t keep track of that. You can on Netflix, because their biggest thing is people completing a movie. A lot of people don’t complete a movie, and it still counts as a view. They may watch 5 minutes and change the channel. So, do you complete a movie? That’s really where they value it—not only that people complete it, but that they rewatch it, rewatch it, rewatch it per household so many times that nothing could touch it.

That one has a Double R logo as well. My kids are like, “Dad, that really worked.” I was like, “I know. Better than I thought.” I didn’t know that manifesting that company was going to turn into that. We just keep making stuff.

I want to do that with Brass Knuckle Films now, with the audience, because it works. As soon as you have a logo and a company, your brain starts coming up with all kinds of ideas. It’s a filter.

Speaker 1

Like I said, sometimes the freedom of limitations is freeing. When I had to do *Four Rooms* and it was like, “We have to use 1 hotel room,” well, then there’s going to be a dead body. 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 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. Right now, the key is to be independent, because a lot of studios can’t even greenlight anything. 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 have my own studio and I can keep all the costs down. We have all the costumes, props, and sets from 25 years of filmmaking to keep the costs down, and 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 1 of the 4 films in that slate from 1 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, and say, “Go tell your friends now so you all spend money on our movie.” Well, where’s your cut of that? I want them to be successful. So, if any of the movies in the slate do well, they make money off that 1, and then the sequels or anything else.

But they’re all going to do well, because everyone needs an action movie and we’re going to keep the costs down.

Lex Fridman

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?

Speaker 1

It comes down to the character. If you think about what the best action films are, what your favorite films are—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* is Superman, but he’s retired and now he’s pissed off and going back into a job. So, the character being really important means the action will then have a character to it.

I think *Léon: The Professional*—that’s a character. When I say we’re going to do action movies, I mean movies that are really action-first. Some movies are more dramas that have action.

Lex Fridman

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 *Predator*?

Speaker 1

*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.

Lex Fridman

Got it. They focused a lot on the action in the trailer, and then you felt there was some otherworldly thing, but you didn’t really know. But it’s a great movie.

So, *Die Hard* is a good example. It was a good example, right? I can think of right off where there’s a character that really made the difference. Then everyone repeated that for a while. It was like *Under Siege*, like a regular guy who actually has some training on a ship. 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.

Speaker 1

That became an element that people repeated a lot.

Lex Fridman

What about *Taken*?

Speaker 1

That’s a great one. That’s a great character who is superhuman, who’s also retired. There’s a superhero-type character in an extraordinary circumstance. Now his daughter’s taken, right?

Then there are ordinary people, like Sarah Connor in *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 the genesis of a character, and you see a character go from waitress to revolutionary—to step up.

Lex Fridman

Yeah. What about mob movies?

Speaker 1

Some of them, like *The Godfather*, really is not action. It’s not an action movie. It’s a drama that has some action.

Lex Fridman

I mean, *John Wick* is a mob film in some sense. *Goodfellas*—I mean, there’s a lot of dynamic action, but it’s really not action-first.

Speaker 1

That’s really a character-type piece.

Lex Fridman

Great. Freaking amazing. It feels like action by the way he does it. It’s fast-paced, fast-talking, fast-moving. *Escape from New York* is 1 of my favorites since I was a kid.

Speaker 1

Because every movie—you’ll notice this now that I tell you—even a romantic comedy, there’s a timeline. Every movie has to have a ticking clock, so the audience knows this story is not just going to take place over a period of years.

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.” *Escape from New York* has the best example of a ticking clock, because he’s literally got bombs in his neck and he has a watch that shows him how little time he has. He’s constantly clocking it, and it gets you like, “Oh my God, is he going to make it?”

That’s the best use of that, and no one’s ever topped that ticking time clock. All the other ones seem artificial in comparison. In Aliens, we’ve got to get off this planet now because the whole thing’s going to blow up. There’s a timeline. You’re already urgent, and now there’s an extra timeline on it. This is what happens.

Lex Fridman

As you’re talking, you’re just making me fall in love more and more with action films. Sometimes you forget how much you love a really good action film.

Speaker 1

In fact, The Terminator—oh my God—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 bead of sweat in this movie.

I was watching it again with somebody, a woman, and there’s always a point when you’re watching that movie where she’ll turn and say, “I love this movie.” Do you know what point that is?

It’s the point where Michael Biehn tells her, “I came across time for you, Sarah. I love you. I always have.” You’re just like, “Oh my God, there’s a real emotional love story there.” He put that into Titanic, and he put that into Avatar. He figured out that thing that makes those movies work.

Lex Fridman

By the way, I should say that there is an aspect of El Mariachi that is a love story to me.

Speaker 1

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, “A tragic love story.” I was heartbroken that she’s dead.

I got heartbroken twice. Let me tell you the second time it happened. First, you’re making that and you go, “Okay, this is how it has to go.” But then you’re invested in this person. You go, “Oh man, she has to die. It’s going to be really sad.”

In fact, when the studio said they were going to remake it, I thought, “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 show it to an audience. The audience liked it the way it was, so they said, “We’re going to take this movie to some film festivals.” I was like, “No, not this movie. This is my practice movie. No one’s supposed to see this movie.”

Lex Fridman

Yeah.

Speaker 1

They go, “No, no, you’ve got something.”

I said, “No, no, dude. If I knew anyone was going to see this, I would have shot it completely differently. Give me $2,000. I’ll go reshoot half of it, just knowing people are going to see it. I want something.”

The head of the studio was really smart. He said, “You don’t know what you have here. It’s something really special. Let’s take it to Telluride and see what happens.”

Telluride and Toronto did great, like I said, and it won Sundance. So now we had to put it out. But I was like, “I would have said, ‘Don’t show that movie.’”

The questions about the ending didn’t come into play, because we ended up making Desperado, and the girl in Desperado doesn’t die. We didn’t do that. We didn’t kill Salma Hayek. But that’s what needed to happen in El Mariachi.

Quentin called me 1 time. People would always say, “Oh, Reservoir Dogs.” He borrowed from this Hong Kong action film called City on Fire. It’s about these guys who are all criminals and kill each other, whatever.

He said, “Hey, they’re showing a double feature called East Meets West and West Meets East. They’re showing Reservoir Dogs with City on Fire, the 1 they say I borrowed from. And they’re showing El Mariachi with a Hong Kong film called Run [?], where they ripped off Mariachi.”

They just took the whole story. It had 2 Chinese actors in Mexico with the guitar cases. They just followed it beat by beat. They just remade it without even getting the rights or anything. It was so fun to watch.

So we saw El Mariachi first, then we watched that 1, and I’m like, “What’s this big brothel scene, though? This isn’t my movie.”

#465

Oh, the bad guy. There's a scene in my movie where the bad guy has 2 girls in bed with him, and they figured that was a whorehouse, but it was just this apartment. So they got this whorehouse built up, and they have helicopter shots and all kinds of big things, and the action was awesome. But midway through the movie, I'm like, “Oh shit, she's going to die because I killed her in mine. I don't want her to die. I like this actress. She's really great, and they have a really great love story.” I go, “Well, 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 Spy Kids 2, because 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.’” I didn't even think about the implications of that.

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. Then he thought, “Well, what if I put some together, like a lizard with a snake, and it's a slizzard? Or you have a spider monkey, which is 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?” It got out of control, and they turned into these huge creatures, and now they're trying to eat him. So he's hiding. The kids find him hiding, and he says this one line that people keep commenting on. It's on the internet a lot, this meme: “Why is this line in this movie?” It's so wild.

I wanted Steve to come up to the camera—he's just lost in his own creative world—and say, “I can't even go outside because my own creations are going to eat me.” He comes up to the camera and goes, “Do you think God hides in heaven because he, too, lives in fear of what he created here on Earth?”

It's really just for a moment, this thing, and it's like—because you feel that way when you're creating stuff. You're creating something, and now it's taking on a life of its own, and you're like, “Oh no, now this character has to die. I didn't want that.” You know, this domino effect of creation, and you start thinking, “Well, that must be what creation is. Maybe he is hiding up there because, look, he didn't expect all this shit to happen, giving us free will and all that.”

Lex Fridman

Yeah. In this particular context, you are the creator of this story, and for some reason it makes me feel good to know that you feel the pain of this character dying.

#465

Yeah, absolutely. If I'm writing it, but it's not coming from me, I'm surprised sometimes. Quentin would say that. He'd say, “You just get 2 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?” Now I know what that means. It's like he just gave them life, and now the dialogue's coming through him.

Lex Fridman

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 and as a creative mind? What do you see in him that's beautiful? That's brilliant?

#465

Since I met him, he was just this brilliant ball of energy. If you see him—I walk around his house and I'll see a few sheets of paper, all handwritten. I'm like, “What's that?” He goes, “Oh, that was something I was starting to write, and I'm not going to finish.” Can I take these and turn them into a whole trilogy of films? What he throws away, all mortal men would kill for.

Do you meet people like that? I tell people, your parents say, “Watch out who your peers are.” When you're younger, that means one thing, but when you get older, surround yourself with people who swing much farther than you. That's really true. Just by being around him and working with him, you learn stuff by osmosis, and it just ups your game because they swing way beyond you.

Jim Cameron was like that. 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 this, and I went, “Hey, I just took a 3-day Steadicam course because I can't afford a Steadicam operator, so I'm going to operate the Steadicam myself on this bar.”

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 like hanging out with somebody of your ilk, but you don't want somebody who's doing what you're doing. You want somebody who's above that.

You know what he said? He goes, “I bought a Steadicam, but not to operate it. I'm going to 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 want to hang out with, not someone who's doing what you're doing.

So surround yourself with those kinds of people. That's when you learn things like “Don't blink”—somebody who's really swinging for the fences and accomplishing so much. 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 going to like my next film I'm writing right now: Pulp Fiction.”

