#465 – Robert Rodriguez: Sin City, Desperado, El Mariachi, Alita, and Filmmaking

The following is a conversation with Robert Rodriguez, a legendary filmmaker and creator of "Since City", El Mariyachi, Desperado, Spy Kids, Machete from Dostaldon, Alita, Battle Angel, the faculty, and many more. Robert inspired a generation of independent filmmakers with his first film, El Mariyachi, that he famously made for just $7,000. From that film, in many sense, he was not only the director, he was also the writer, producer, cinematographer, editor, visual effects supervisor, sound designer, composer, basically the full stack of filmmaking. He has shown incredible versatility across genres, including action, horror, family films, and sci-fi. With some epic collaborations with Quintan Tarotino, James Cameron, and many other legendary actors and filmmakers. He has often operated at the technological cutting edge, pioneering using HD filmmaking, digital back lots, and 3D tech, and always, through all of that, he's been a champion of independent filmmaking, running his own studio here in Austin, Texas, which, in many ways, is very far away from Hollywood. He's building a new thing now, called brass knuckle films, where he's opening up the filmmaking process so that fans can be a part of it, as he creates his next four action films. I'll probably go hang out at his film studio a bunch, as this is all coming to life. His work has inspired a very large number of people, including me, to be more creative and whatever pursuit you take on in life, and have fun doing it. And now, a quick few second mentionary sponsor. Check them out in the description, it's the best way to support this podcast. We've got in video AI for video generation, brain iPhone for focus, Nesswee for business, Shopify for e-commerce, and element for hydration. She's wise to my friends. I do try to make these adries interesting and personal, often related to stuff I'm reading or thinking about. But if you must skip them, please still check out the sponsors, sign up, buy whatever they're selling. I enjoy their stuff, maybe you will do. Also, if you want to get in touch with me for whatever reason, go to extreme.com/contact, and now on to the full ad reads, let's go. This episode was brought to you by in video AI, a video generating app that allows you to create full-length videos using just text prompts. Obviously, in video is the perfect sponsor for this conversation with Robert Rodriguez. He has been for decades the guy willing to use cutting-edge technology, digital HD, VR3D, and now we're in a time in a space where it has not quite used by the big filmmakers, because they're not really sure how to leverage its power. And so I think it's really the role of the independent filmmakers to start playing with video generation. Start playing five seconds, ten seconds at a time, seeing what you can do in a storytelling art form. I do think it's a skill I've used in video a lot, there's some aspect of it. You have to kind of nudge the system into that direction. I mean, it really is like having two directors. And there's things that humans are really good at, and there's things that AI is really good at. The dance between the two is where the art form is. Anyway, you can try and video AI for free saving you lots of time and money. You'd otherwise spend on editing, animating, and other production costs, go to invideo.io/legspod. That's invideo.io/legspod. This episode was also brought to you by brain.fm, a platform that offers music specifically made for focus. I remember thinking that focus or the lack of focus was 100% the consequence of your mind and nothing else. But you should be able to shut off the world and deeply focus on a particular thought or line of thought or on nothingness or on your breath, you know, like you do meditation. You should be able to do that just with the power of your mind. And in some sense, I still believe that. But I think there's just some things that make it easier. I first discovered that, I don't know how long ago now, but listening to different kinds of noise, white noise, brown noise, and realizing, whoa, something is happening here. The mind is just much more naturally, much quicker, much more efficiently, able to achieve that state of focus, or you shut off the rest of the world. And then so brain.fm takes it just to another level, there's just so much variety for any working environment where you want to optimize the kind of audio landscape. Use your focus and try brain.fm free for 30 days, but go to brain.fm/lex. That's brain.fm/lex for 30 days free. This episode was also brought to you by Nest Suite and all in one cloud business management system. Boy, we're really getting to understand the inner workings of individual businesses and the interaction between those businesses within the supply chain domestically and internationally now with the new evolving trade policy. I probably have several conversations with the top leadership on this topic soon. The economy is both an incredibly