I thought, man, I'm going to put this guy—he's so fun—I'm going to write him into my Desperado script, which I was writing. That was before Pulp Fiction and all that, when I had cast him. I didn't know he was going to become such a household name. I was just 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.”

But 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. Originally, Pulp Fiction was for TriStar because Danny DeVito was a producer and was going to make it for TriStar. So he was there writing Pulp Fiction, and I was writing Desperado.

I'd go show him storyboards from Desperado, and he'd come act out scenes from Pulp Fiction, and we got to be really good friends that way. We'd go eat lunch at Versailles across the street from the Sony lot.

Then Sony passed on Pulp Fiction. It was too weird. It was too long. It was an $8 million movie—or $7 million. They were like, “Ah, we're going to go make the next Pauly Shore movie instead.” They didn't understand this thing.

Miramax got it, and they had just been bought by Disney. So they produced their first film, which was Pulp Fiction. Then that thing went to Cannes, and it was a whole thing.

What I loved about his story is that when he made Pulp Fiction, he had a director screening. He showed it to some directors. I wasn't able to go, but anyway, I had dinner with him once, and it was in my journal. I keep a journal. At 2:40 a.m., after I had dropped him off at his house, I said, “Oh, wait. How did your movie come out?” Pulp Fiction. He had just finished it, and he went, “Nah, it still feels like a movie Quentin would make. It doesn't feel like a real movie.”

And I was like, “That's fine. What do you mean?” He said, “It feels like one of those movies I would make. Reservoir Dogs doesn't feel like a real movie.”

I was trying to be the supportive friend, going, “Oh man, he was so excited about this movie. Now he's bummed about it.” I was like, “Well, it should be different.” He wouldn't have it. I drove off. So I thought, “Oh, I guess that wasn't the one.”

So I went home and called some of the directors who were at the screening, and they go, “Yeah, this isn't the one for him. It's not.” None of them saw it. None of them saw it. I know, you're surprised.

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 is he wasting all this time with us for?”

Only Spielberg was the one who said, “It's naive, and it's going to do really well 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 1 or 2 people.

So he said there's 1 person.

Lex Fridman

Oh yeah, who is your Spielberg?

#465

Kathryn Bigelow. Without a doubt, she's the only one who said, “There's something here.” No one else was seeing—was saying that.

He said, in fact, because he suddenly remembered he had forgotten the story, but if it wasn't in my journal, I would have forgotten 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 was like, “What the hell?” I know. “I've only made 1 movie myself, so never mind. I guess we were all wrong.”

So even he didn't expect that at all. That was a shock, even to him. So think about that.

Lex Fridman

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 don't know. And you 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? Can you see it with hyperfocus? Because it seems like that.” And he goes, “It's really far...

Speaker 1

“It’s out of focus.” And you work on it and you work on it, and it starts coming.

Lex Fridman

Okay, good. So that’s normal. I thought maybe he had laser vision or something.

Speaker 1

But no, even he doesn’t really know. But he feels, and 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 it all. Proximity is huge.

Proximity will change your life. It did for me, 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, ups your game, and you’re able to do things you weren’t able to do before. You get ideas you didn’t get 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 Krüger. He gives a workshop once a year. I’m going to go there, and I bet I’ll learn more about directing by watching this guy paint than I will by watching another director, because now I know how creativity works.

You’re going to learn lessons outside of the box by doing that. I try 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. But this really tells a story of how important proximity is.

So I do this painting, and it’s like, “Ah, it fucking looks like garbage.” I’ll show you. It looks like garbage. See, you never should say, “I can’t,” because you just cut your leg off. But I couldn’t, at the time, paint by putting a paintbrush into paint and then writing on the canvas like that without using some kind of medium, which this guy, Sebastian Krüger, would do.

First, I did a digital painting of Danny Trejo, just to get the framing and all that. That’s on a Wacom tablet. But then I did it with paint, and it’s all cruddy, and the paint is too thick, and it just looks terrible. I just gave up right away. I was trying to practice so I wouldn’t be a total buffoon there, because it was the next week, and I thought, “He’s using a different brush, obviously. He’s using better paint. This stuff is clogging up, and it’s crap. I’m sure when I get there—”

So I get there, and he’s doing Mick Jagger.

Lex Fridman

Mm-hmm.

Speaker 1

He starts with a midtone. 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.

I’m like, “Why are you concentrating so much on the cheek first?” And he’s like, “It’s different every time.” And I go, “Why do you—what paints are you using?” And he’s like, “Those regular acrylic paints.” “What brushes do you have?” “Regular brushes.” I’m like, “How come mine doesn’t look like yours?”

Let me try what he’s doing. You start with a midtone. I’m going to do that Danny again. Start with a midtone. I’ll start adding some highlights. And I did that. Everybody kept coming over, going, “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.

You’re just watching, and he doesn’t teach you anything. He just starts painting. So this is the photo he had as a reference, but then this is his painting, right?

Lex Fridman

Yeah.

Speaker 1

And because I’m there, he’s not teaching you how to paint. Through osmosis, you’re learning something. You’re seeing that there isn’t a trick.

Lex Fridman

Yeah.

Speaker 1

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? 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 did was cartoony. That was just easier for me because I thought I would need too much training.

I did another Trejo. I started doing it realistically. I finished just one section of his face and put the brush down, because I did that shit the same day.

Lex Fridman

Nice.

Speaker 1

I got out of my way by 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 4 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.

Lex Fridman

And drawing Danny Trejo, of all people—it’s like there’s so much going on there. He’s so expressive. I mean, you’ve worked with him a lot, and you’ve created that. Can you just talk about what it’s like creating those characters?

Speaker 1

What was exciting about Desperado is I went to go make it, and there were no Latino actors working in Hollywood because no one was creating roles for them. So I thought, “Wow, I’ve got to go create my own stars. We’ll bring Antonio from Europe, because they kind of know his name from the Almodóvar movies.”

I saw him in Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! when I was in the hospital writing El Mariachi. We were watching TV while I was a patient. There’s a scene where he headbutts Victoria Abril. He just gives her a headbutt; he goes like that. 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 said, “Oh man, I’d love to do action.” So I said, “I’ve got a movie for you. I’ve got a movie for you.” It was a sequel to El Mariachi.

I found Salma on Mexican television. She couldn’t get work in the U.S. because of her accent. I mean, this is one of the best stories. I was really determined to hire a real Latina, especially a Hispanic and Mexican actress, to be the Mexican character. That’s as authentic as you can get.

There was no one who was getting any jobs because no one was creating any. So there was no one who had any movies under their name, because there was no one. It was a whole systemic problem, right? This was 1994, 1993.

I was watching a Paul Rodriguez show on Univision because I was trying to practice my Spanish. I was having to do all these Spanish interviews because El Mariachi was in Spanish. That was the only other part I didn’t tell you. I didn’t speak Spanish when I made that movie. We didn’t grow up with it.

I left that part out of the El 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 would be even more inspiring. Now you have no excuse.

I wrote the English subtitles, basically. I wrote the titles—what became the subtitles—and then we took them to the actors, and the actors would translate them for me. I was like, “That is so inspiring.” I would try to speak Spanish and say, “Let’s record,” and they’d be looking at me like, “That means ‘let’s remember.’ ‘Record’ doesn’t mean ‘record.’” Now I know. Back then I didn’t know.

So I’m watching Univision, and then there’s Salma as a guest. She’s a big soap star down there in Mexico, and she comes out. She’s beautiful, she’s funny, and everyone’s laughing. She’s Salma, everyone we know now.

She starts talking about what I gather from what she’s saying: that she’s having trouble finding any work in the U.S. because of her accent. Paul says, “Well, say something in English.” Then she says something, and she sounds just like she does now. He goes, “That’s great.” She goes, “I know. I know.” And I went, “I think this is the girl.”

So I called her into my office, and I videotaped our first meeting together. I have that somewhere, just telling me about herself. And it’s Salma. It’s Salma—there she is with her energy, with her passion, and she’s funny.

She became instant friends with my wife. Before they walked over, Salma said, “Your wife and I are best friends.” She already was like part of the family. She’s 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?”

“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 other movie with her in English called Roadracers. It was my second film for Showtime, a really cool little Rebel Without a Cause–type movie, and I gave her a role in that.

We had an example of her doing English, and 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.”

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, 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.”

While he’s spitting it out, it’s going to be a big dramatic action with a very light delivery. So we got it down to a science. The next day we show up. Antonio does the scene, and all the girls come in. He does it with her. Clearly, they’ve got amazing chemistry. She just nails it. He’s great. He loves her too.

The studio was like, “Okay, you can hire her.” Reluctantly, like that, right? But once they saw the footage as we were shooting and they saw it on the big screen when they were watching the dailies, then they were like, “Oh my God.” Then they saw it. Then they saw what I saw when I met her.

Sometimes, like you say, what do you do when people are like, “Hey, why are you using these?” Just know that not everyone’s going to 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 2 rocks or whatever, but follow your instinct, because you can. Everyone's going to have an opinion, and it is not necessarily the right one. When you're an independent filmmaker, you can make those decisions that change people's careers, that change the world. That's why you want to remain independent.

That's why what's happening now in the industry is great, because I get to make movies the way I started, which is what I've always liked to do: 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. Danny Trejo, we were doing Desperado, and I'm casting all kinds of people. I have this character that I want to have a bunch of knives. He opens up his vest, and there's a bunch of knives. So, bring me all the coolest-looking Latin actors we can find.

Before he even walked in, there was 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 thought, I want to give him a cool role. Whoever 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. I say, “You need to have this in your hand and look like you sleep with it. Just practice flipping it around your hand.” I gave it to him and said, “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. We get to the set, and he kept saying, “Put me in, coach. Give me a line. Give me a line.” I said, “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, and you're such a nice guy.” I didn't let him talk till dusk.