resilient and a fragile system. Whenever you have these centralized, big, giant hammer type policies, they can have an impact that reverberates not just through the direct consequences of those policies, but just the second, third, fourth order effects, plus they create the psychological effects within human minds of uncertainty, a fear, and based on that, they make decisions which are often suboptimal for the economy. And so you get to see the inner workings of businesses and how they function in response to those, almost like a immune system within each business to see how can we survive? How can we turn a profit still? And all of that comes into play all the HR, all the inventory, all of that. I'm deeply grateful for the wisdom and the power of the market. Should be careful not to mess with it too much. Download the CFO's guide to AI, machine learning, and that's sweet dot com slash Lex. That's net suite dot com slash Lex. This episode was also brought to you by Shopify, a platform design for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store, speaking of capitalism. I've also been reading a large amount of literature on China to understand the culture, the peoples, the mechanism used by the government, all that to help me understand and break through some of the propaganda of the Western perspective. Of course there's truth to it. This skepticism and the caution that the West has, but I think there's a lot of interest to play here and a lot of warmongers that want to wage wars instead of make peace. I do think that the economy and economic relationships and trading and buying and selling all of that is a fundamentally peaceful action that protects us from escalating military conflict and otherwise. I continue to hope or past all that military conflict. But anyway, the thing I love about America is the companies. The huge number of entrepreneurs building stuff, creating stuff, dreamy, buying and selling from each other. I don't know. That just fills me with hope that individuals can dream and have the power to bring their dream to a reality. Anyway, sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash Lex. That's all lowercase. Go to Shopify.com slash Lex to take your business to the next level today. This upsides brought to you by element by daily zero sugar and delicious electrolyte mix that I'm drinking now as I'm traveling in the middle of nowhere. Barely know where I am, barely know who I am, barely know what time it is. I've been feeling lost and out of balance for many reasons. Hopefully there will be a sinus of sort, so sort of little miracle that'll help me find my way. This conversation with Robert was an inspiring one. He really did everything he's done against all odds, fearless and bold. When she goes wrong, he just figures it out. There's something about him just being around in the energy of urgency, of creative excitement to just take on the problems of the day. It's not like excitement to create. It's excitement to take on the problems that will for sure come when you try to create. The different angle is a more honest one. It's a more inspiring one, more energizing one. Yeah. Anyway, while we're talking about element, watermelon salt, get a sample pack for free with any purchase. Try it to drink element dot com slash Lex. This is the Lex Freeman podcast to support it. We check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Robert Rodriguez. (soft music) - Has there been a time when there was like one take and you only have one take to get it right? - Oh, all the time where you're just like, or just you know how long it'll take to reset and you're just, but then you know what you, you gotta just work with what you got. You gotta look, work with your results. - You get nervous or no in that moment? - Oh yeah, you're nervous going like, just I hope it goes off 'cause 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, you know, I've just learned that if something happens, it's just meant to be that way. And I got used to doing things in one take and just living with it, it didn't bother me. One movie was even a low budget movie. They had rigged a car to implode 'cause I was gonna throw a guy at it. So we needed a car to implode and then we're gonna throw him and marry it together, right? And the car guy goes, yeah, we're gonna have three cars rigged. Three cars, why are you not doing it? In a long case, one doesn't work and then we have a second, we have three, and we said, we don't have a night to go shoot, take after take, we're doing just care one car. And if it doesn't work, we'll figure it out. And if you don't have time to do it again sometimes, it's such a long setup. So I go, no, I'm good with it, just go, wouldn't it an a grindhouse movie? They only had one take, so that'll make it more authentic. - When it all goes to shit, when it fails, you just, what's the next thought? So I'll tell you, two things happened, I'm just still done. First was, okay, you know how those explosions when somebody walks away and slum ocean