One thing I noticed was that the town we were shooting in, the Mexican town, was the same town where I shot El Mariachi. We went back there because I wanted to pay back the city. 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.

I know magnetism when I see it. I thought, “This guy's got something.” So I went to him and said, “I got a movie we're going to do someday.” This was 1994. 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 who played in El Mariachi told me this funny story. He said, “Hey, look at this story: the U.S. DEA and FBI sometimes would hire a Mexican federal to come do a job for $25,000 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 who escaped from Mexico. 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. We never got around to doing it. So when I did Spy Kids, I put him in Spy Kids and 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.”

A few years later, Quentin and I were doing Grindhouse, and he'd already done From Dusk Till Dawn with me. I was building my own Latin star system. Salma showed up in a bunch of my movies. Cheech showed up in every movie. Danny showed up. I brought Cheech out of retirement and put him in my movie.

I needed to create my own Latin star system because, when you write in your own voice, you're probably going to write somebody that's Latin. You need to have a star system that matches that so you don't have trouble casting and people aren't saying, “Well, you can't hire this person.” So I built up my own star system. Danny was one of my stars.

After we did Grindhouse, we had to do fake trailers for it, 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'll be so fun. We finally get that out of our system, and doing a trailer is so fun. It's 2 days of shooting.”

I was still being that resourceful guy. We asked this company that had a digital camera we wanted to use, “Can you let us use it? Send it to us for a couple of days for a camera test?” Instead of shooting a camera test, we shot the trailer. So we got a free camera and 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 2 gals. I 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.

There was blaxploitation in the ’70s. There was never Mexploitation. It felt like this should have existed, but it didn't. It's a Mexican superhero. I'd just never seen anything like that. Now, even his mom calls him Machete. He just became this guy.

Of the 250 movies that he's been in, Machete is his most famous one. For 5 years, people would come up to us and say, “Where's Machete? When's that movie coming out?” We'd say, “It's not a real movie,” but it looked real. They wanted to see that movie.

So we finally made the movie because people just asked for it. I wanted to be resourceful again. All those shots that are in the trailer are really great. I got to reverse-engineer the trailer into a movie so I could 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 her hair. We'll cast Lindsay Lohan there, or the senator will switch it out for Robert De Niro.

I just reverse-engineered it. Every time there's a shot in the trailer, it's in the movie, but I shot all the footage around it to lead up to it. That's another fun creative exercise: to reverse-engineer something you just did on the day. You just threw a bunch of cards out, basically, with that trailer, and now you've got to go make a movie using all those cards. That's a creative exercise that I thought was so satisfying and so fun.

Lex Fridman

Yeah, that was beautiful. You're actually known, in part—maybe you can correct me—for doing pretty unexpected, surprising, interesting casting. 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 experience, they call it. How do you make that happen? Can you just tell the story?

#465

I'm the editor. I'm the cameraman. I'm the DP. 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 out in 4 days. You come down for 4 days.”

There's a scene where he's in the hospital. He's just smiling, and 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 cross the hallway. That's the set. The room next to yours—we turned it into the hospital set. So you're just going to come laying there in your pajamas.”

Lex Fridman

Really? That's what you did?

#465

Well, yeah. We had to save time. We only had 4 days. Everything had to be very thought out to be like, “Boom, boom, boom. Let's shoot the money and get him out of this. We don't have to spend a lot of money on him.”

Book a room in a hotel, set it up to look like a hospital room. That's our set, and it's real. You don't have to dress it. It's just right there. All you do is put a little tube there for his IV, and then you have a couple of nurses, and it looks like a genuine hospital. Resourceful, resourceful, next door.

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 6 months, where they have you sitting in a trailer.” I don't like to do that.

I gave Lady Gaga her first 2 movies because, after Machete, she said publicly, “I saw Machete, and my song ‘Americano’ should have been in Machete.” I thought, she saw Machete. So I called her up and said, “Hey, I'm making a sequel, and I would certainly use your music. But have you ever thought about acting? You're an amazing performer.”

“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.” She said, “Actually, I studied acting before I became a singer.”

I said, “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 6 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, “Would you just go to Austin? Robert, put me on a green screen.” 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, too.

I was like, “I have a set here waiting for you if you’re on tour in Houston. Just drive into Austin. I’ll shoot you out in half a day. You could be in a scene with Joseph Gordon-Levitt.” Sure. She came down.

Lex Fridman

So, wait, how do you take Robert? How do you take Lady Gaga and solve the puzzle of all the scenes they have to be in? How do you shoot them quickly, efficiently, conveniently?

#465

You have to edit your own movie. I have this analogy—a food analogy that works really well. The script is like your grocery list. Filming is like grocery shopping: getting the best performances, getting the best ingredients, right? Editing is like the cooking. Too much of this, not enough of that, you fuck the whole thing up.

So many filmmakers do not edit.

Lex Fridman

Yeah.

#465

And they give it to some other guy who might look at all your ingredients and go, “This is all great, but I’m going to go make a fucking soufflé.” And he makes something else.

By doing that job—I mean, 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. There could be 150 or 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 close-up,” or, “You’ve got to reshoot that because it doesn’t match,” because 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. I kind of stumbled upon it. I realized that’s what the problem is, because across the board I’m watching them going, “That’s not going to match. You guys are just spending money sending crews out shooting stuff for this. It’s just a clusterfuck. Let me show you.”

And that’s how it is in Sin City: Bruce Willis, 9 days. Brittany Murphy’s in all 3 stories, 1 day. Benicio del Toro, 3 days. You’re just shooting their stuff.

Lex Fridman

Whoa.

#465

Mickey Rourke is in a sequence with Rutger Hauer. We shot 8 months apart. I didn’t have Rutger Hauer until I was doing Sharkboy and Lavagirl. I just shot Mickey acting with me, and then I shot Rutger acting with me, and I just cut them together.

Lex Fridman

Wow.

#465

What’s weird is, like, editing exercises—I used to do these editing exercises where I would tune my VCRs together and cut my movies. Sometimes I would just cut a music video. I cut a music video once because I was a big fan of Rutger Hauer and a big fan of Mickey Rourke. I said, “I want to make it look like they’re in a movie together.”

I cut this music video together, and it showed lighting on Rutger from The Hitcher and lighting on Mickey from Rumble Fish. But Rumble Fish is black and white, so I made the whole thing black and white. I was 19 years old when I did that.

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 8 months later, and it was Rutger. 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 then in black and white.” That’s some weird shit, right? That’s the magic of creativity. Sometimes when you have a vision, it’s not clear, but it’s coming to you from the future.

You’ve got to just follow the voice. No matter what anyone says about your curtains, just follow the voice you’ve 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.

This is 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.

I’m going to show you this test.

Lex Fridman

Okay.

#465

For From Dusk Till Dawn, the TV series, I would always shoot the first episode and the last episode of a 7- or 8-episode season. There were 3 seasons. By the time we got to the third season, I was doing Alita, so I couldn’t do the big finale episode.

My actor who plays the George Clooney character, D. J. Cotrona, is somebody who fucking wanted to be a writer and was writing. He wrote Fight or Flight, this movie that’s going to come out with Josh Hartnett.

After doing this, he was like, “Man, hearing you talk—you know what I got? This is what I love about you: You inspire people. The feedback loop inspires you back.” He said, “Man, hearing you talk for Red 11 and the cards, I’ve got a script that’s partially written. I’m just going to go crank it out in 3 days. I’m going to cut off the phone. In 3 days, I’m going to finish that thing in 3 fucking days.”

He came back and said, “I finished the script.” I read it, and I go, “You wrote it in 3 days?” He goes, “Well, I wrote some of it before, but I just kept thinking I wasn’t ready. Then you told me the thing about not being ready, and you said that it really resonated. I went and I finished it in 3 days.”

I go, “Man, I’m going to do that. I’m going to go do the D. J. method.” I call it the D. J. method. I have a bunch of half-baked ideas that I’m just going to turn off the phone and finish in 3 days. I’ll fix it later, but the 3 days are going to be pure pipe. It’s just going to be coming through because you’re just going to be picking up the pen.

Anyway, he came to me with this idea. He said, “Oh man, I was hoping you’d do the last episode of From Dusk Till Dawn because I had this great idea for a scene. We’re in a zombie town, a Western town. We have one of those guns where you have to pull the trigger—the hammer back—before you can fire.

“So I thought, what if I have a gun that’s empty and I’ve got bullets in the other hand? I bump into a zombie, the bullets go flying, I jump and catch all the bullets, and shoot the guy before I hit the ground.”

Lex Fridman

Mhm.

#465

Okay, that’s kind of a really cool Desperado-type thing, but dude, this is a 7-day shoot for these episodes. Everyone on the crew will have a different idea on how to do that: the stunt guy, who will put you on wires because you have to do all that action; or the DP, who 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. Your editor is in a room somewhere. The VFX guys aren’t there. You’re not going to be able to ask them how to do it.

But I, with my own VFX, came up with how we did all the shots in Sin City and all the Spy Kids movies. 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.

When it comes to your scene, we’ll switch places, because it’s got to be done quickly. 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. If you were on the set, this is what it would look like.

I get there, and they say, “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 want to see you just jump and start to twist as if you’re turning. I just want to see how much airtime you can get to get any action before you hit the pad.”

He starts his jump. He barely starts jumping, and he’s already hitting the pad. I was like, “Okay, that ain’t going to work. You get out of here, D.J. You’re going to do it. I have no idea how I’m going to do this. I hadn’t thought about it before.”

But now you’re there. So, awesome. Now the options are very limited. You’re very limited. Look at the sun. You’re going to 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 going to do 3 jumps, and I’m going to cut it to look like 1 jump. All the bullets are going to miss. Only 1’s going to go in.

So here, just follow what I’m saying. 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 operate that. What’s on the B camera?”

“Steadicam.”

“Leave it on Steadicam. No chance. No time to freaking 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, D.J., start running towards those 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 going to add those digitally. I’m going to 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 want you to commit to jumping out and look at the barrel in your hands when you’re jumping, because that’ll look like you’re looking at the bullets. Don’t even think about catching a bullet. Don’t think about starting to turn. Just stretch your body out. Get a really graphic look. Look how cool that looks.

And then the side-view shot—I shot this at the same time. You can already tell it’s going to look like bullets are missing, right?

Lex Fridman

Mhm.

#465

Okay. Now I need this part, though.

#465

I need the part where he’s catching the bullet. This little window there. How am I going to do that with a lens that long? It’s going to be all out of focus, and it’s not going to be slow-motion enough.

He even knows me, and he’s like, “What the hell am I doing?” I say, “Just lay on the pad and rock up and down.” 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, I’m saying, “Just do it again.” He’s like, “What is it?” “Rock up.” Then, as you go down, it’s going to look like you’re falling.

“The bullets—okay, you’ve caught a bullet. One went in. Now, second jump. When you do the next jump, it’s 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. That’s all you’ll get before you hit the pad: snap, turn, right?”

I wanted the cameras to feel like they were dropping with him. That’ll give you more of the sensation. So let’s actually lower that Steadicam shot, flip it upside down, and get a low angle. See how the sun’s right there? It hasn’t gone behind the building yet. Then I lowered my camera down and got that angle.

Now, the last jump. I said, “Just bury 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 3 jumps, but the audience will know. They’ll be like, “We believe that this guy can do anything.”

“I want you just to finish by turning, cocking the hammer back, and firing before you hit the ground. I’ll give you 2 takes for that.” He almost gets it there. Then we do a second take. Boom. That other one was probably a little better, even though you don’t really see it.

I’ve got to go do everything now. I’ve got to cut it, add the sound effects myself, and put the music in myself, because the music guys would just end up filling it with music and ruining it. The 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 and the clinking of the bullets as they’re bouncing off. So you have this breathless moment. No music. Cut the music.

You cut it so that you’re like, “I wonder if he’s going to make it,” right? I go home and cut it before I even have the visual effects in. I cut it that night because I cut my own sound effects. I cut my sound effects in, and you can already tell it’s going to work.

You can already see, even with the bullets not there, where they’re going to be by the sound. It’s going to work. I call them up and say, “Dude, this is going to work great.”

Then I go to the effects guys and say, “Okay, there’s a bullet in this frame, and the next frame it’s here, and the next frame it’s there. Then it hits the barrel and starts bouncing this way.”

I want it that clear so we can follow that a bullet was supposed to go in, that it bounced way over there, and then this bullet bounced way over there. 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 for you again. Just the sound will play like there are multiple bullets flying. I don’t need to see all those bullets, or the eye’s not going to know where to go.”

Then they got it right. Brilliant. Then check this out. I’m going to show it to you twice because you’re not going to believe it.

Lex Fridman

Wow. It changes direction. Wow. Wow. Crazy. Well done. You don’t even see that in a feature film, much less a TV show. Well done. Just as a director, well done.

Speaker 1

Oh, thank you. Just one more time, and I’ll show you something you didn’t notice both times.

Lex Fridman

That’s amazing. Just those decisions coming together perfectly. You got minutes just moving the camera like you decided to do, and it really worked well. The balancing of the mattress, whatever.

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, right?

#465

I’m seeing it because I’ve done it enough. That’s why you really want to learn all those jobs, because you come to a moment like this when the shit’s fucking hitting the fan, and you’ve got to know how to pull it out.

You could have gotten all those people together, and they never would have figured that out. One person had to see it all the way through. You’re seeing the bullet, how it’s going to go in, and the result.

I’ve done it 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’ll miss the point.

Lex Fridman

I love that you’re thinking about where the eyes of the audience will go. I feel like too many people might think about some more general concept of a scene, versus asking, “Where’s the audience’s eye? Where’s their eye?”

#465

Well, you’re drawing it through sound and through picture. I’m going to show you. If you notice, without the sound, you don’t really see him click that thing back.

Lex Fridman

You don’t really—right. I thought I saw it.

Speaker 1

You think you saw it, but you hear it, so you feel like you see it. But watch. He’s actually already finished. You don’t really see him do it, but you swear you saw it in a close-up because the sound is in a close-up. I put the sound in a close-up.

Now, here’s another thing you didn’t notice. He hits the ground in the first shot. Watch: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. You didn’t notice it because I didn’t play the sound there.

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 see it in your mind, right? So check that out now with the sound on, and you’ll see both those parts play completely differently.

Lex Fridman

Right.

Speaker 1

Now you hear it. See, I know he can get away with that because I know editing. If I don’t play the sound, 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.

Lex Fridman

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. To be a craftsman, you have to learn all those crafts—not just with the visuals, but with the sound.

#465

With the sound, too. Sound is so important. Sound is half the picture. If you cut sound, you realize how important sound is.

I would learn so much by doing those movies, like Desperado and 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. You only need to see 1 or 2 hits, and you can hear 5.”

Lex Fridman

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.

Speaker 1

Yeah, your brain fills it in. That’s why it’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, he didn’t. I didn’t see him click it back. That’s really needed.” I can do that with sound. Let’s just go. Let’s just keep moving.

Lex Fridman

When you say “sound close-up,” was that so all the other sound dropped away and all you heard was the sound, like the mic was right on that thing? You hear it so big in your ear that you swear it was in close-up, too?

Speaker 1

That’s just playing in post a lot. I have a whole library of sound effects from all my movies, so I can pull up the gun sound we created for Bruce Willis in Sin City and use it, or mix it with Antonio’s gun from Desperado.

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 sounds of the key instead of key sounds because it wasn’t sound close-up enough.

If you listen to it, you hear all these gun sounds for the key because that conveys the sound better. I’ll use different kinds of sounds that just have impact and put them somewhere, like when he hits the ground.

I like playing with all that in post when I’m editing because it makes my editing job easier. Sometimes it’s like, “The sound is covering me. I don’t need to keep trying to massage this. The sound is actually selling it.”

So I keep those sound effects in the final movie. It’s all part of what’s necessary. It’s like being a chef. If you’re there cooking and you’re going, “I know the recipe says this, but I think it really could use jalapeños and some extra pepper, or maybe a little more salt. Then it needs an acid of some kind, so I’m going to add some lemon juice.”

Lex Fridman

You made me realize—I’m not sure where I saw that, but you were talking about making almost like home films for fun. I think you mentioned how exciting you can make a very mundane scene by just adding sound.

There was, I think, a little kid with this car. You had one of those little cars—

#465

I added a motor sound to it, and it’s like, “Wow.” It sounds realistic somehow. We were playing with these little cars, filming ourselves playing with the cars, but then I replaced it with real car sounds.

Your brain links the reality of the real thing, and you realize how unimportant the visual is and how important the sound is.

#465

Actually, sound is everything. That's why I was really lucky in El Mariachi that my camera didn't work for sound, because then I got really good sound that I wouldn't have gotten with a shitty mic out of frame. That's the first telltale sign of a low-budget movie: bad sound. Bad sound right away. You can already hear all this hiss, and the mic was too far away, 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.

Lex Fridman

Just on—what's the plan with the 4 action films? What are the next steps?

#465

I'll probably direct more than 1, because there are already several that I want to do, but I'm going to direct at least 1. I'm producing all 4. They're all at my studio.

Lex Fridman

It does draw you in. It draws you in and makes you go, “Now think of ideas you never would have thought of before.”

#465

Mainly because it has a filter. Well, now I don't have to think of all these ideas. Like me on that set, there are only a very few things I can actually come up with that are action-driven first and have a great character.

Lex Fridman

You'll get to it a lot faster with a filter.

#465

That's the beauty of a filter: 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, they've got a reason to come up with the idea, and they've got a deadline—which is the best thing you can do. Have a deadline, because when you have a deadline, you can freaking move mountains.

You know, I had a Spy Kids in the theater every year, 3 years in a row, without it being preplanned. Every year there was a Spy Kids. The 3rd one was the biggest one, with the biggest cast, mostly green screen, a video game, and the 1st digital 3D movie ever. So, getting visual-effects companies to make that, we realized, “Oh, I shot it with 2 cameras. That means each effects 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 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 knew it was going to be this complicated, but I wanted a challenge.

They said that McDonald's will sue us for $20 million if you move the date. You have to have a movie in the theater. We started shooting that movie in January 2003. It was in 3D in theaters by July. That's the fastest any effects movie has ever been done. That's because you had no choice.

Lex Fridman

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, and 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. You had to get out of your way because your deadline was up, and you had to come up with it.

#465

So many people are going to come up with all these extra great ideas at the last minute. But I think it looks like everyone who's already signing on—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, “When we close the funding in May,” but we didn't say when, exactly. So I think that gives them a sense of a deadline, like, “Shit, it might be May 1 or maybe May 2, so we better get my idea going.”

I think it works in your favor, because then you come up with stuff, and 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 into, are now like, “Oh, I can do these now. I know how to finish it.”

Lex Fridman

Now, I have to ask you about Alita. You've done so many incredibly innovative projects. This is 1 of them. 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.

#465

Yeah.

Lex Fridman

And then you started to collaborate with him on it, and these 2, I would say, brilliant directors, but with different styles, like you were talking about. 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, and put them into this, with the power of technology, into the real world. You have to convey all the emotion, the richness of the human face. Can you just speak to the process of bringing that world to life?

#465

Sure. I never would have attempted it if it wasn't Jim, because Jim has figured a lot of this out. Just to get you again—remember, like I said, “Hey, Jim, I'm operating a Steadicam. What do you think of that?” “Well, I'm designing a new system.” That's always how it is between him and me.

When I went to show him Desperado when it was done, he said, “You might not want to sit through it. If you don't want to sit through it 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.”

This was in 1995. He was showing me the scriptment for Avatar. There was no technology for that. He was already doing stuff that didn't exist.

Lex Fridman

Wow.

#465

Yeah. I was reading it, going, “This is a great story.” He's like, “I don't know how the fuck I'm going to do this. It's impossible.” He'd just done Terminator 2 a few years before. It's like, that was state of the art.

So Alita was going to be the movie he did first to prepare for Avatar. 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. Then, as they got deeper into the tests 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 with Linda Hamilton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Eddie Furlong for the 3D ride he made for Universal a few years later. I feel like I've been around a lot of his career. Being able to visit the set of Avatar, I 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.” Really, talk about me shooting Mariachi, not seeing the footage. He's making this whole movie without even knowing what the end result's 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, 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.”

Anything that I would come up with on this movie, his team—because he had all his Wētā people working on it—would work on it too. I do a fast version of his process because it's a lot of live action. Avatar is 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.

Lex Fridman

Well, here at Troublemaker Studios.

#465

Yeah, that's where it was. Yeah, it was shot here.

When you go see my city, I built it very resourcefully. This is weird: it looks just like the town from Mariachi, but it's in my backyard. I'm like, “It looks better than the town from Mariachi.”

Lex Fridman

Yeah.

#465

90,000 square feet. 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 can shoot it all the time for Mexico or South America or Europe or whatever. It's 7 streets, and we added digitally above it. The ceilings are 20 feet high. You have to come see. You won't believe that it's here. It's unbelievable.

Lex Fridman

Where is it?

#465

North of Austin. It's where the old airport was. So it's on 51st Street. It's really close to town.

Lex Fridman

I would love to visit.

#465

You've got to come see. You're not going to believe it. All my props, all my stuff from all my movies.

People who are investing in Brass Knuckles, that's why they 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. He'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. 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 the audition the first time. I was like, “Oh my God, this person has something.” If we can capture even a fourth of her facial expression, it’ll bring so much life. They got it one-to-one.

It really helped Jim on the next Avatar at Wētā because they got to try a bunch of things. That’s why Avatar: The 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.

Lex Fridman

Can you actually educate me on the VFX process? Is this like a performance-capture technology?

#465

Yeah, we have her in a suit for capturing her body movements, but also for facial capture. It’s a performance capture of all her performance, all her emoting, and we have witness cameras around everywhere to pick up where she is.

Everything else is real, and we’re just replacing her with someone even smaller in size. You have to erase everything behind her. There are a bunch of technical things you have to do, but the idea is to capture whatever performance she gives. She’s such a great actress, and you want 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.

She’s acting with all this, acting with all that, but it just disappears. You don’t notice it’s there. She can just perform through it.

Lex Fridman

What were some interesting, unique, challenging things about directing her performance in this kind of world?

#465

I just knew she had to be her. It was going to be so easy with her. She’s just so great. Everything was so real, and she was that character. She becomes that character who’s seen this world for the first time.

No special effects are going to help you with that if the performance isn’t there. 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—Mahershala Ali. You’ve got an amazing cast of people, and that’s really the heart of it, so the technology kind of goes away.

Lex Fridman

How hard is it to get the actors to act when the full world is not around you?

#465

We put so much of the world around them. When you see the city, we put a blue screen way in the back just to 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. That way, she had to fit into that world and be as real as that.

Because if it was all done in CG, then you can fudge everything. But if you put her in a real environment, that’s a real challenge. That really helps them on 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 on the next Avatar. That’s why it just feels like you’re really there. It’s stunning.

You get there by having something to work on like this, to take the technology to the next level. It was cool to be able to help, knowing that you’re being helpful to him in his process and not just distracting him. But he also liked that his artists had something else to work on besides just Avatar—to work on something different, to freshen up their perspective on things and their methodology.

That was a really exciting movie to work on. Then we got to shoot it here—a Jim Cameron movie here in Austin. Having him here was the best. My whole crew, who’ve worked with me for 25 or 30 years, everyone had an extra spring in their step because they were like, “Wow, we’re working on a Jim Cameron movie.” That’s just a high bar of achievement for everybody working on it.

Lex Fridman

Since we talked about a few other directors, can you speak to the genius of James Cameron? What makes him special? You talked about some of the differences in your approach and his. He’s created some of the most special movies ever. What’s behind that? What would you say is interesting about the way his creative mind works?

#465

I think any of those guys—George Lucas, James Cameron, John Lasseter when he did Pixar—it’s a mix of technical and creative. I got really lucky. My first job was at a photo shop because my dad had a friend who owned a photo shop. He said, “Your summer job, when you’re 16—go over to my friend Mario’s.”

So I go to Mario’s photo shop, and I’m developing pictures—you know, developing photos from film. He said, “Here, 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.”

I went home, and I have a bunch of siblings, so I thought, “Well, they’re the stars of Bedhead.” I took all these pictures of everybody. I took them back, and when he developed them, he looked at the pictures and said, “Whoa, these are really creative. You’re a creative person.”

Sometimes people tell you something that you can’t unhear. He goes, “That’s a gift, but you need to know 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, “Unstoppable? Wow.”

He said, “So here, I want you to learn Zone System photography. I want you to learn the technical part of it.” That’s why I didn’t take a crew on El Mariachi, because I knew if I’m just the creative person and I need a crew to actually technically make the movie, I’ll always need something.

When you want to really change your life, you want to get your “I need” list down to as little as possible. If you’re like, “Well, I want to shoot my movie, but I need a cameraman, and I need somebody who knows how to light,” your “I need” list keeps growing. That’s further and further and further that you will be from what you need to accomplish.

So I went down there without any help. Remember that script analogy where the guy said, “Throw away 3 scripts”? I said, “No, I’m going to write 3 scripts and then shoot each one, so I get better at each one of those jobs and I can learn to be technical.”

My technical capability was so little. I was literally calling the guy on the phone: “How do I use this camera?” That’s how little I knew about it. But I knew that by doing the job, I would learn by being both. That’s really the key.

Jim Cameron is like that. When you think of those guys—George Lucas, John Lasseter, Pixar, Jim Cameron—they’re very technical and very creative. Putting those 2 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 what I just showed you in that demo. You’re able to be both technical and creative, and then you’re unstoppable.

He’s one of the best at it. He knows how to craft a story, and he’s very analytical as well. We bounce off each other in a funny way. He came down to visit my studio before he did Alita.

Lex Fridman

You only surround yourself with people who are like you. You exude creativity from every pore, and so does everyone at your studio.

#465

I never think I hired them that way on purpose, but I think if you’re not that way, you kind of know you don’t belong there, and you kind of leave.

Lex Fridman

Yeah.

#465

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 kind of fuzzy with the logic, and 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—”

They’re just super great at what they do. The bar is sky-high, and they’re all like that. If you’re not part of it, if you’re not like that, you can’t hang with those guys. You can’t hang with him very long.

Lex Fridman

I heard a story where the guitar case is a rocket launcher. You create this real world where everything is possible, where the magic feels real. For James Cameron, he has to know how a guitar case would work so that it could actually double as a rocket launcher.

#465

When I show him the trailer for Grindhouse and he sees the machine-gun leg 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, you believe it.

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—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.”

He’s just cranking out all this stuff. I’m like, “Can I take this and go get this, please?”

We bounce off each other because I love 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.”

He likes that about me, but I 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?” 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 is very rare. That’s very rare, and he capitalizes on both.

He had this submarine model, this big, on his desk—the one that he broke the world record for going down there in. Just seeing it, and knowing that he has kids and a wife, I was like, “Weren’t you afraid going down there, knowing something could happen?” He said, “No, I wasn’t afraid.” I asked, “Why not?” He goes, “Because I designed the escape vehicle.”

Yeah, if it was any other bozo, I’d be afraid. But he designed the escape. That kind of confidence—that’s him. He just knows: if some other bozo had designed the escape vehicle, I would be afraid. But total confidence. He did it. Extreme confidence. That’s 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. I was there in my house, and they made me cut in Los Angeles because, at first, I told the studio, “I want to edit Desperado myself, because it’s important that I edit it.”

They said, “No, you can’t.” I asked, “Why not?” They said, “We’ve never had a director edit his own movie here, so we don’t want to set a precedent.” I thought it would give me too much power. I said, “This is the power of precedent.” I said, “Well, you bought El Mariachi, and I edited that.” So I said, “Okay, but you’re going to have to edit in Los Angeles so we can watch, because we don’t think you know what you’re doing.”

We saw the footage, and the shots were really short. They said, “It’s too short.” I was like, “The shots are too short.” Oh, because I was shooting my cuts. They’re used to seeing footage where Antonio walks into the bar, and it’s going to be a dialogue scene. They expect the whole thing to be done from a wide shot.

I would shoot the wide shot: he walks in, “Cut. Move the camera. Let’s get over here,” because I’m not going to use it for the rest of the scene. I know we’re going to get into coverage because I’ve already cut it. So I was like, “That’s interesting.”

I cut the first scene. If you’ve ever seen Desperado, the first scene is the best scene. Steve Buscemi is telling a story. He’s talking about the myth of the mariachi. He’s doing crazy stuff. It’s crazy. Great scene.

Then they come over, and I say, “Hey, come see my first scene.” They come over to my house and watch it. “Okay, you know what you’re doing.” They leave.

I was cutting Desperado in the house that I rented there. We shot Four Rooms and From Dusk Till Dawn at the same time, so I was cutting Desperado, Four Rooms, and From Dusk Till Dawn myself. I was the editor. I didn’t have an editing team other than the people who imported it into the machine.

Del Toro came over. Soderbergh came over. “Can I borrow it for Schizopolis?” No one had heard of somebody having an Avid in their living room. Jim comes over and says, “I hear you have an Avid in your living room.” I go, “Yeah, come check it out.”

Lex Fridman

Mhm.

#465

It sounds unremarkable because this is what you do right now, but back in ’94, it was unheard of. I’m cutting 3 movies at the same time myself. I roll out of bed, I come here, and I can cut Desperado, Four Rooms, and From Dusk Till Dawn.

Jim went, “That’s it. I hate working with editors.” When he was doing Terminator 2, they wouldn’t even let him put the “Bad to the Bone” song in Terminator 2 because they didn’t think it would work. He had to sneak into the edit room at night on the weekend to cut it in and then 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 going to do this. I’m going to tear down a wall in my house. I’m going to put it in a room. I’m going to cut my next movie.”

And he did. He got an Oscar for editing Titanic. “I can’t do 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 footage, he’s showing me footage that he cut himself on his own machine. Again, it gives you all those tools to be able to really find the vision you’re looking for, because you can’t always explain it to somebody. You don’t always know yourself. It’s part of you coming up with it as you do the process.

Lex Fridman

Just on a small tangent about the different software and the technologies involved: you mentioned Avid versus Premiere Pro. Premiere was still in its early stages, and I think Soderbergh looked at it and said, “Yeah, I can’t afford an Avid for this movie. I’m going to go do it.” I think he started cutting on Premiere.

#465

I’m sure it’s all better now. I’ve always used an Avid because I just always rent it back to the same production. I don’t have to buy a new one. But there are lots of good systems. I’ve heard about all kinds of systems. I just use the same one.

Lex Fridman

I guess that’s the question I have for you. It’s interesting for people, and it’s very interesting to me—the details. You use Avid. What do you like? Multiple monitors? One monitor?

#465

I have a couple of monitors, and then 1 big monitor to watch it if I’m watching the scene back, because the monitors are still a little wacky. If I ever designed my own system, I’d probably design it differently. But I’ve literally 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. I can cut so fast with that. I just don’t use the mouse for shortcuts. I’m just like—

Lex Fridman

So you found your way, the preferred way, the workflow of using it. Now you can sort of let go of the technical and be creative.

#465

Yeah, just be creative. It’s just a tool. It’s just a tool. It doesn’t matter what system it is. If you can get it to work for you, great.

There are a lot of problems I have with it that I know are probably fixed on another system, but they’ll have a whole other set of problems. So why bother with that? There are limitations that I think it has that would need to be fixed, but not for what I’m doing. I can still do what I need.

Lex Fridman

It feels like part of the artistry is that every system has limitations, and you learn how to work around those limitations.

#465

Yeah. My first VCRs—those things were—I was always known for taking whatever little basic equipment I had and milking the shit out of it, pushing the boundaries of what it could do.

Now it’s flipped. 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 capability out of it, because I would have to spend a lot of time figuring out all the stuff that it can possibly do.

I’m sure it’s all great, fantastic stuff, but what a different world from when I grew up. It was like, “Okay, let me splice these 2 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.”

Now it’s the other way around. All this equipment is great. When people come to me and say, “I’ve only got this camera,” I’m like, “That camera’s 10 times better than anything I had for my first 15 years of filmmaking.” You have no complaints. You can just start now and start making stuff.

Lex Fridman

I have a lot of friends who are huge fans of your movies. One of them asked me a question I absolutely must ask you: do you know if there’s a sequel to Alita coming?

#465

We’re working on it. We’re definitely working on it. Jim and I both want to make it. 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.

We would love to make another one. We have ideas on how to do it, because it was always built to be a trilogy. He sees that there’s a lot of love for it. It was just weird because it was a Fox movie, and then Fox got bought by Disney. Disney had enough work with their Disney movies, so they weren’t really making Fox movies.

But now they’ve started to make some Fox movies, like they did Deadpool, and some Fox movies are starting to get made. The time might be right for us to come back and do an Alita.

Lex Fridman

No, I hope you do soon. You do so many different kinds of movies. That’s a whole different kind of puzzle, right?

#465

Yeah, but it’s not a bad one. It’s a good one. It’s a cool one. It’s one of the few. Usually I make kids’ and family movies or R-rated action-horror movies. That was the first time I got to do a PG-13 movie, which had a lot of action but was for families to watch, too. It was kind of the best of all worlds.

Lex Fridman

I have to ask you about Sin City, one of my favorite films of all time. It was a visually stunning world. What are some interesting, detailed aspects about creating that world?

#465

This is why you just have to follow your nose and go do something. Jim and I were both into 3D early on. I visited his set for the Terminator 2 3D ride.

From Dusk Till Dawn—I wanted it to be 3D, actually. When they got to the bar, if you watch from that point on, everything is 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. They were so bad that I went, “Okay, we can’t do it.”

I really wanted people to have to put on glasses when they got into the bar, and it was going to turn into a different 3D movie. I got to do that on Spy Kids 3D.

When I did Spy Kids 3D, I thought, “Oh, if I get Jim’s cameras that he’s used for these underwater 3D documentaries, I can make the first digital 3D film for theaters.” 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. We could 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 this, 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, you know? So you remember, and you go, "Okay, this is why I'm wearing the glasses." You're wondering why.

When I went to make my next movie, this is how crazy we shot Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over. Remember I told you how fast they came out? That was in the summer of 2003. A few months later, Once Upon a Time in Mexico came out. Two number-one movies. Both were finishing trilogies of mine, and each one starred Antonio Banderas, Danny Trejo, and 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 one's like, 'Hey, family.'" It was really fun. It's easier to do very different things than to do 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?" Antonio was on the set. I was going to shoot him out in half a day for Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over because he was 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 from Once Upon a Time in 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. It's just kismet, you know? It's just how it happened to happen that day. It was 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've got like 3 copies of this already. It would always grab me by the throat.

I liked that he was a writer-director in a way, because he not only wrote the comic, but drew it too. A lot of times, it's a different writer and a different comic artist. It's like a real kinship, you know? 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, with the actors on green screen, I can make the backgrounds look just like this. I can contrast the actors up, and I could get this very graphic look, which sometimes, for a window, is 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 a white dot behind them for a streetlight, and that looks just like the book. So I'm going to bring the book to life.

I'll show you how fast we go from development at Troublemaker. It was October, and Once Upon a Time in Mexico was coming 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 the green screen here in my studio. You'll see my green screen where I shot all these movies.

I shot my sister and myself, put it in black and white. It looks just like the comic, but it's moving. So I called a comic-book artist friend of mine, Mike Allred, and I said, "Do you have Frank Miller's number?" He goes, "Yeah, I do." I said, "Okay, I'm going to call him up."

So I called Frank Miller. "Hey, this is Robert Rodriguez. I have a test I want to show you for Sin City. I'm going to be in New York tomorrow." He's like, "Tomorrow? Okay, yeah, sure. Come by. Meet me at this bar." I booked a flight for New York. I had my laptop just like this.

I went to the bar and showed him what looked like an image from his comic, and it started moving. He's like, "Wow, how did you do that?" I said, "I got my own studio and all this." 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 are like, "Oh, Warner Bros. bought this a while back," and then you've got to 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 going to go back and draw a comic that's so raw that it can never be made into a movie." So, of course, I call him and say, "Hey, let's make a great movie." I showed him how we could do it, and I said, "I know you don't know me, and you're going to have to—I've got to earn your trust for you to give me your baby. But we can make this right away."

He was excited for about 2 seconds, and then he goes, "Oh, no. Then we've got to write a script, and then the studio's going to have notes. All that shit." He's been through it before.

I said, "It's not like that. I have a whole different setup. I've 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 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 3 of the stories down. I'm just going to take stuff out, really. I 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. We'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. This would be really cool."

So he's like, "All right." There's nothing on him to do. It's all on me. I wrote the script in December. In January, Josh Hartnett and Marley Shelton came down, and Frank flew in. We shot for 10 hours on my green screen.

We shot that opening sequence, an incredible opening sequence. We recorded his voice-over right then in my little voice-over booth. Marley Shelton comes up: "Why did you 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." I tell Frank, "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 beyond what 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 make it look like any gritty crime movie, and they would miss the point: 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. If this was moving, it would be the most phenomenal movie."

I asked him, "Do you ever feel like directing any of these short ones?" He said, "I thought about directing The Big Fat Kill, maybe as a short film." I said, "You should come direct that one. Shit, you should direct all of them with me, because I'm really copying and rewriting the book. You should direct it with me." He said, "All right, let's go."

So, remember, I met him in November. I wrote it in December. In January, we shot the test. It took me a couple of weeks to do the effects. He loved it. I made a meeting with Bruce Willis and showed it to him.

What's so cool about doing that opening scene is that, with any actor I show it to, 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 into a test." He watches it: Josh Hartnett's voice-over, music, titles come on, first name on the screen: Bruce Willis.

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. That was just easy to get.

By February, we were building the few little sets we had, like the bar. I told Frank Miller, "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. I remember because my son was born March 3rd, and I was in L.A. for his birth because I was also recording the orchestra for the score I had somehow written in the past few months for Kill Bill 2. That's how much stuff was going on.

Lex Fridman

You're shooting that in parallel with Sin City. That's hilarious. Is that right?

#465

Yeah. Sometimes we'd be shooting with the kids, and then in the afternoon Mickey Rourke 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 edit suite. I would scan the artwork into the computer, edit the storyboards with the sound effects, and do the voice-over. 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 had a template with the real drawings and the lighting for how we were going to do it. It was funny because I could do a pretty good Bruce Willis because I’d known him so long. We were doing his voice-over, and he would hear my guide voice for the timing and be like, “Is that me? Is that you? I can’t tell. I like that one. That one was me. Just do that.” It was like, “Oh, man. It sounds like me.”

Lex Fridman

First of all, why haven’t films like that been made?

#465

Well, it’s a very specific look because it went to the 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 until the end of the movie.

You’re just in this world where all these layers of unreality—water doesn’t photograph that way, snow doesn’t photograph that way, but it’s there, and you’re seeing it, and you’re seeing the actors. So it’s really like a dream world. I was really into it, and I did tests for the most difficult shots first. How do I get his tie to glow in the dark like in the comic so it’s still in the shadow?

I realized, “Oh, use fluorescent tape and a fluorescent light. That way I can keep it—we can still key it.” I started doing my own visual effects like that early on because I knew technology was changing so fast that I would need to know how to do it like a magician.

Shooting digital, nobody wanted to touch digital back then. Directors of photography were all afraid of digital. They didn’t want to have to learn something new, so I had to DP it. When I was photographing it, I was like, “It’s so fun to light, because you have to have that light out of frame right now. But I could bring the lights in right here, as long as they’re not crossing it. I’m just going to take it out of the green anyway.”

I could have the coolest lighting on everybody: cool edge lights. You could have an edge light back here, an edge light back here, and a fill light here. I erase him. I just take him out.

Lex Fridman

Can you educate me and people who are curious about this? What is the power of light when you’re telling a story, when you’re creating a feeling or an experience? What’s the artistry of that?

#465

Well, if you look at the drawings, too, sometimes it’s the absence of light. You would see this face, but then this would be completely black, and you would still see my eye, which is impossible, right? But you believe it when you see it because it’s there.

Things like that were a lot of the tricks I tried first because I liked that about it. You have a guy completely backlit, so there’s no light on his face, but yet his glasses are glowing white. We’d put fluorescent tape in there, hit that with a light, and then we could turn it white later. The black and white really helps, and then just upping the contrast.

It’s something that you have a feeling for, but you’re able to try it. In fact, when I took it to George Lucas—because we were the only guys shooting digital—he said this to me early on: “Man, it’s so good you live in Austin. That’s why I’m in Marin County.” When you live outside of this box of L.A. and Hollywood, you think outside of the box automatically. You’re just going to stumble upon innovations.

He was right. It was like, “Yeah, why aren’t we shooting digital? Let’s shoot digital. Why aren’t we shooting digital 3D? Let’s do that. Why don’t we just use green screen for the background?” You just start innovating because you’re away from anyone saying, “Hey, you can’t do it that way,” which they would say if I was in L.A.

We just came up with a whole other method. I took him to Sin City to check out the first thing I was going to show at Comic-Con. He said, “Now, this will really show people what digital is capable of. This really shows how avant-garde you can get with that. You could never have done that on film.”

By immersing myself in that technology early, I was able to make a movie like that, and then everyone had to play catch-up. You should always just follow your instincts. That’s why, if people say, “Don’t use those curtains. That’s not going to work,” just blow past those guys. Go innovate your own thing, because sometimes not knowing is better.

Being too naive to think, “Don’t you know you shouldn’t have been able to make that movie that way?” People would say that all the time. “How did you make a movie for $7,000? It’s impossible.” Why do you keep using that word? It can’t be impossible if I did it, because I’m not that smart.

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 had a slope. I didn’t really realize it was going up that high.

Lex Fridman

You’ve talked about how a big part of your approach to filmmaking and to life is manifesting—the reality you want. I would love to ask you about manifesting, but you asked me at the beginning of this conversation, “Do you consider yourself a creative person?” I should reflect on that because I was very uncomfortable answering that.

#465

Yeah, I noticed a little bit, and I was like, “I’m going to free you up so that you’re never uncomfortable again.” It’s scary to say that about yourself, to think there are a lot of people who go, “Well, you’re not an artist. You’re not creative.”

But no, you’re not saying, “I’m an artist.” You’re saying, “I’m a creative person.” But that’s an artist, too, isn’t it? An artist isn’t necessarily a guy with a French mustache and a funny hat. That’s not necessarily what an artist is. Artists are regular people.

Regular people relate to art that’s imperfect. If you can make art that’s perfect, no one will relate to it. So when you think about it like that, you go, “Well, I can make imperfect art.” So, yeah, I am 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 were uncomfortable saying it. You’re a real artist.

Lex Fridman

Yeah. There’s some degree—I don’t know if you could speak to this—but there’s a fear of creating shitty things. I’ve created a lot of really shitty things in my life, and it always feels like that’s really important to do.

#465

Okay, you’re judging something that you have no business judging. That’s why I like making movies that have less money and less time on purpose. The biggest movie of 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 million, but I want to be a hero and come in at $50 million, because, one, it’ll make it better, and, two, you’ll make 3 of them instead of just 1.”

I don’t want to just go spend the farm. Not many filmmakers do that. They’ll 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 because they’re going to leave you alone. You can do whatever you want.

I like the creative limitations that come from less money. That’s why I like Brass Knuckle Films. We’re going to make them for less so that they’re 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 3 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.

I wouldn’t judge it. If you called your movie shitty, that’s like John Carpenter saying, “Yeah, nobody liked The Thing. It’s a shitty movie and everyone hated it, so it must not be good.” Then, 10 years later, it’s a masterpiece. So don’t judge it, because the words we use on ourselves are very powerful.

If you say, “Well, I’m kind of an artist sometimes, and I make a lot of shitty stuff,” that’s going to be your lot in life. I’m in pretty good shape for a director. It’s not because I’m operating the camera; it’s because I work out, right?

But I always hated working out. I wasn’t into sports. I was a filmmaker. I was a cartoonist in high school. I was really tall. They would say, “Come be on our team. We need you. It’s a small school. We need you.” I’d be 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 the Elijah Wood character when they would say, “You’ve got to come run with everybody.” I would say, “I don’t think a person should run unless he’s being chased.” I gave that to the Elijah Wood character because that’s the guy I identified with. He’s there with his camera, and that was me.

So I hated it. And then, because I was a cartoonist, drawing like this for hours—4 hours—my back would go out for a month. It would just go out from being so tall and crunched over.

When I started making movies, operating the camera and doing Steadicam, every year my back would go out to where I would need cortisone shots to get up again if I was filming, or I’d just be out for a month. On Spy Kids 2, Ricardo Montalbán 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 Steadicam.”

He goes, “You have to work out, Robert. You have to work out.” I was like, “Okay, yeah, I know. I know.” So then I thought, “Okay, next year I’m working with Stallone.” I asked Stallone.

#465

I asked Stallone, “How do you get in shape? Because I need to get in shape. My back’s always going out.” He goes, “Get a trainer.” Anyone we ever saw in Hollywood who got in shape had a trainer. I said, “Even you? Anybody? Oh, I need a trainer. He has a trainer.”

No, I need a trainer. I can’t train. It’s like, “Well, shit. If you can’t even train on your own, then what do we mortal men have?” So I got a trainer, and guess what happened? I hated it. I would feel sick when he was coming over because I hate sport. I hate working out. After some years of doing that, I just couldn’t stand it. But I know it’s good for my health, so the desire is there.

If you can’t accomplish something in your life, it’s not a lack of desire. If you want to be more creative, it’s not a lack of desire. It’s a lack of identity. The fact that you were comfortable 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.

A friend of mine from Mexico 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. I’ve been smoking since I was 8 years old. She said, “Well, you’re going to go back to smoking because you just told me your identity is a smoker. Right now, you’re a smoker who’s not smoking. What’s going to happen eventually? You’re going to think you have to say, ‘I’m a nonsmoker.’”

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. You start choking at the smell of smoke. “Okay, I’ll try that.” She walks off, and I go, “Shit, I forgot about my own lesson. I wonder where in my life I could apply that.”

Working out, of course. My God, I hate working out. No wonder I’m 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.

By the next day, my life had completely changed. It’s easier if it’s opposite day. If you’re just doing it by degrees, that’s bullshit. You’ve got to go complete opposite. If there’s a doughnut, and you say, “Well, I’m going to only eat half of it,” you’ve got to go, “No, I’m going to get an apple.” Opposite day is much easier.

Not only did I change my life by working out, I never needed a trainer. I haven’t 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 who called themselves an athlete, but that’s how much it can change your life by changing your identity.

So if you want to be more creative, you’ve already got that desire. You’ve got enough of that. You don’t need more desire. You need more identity. You’ve got to say, “I’m a creative person,” with a straight face. 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 going to do more creative stuff because that’s what a creative person does.

Lex Fridman

It doesn’t make sense to me how manifesting works, but it does seem to work. Basically, visualizing a path toward a certain kind of future. I guess everything around you, everything within you, kind of makes way for that possibility. It’s weird, but it’s kind of nice to know that you can do that. You have to have that conviction and just start with a label.

#465

Yeah, the label you just gave yourself. I changed my label. My label was, “I hate working out.” Now it’s, “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. You can’t help but conform to your identity. You’re always going to conform to your identity. So just change your identity, and you’ll change your life.

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 go from a guy who doesn’t want to work out, who hates it, hates it, and already had the desire—I was already hiring the guy—I lacked the identity. As soon as I changed my identity, boom.

Lex Fridman

Well, one of the things for me that’s probably like that is music, just playing guitar.

Speaker 1

Are you a musician?

Lex Fridman

Yeah. Music.

Speaker 1

Look at you. You paused.

Lex Fridman

I would definitely not. I’m going along with it now, but if we’re honest, if we’re just in that moment, I wouldn’t have said it. But I heard you rip on fucking guitar, and I’ve heard you play kind of amazing in all different kinds of contexts.

Speaker 1

Oh, but I should be like freaking Santana by now because I’ve had a guitar in my hand 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.

When you apply yourself to rehearse for a couple of shows, you book some shows. Look at this. This was me playing our first arena show, opening for George Lopez. That was crazy, to be on the stages where your heroes were, where you saw them, and now you’re seeing what their point of view was. It blows your mind.

You need to just 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.

Lex Fridman

Yeah, and I mess up a bunch of times.

Speaker 1

But you don’t want to focus on that. You just go, “Okay, I got through it.” When you’re up there, it’s not that you’re 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 closely and you’ll see they screw up a couple of things, but you just won’t know. 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 could really just lean into it more, change 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’re doing this to yourself. You’re literally doing this to yourself. I don’t 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.

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 in my lap. I trust the process. You don’t have to know. If you trust the process, you’ll figure it out.

Lex Fridman

But here’s the thing: sometimes you fail, and there’s an audience.

Speaker 1

Yeah. Then you get 4 rooms.

Lex Fridman

Yeah, yeah. And then what? And then what happens?

Speaker 1

Right. Don’t blink. Don’t blink, and then you sift through the failure.

Lex Fridman

Yeah, exactly. And you go, “Wait a minute. What did I get out of that?”

Speaker 1

Yeah. I’ve done that a bunch.

Lex Fridman

I love how much of a mess this human existence is.

Speaker 1

Yeah.

Lex Fridman

You’ve talked about the importance of journaling because reliving is living. I love that phrase.

Speaker 1

I came up with that because it’s like, wow, I see so many people who get after you for filming a concert, and they go, “Live in the moment.” I’m like, “Dude, counterintuitive. The moment goes by like this. 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 through my computer. All I’m going to have is a file photo of you, maybe in a suit, and you picturing me, maybe in a black T-shirt. The metadata narrative is going to say, “Had a great talk about how we remember creativity.”

Their brain doesn’t remember. But when I pull up old home movies I can show my kids that I just found, they don’t remember it. I don’t remember filming it, and it’s like new adventures. It becomes iconic, and it sticks in our head. All our jokes are based on old things that we used to do and say. Reliving is living.

Keeping a journal is very important because I found that anything past 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 a $10,000 Santana. It was given to me for my birthday by the studio where I made that movie.

How can I not remember that? It’s crazy what you don’t remember. The brain is not a very reliable computer.

Lex Fridman

It's made out of freaking butter. That's a really profound idea: so much of our life is lived through replaying our memories, and watching stuff is one of the ways to refresh them, to give them more texture and details.

Speaker 1

It makes it iconic in your life and part of your life. Otherwise, it just went by. It went by. 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, but I've got to remember.”

When you go through your journal, I go back and find, wow, a life-changing thing happened Friday. Another life-changing thing that I didn't know at the time, but now I know really set me on my path, 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.

I swear I've talked to a big group of people—500 people—and asked, “How many people here journal?” “Mm-hmm.” Two hands, three hands. I couldn't believe it. It's like, man, you guys, if there's anything I can impart on you, it's this: 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. I keep a journal—one file per year—so I started a new one in 2025.

If I'm going to do a Director's Chair episode, I look up Michael Mann—all the conversations we had since 1994 that I wrote down because I felt they were important—and it's like, oh my God, I can't believe we said that. That's how I knew about that thing with Quentin. I had forgotten that story about Quentin saying, “Ah, Pulp Fiction.” I had forgotten that because, from the moment I asked him that question to the success at Cannes, it was very quick. So 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, and he didn't think that was the one for him.

When it's private journaling, there's an honesty, an innocence about 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, but the profundity comes back, and it's crazy.

So much of what I figured out then—I was talking like a professor by the end of that. People come up to me and ask me all these questions about things 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 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 through you sometimes. So the act of sharing—that's why I've always liked to share information, because the feedback loop is insane. Me inspiring Racer to go write: he writes the script in 3 days, comes back, and tells me, “Now I'm doing that method.” It's like, wow, people come back with their version.

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 it so many times. They've come back and said, “Wow, Dad, that lesson you taught us about this is really—it's really become big in our minds.”

I say, “What was that?” They tell me, and 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 over time.” They turned it into something else, and it's like, “Wow, that's so cool.”

That thing about reliving was one of my favorite ones. My mom was turning 75 and didn't want to do anything for her 75th birthday. I said, “Why not?” She goes, “The whole family is going to want to do something. 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 did we do on your 65th?” I didn't even remember. 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've got to have a journal of that. I'm sure I have video.

I go back 10 years, see what tape I had it on, find the tape, and pop it in. I forgot about all this stuff. So I cut together a 10-minute version of it and 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. And 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.

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 leaning into the screen to see what's around the corner, and they're remembering the place and the sounds. 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, “This is that dogshit. What kind of camera was that? What were the limitations?” You put one of those files up on your screen, and it's this big on your laptop now. That's how low-resolution the footage was back then. But that didn't matter. Compared to our memories, that stuff is virtual reality.

Living is reliving. 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 and 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 what's important later compared to what was happening at the time.

Lex Fridman

To add on top of that, journaling, or home films, is a raw projection of what's going on in the moment. I think it's also really powerful—and I've done this—to do a high-effort description of where your life is, just for yourself.

Sometimes journaling is low effort. Sometimes it's just, “I want to mark that we had this conversation. I had to go do something at 5; I did that. I met somebody that I know last night. I met somebody that's going to be life-changing. I'm going to write a little bit more on that because I know now, but I'm just going to record it so later, if I look it up…”

One of the cool things you could do is—for example, Jimmy, MrBeast, does these videos, which are great. I think it's a great exercise to do for yourself: a video he records for himself that isn't to be published until 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.

Then time flies, and you get to a point where it's like, holy shit, it's been 10 years, it's been 20 years. You get to listen to a younger version of yourself. It would have been hilarious if you shot videos like that for yourself, because of the incredible journey your career has been on. Just think about the delta, the difference between what your dreams were and where you ended up.

Usually, you outdo yourself in many ways. Sometimes your life goes in a totally different trajectory, and the result is kind of funny. It's a nice illustration of the nonlinearity of life.

Speaker 1

I would film stuff like that with my kids. I would film my kid saying, “Hey, Rebel, it's me, Rebel. Fucking Rebel in the future.”

Lex Fridman

Yeah, so you have shots like that.

Speaker 1

Yeah, and then they show them 10 years later, and they're like, “Whoa.” To see themselves talking to themselves and saying, “Yeah.”

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, and pan off to the new Rebel watching it. It just keeps going.

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 an ongoing project. It's just so fun to play with memory and make you realize how fast time moves. They go, “I kind of remember that, but I don't remember being that tiny. I had that memory.”

It's wild how time moves, and it makes them feel much more precious about how quickly time moves and how important every little moment is, because you see the fragility of it too.

Lex Fridman

Does it make you sad? Does it break your heart that the number of memories we get to create is finite, that this life ends, that eventually the story is over?

Speaker 1

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 was trying to remember it. You know, you're like, “God, it was so real.” But if you don't write it down right away, it kind of fades away.

While you're dreaming it, it's really real. 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, had 5 kids, and, oh well, I'm going to go be a fish now.” It's like a dream, like it's gone that way. That's what past lives are: distant memories, like a dream that's faded away. That's why you barely feel remnants of it.

Do I feel sad about that? Yeah. When I tell people, they flip out. Like I said, I want a character to be like that. He's dying, and 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. Then it's on to the next life. Yeah, next I'll be a fish.

It feels like I'm a little sad about it, but then it makes you double down even more on being precious about the life you're in now.

Lex Fridman

What do you think? And record it. Record it. What do you think is the meaning of this whole thing of life? Why are we here?

Robert Rodriguez

I don't know why. I really feel like my kids and I were just talking about this last night. We were just blown away. We did this Vedic astrology thing, which is the oldest form of astrology. It just nails each person.

When you have a kid, you realize right away, this isn't my kid. I'm just in charge of him. He's a completely different soul who ended up in my hands. There are physical characteristics that get passed on because of just how biology works. Sometimes even posture and movement are the same, but the actual person is somebody else.

I have 5 kids, and I had 9 brothers and sisters. They're all different. You realize we made a pact in a past life to gather together, because every time it's like, “It's so good 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.

What's cool is this clarity you get just by saying it. They now know that they were always supposed to be creative people, 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 frivolous? Is that a real job? Can I do that?” Now they realize, “No, you're supposed to be doing that for these reasons.” 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.” 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,” like my first boss told me. “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 keep going and just say, “I'm unstoppable.”

That doesn't mean you're going to use your powers for bad, but you've just changed your life by declaring that. 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 artist I was, 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, if you go back to the 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 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 4 years just based on what I read.” I was like, “Really?” I was probably 17 or 18.

Four years later, I made El Mariachi. I went to him later at a reunion and I said, “You called it. You said I was going to be rich and famous. Why did you say that?” He was like, “I said that? I never—” 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 looked like he didn't even know who I was. He was acting like he never would have said that in a million years.

Again, sometimes things come out of our mouths that aren't us. They come through us. If you think of it that way, why are we here? We're here for a reason. We're going to 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 clogging the pipe: “I don't know if I'm really creative. I don't know if I'm really a businessman.” You're just closing the pipe. You're not going to let it flow. Just be a good pipe. Just say, “I just want to be a good pipe: clean, open.” That's when the magic happens.

And no matter what, don't blink. Don't blink. That dude was getting so much shit thrown at him. I wish you knew that time period, because then you would go, “Yeah, that's right.” It was unbelievable. I can't even convey it.

There was no internet and stuff back then. This was all public—literal press reviews. It was like, “Why are they targeting this guy?” They just did not like him. He had unprecedented success, was a really great guy, and was making amazing shit. So it was the triple threat of making people jealous and pissing them 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 in 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. As I told you, I'm a huge fan. Huge honor to talk to you, brother.

#465

Thank you, brother. So great talking with you. Great questions. You're going to change your life.

Thank you, brother. A 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.