from an explosion that's become kind of, you know, that started with Desperado? Desperado's the first, if you look at all the montages, Desperado's the first. - That's right, that's right. That is the meme, because it was an accident, it was just supposed to be, it was just two grenades, not a nuclear bomb. It throws them over the side, and I just want to like some body parts or something to fly up some shrapnel. It's that literally such shrapnel. And my fix guy was so ragged, running so ragged, we get to there and he go, do you have any body parts of stuff we can throw up or something, you can shoot up, pat and realize it's so high they get past that second floor and say, I don't, I don't, I can give you fireball. I can give you a nice, you know, fireball with propane, but it burns away really quick, like how fast? Or like that, but it'll be big and orange, okay, well shoot it in slow motion, so last a little longer, 'cause it just goes poof. So I told the actors, I know how big this fireball's gonna be, but just walk really fast and just look real determined and then just keep walking. Don't stop and turn around because you might get your eyebrows tinged, so they take off and boom, it goes and in slow motion, it looks great, right? I'm gonna be showing a Jim Cameron before it came out and his hand went up, like embarrassing that before, you know, six months later, Dust Toldon came out. So I liked how much it looked so much that in Dust Toldon, I did it again. So those movies came out within six months of each other, that's why it turned into a thing 'cause people saw it. And so I thought, hop up for the opening of George Clooney and Quinton walking out of the gas station that we have the whole place just blowing up and they just keep talking like it's not happening. You know, like take it another step further, so I'm not just doing the same thing. 'Kay, that one is like, okay, you're gonna walk out and it's all in one take, so we're only gonna do one take. We're gonna blow the thing up, we're gonna start with just, you know, some smaller explosions than when they're further away and it's safer than we'll do the big fireballs. So we're going and you're nervous 'cause like, if one of them trips up a line and you know, the pressure's on them, it's not just you that's nervous, you're nervous for them. They're the ones who got to walk out, do that whole speech, get in the car and drive away. What if the car doesn't start? You know, there's a lot of things that could happen. Well, guess what happens? The thing you would not expect, they go in, they come out, they start talking, shoot it. It's perfect, great, we can move on and the camera guy goes, I don't know what happened, which is like you had a little snafu here, he goes, yeah, we have an auto focus on the steady cam, I mean, we have a focus thing. It just went like this, I felt it go whack all the way out of focus and whack for a second, back like it just reset itself. I don't know why it did that 'cause it was radio controlled and we can't tell 'cause we're shooting film, you know, sort of like, oh shit, watch the daily, 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 gotta reshoot it. So we had to wait to wear back in that location, we rigged it for two more takes just in case. So that thing that was supposed to be the one take is three takes. The other thing that happened was the front of the dust hold on bar. That's in guy that did those explosions. He packed a bunch of explosives behind the actors. When the actors come running out of the bar at the end of the movie and there's an explosion through the door 'cause all the vampires are blowing up. He didn't just, he put like 10 times the other stuff. It blew, you see it in the movie. You see this huge fire ball going up and if you watch closely, you see it already start to catch the whole place on fire. The whole front of that's which is foam. Catching on fire and I cut just before you see that it's on fire. And we, that was the first shot at that bar 'cause we weren't gonna start shooting the other stuff 'til night. So the first shot is that and the set's ruined. Burn 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." (laughing) But right away, this is what happens. My first AD, Doug Ernest Kowski comes over to me and I go over to him. The guys came out with the fire hoses. The fire hoses weren't even adding water. The thing was just scorching. The whole production design team was in tears 'cause they had just spent weeks building this thing and it was up and smoking charred. I said, "Let's just keep shooting." Let's just keep shooting because it looks really kind of cool like this. Yeah, they're gonna 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 buildings of black, we didn't go over there and touch that up. That's real flame that burned. And it ended up looking great. So then the next week when we came back to shoot that other shot that didn't work, we came back and they had repaired it and we shot all the night stuff, which is the majority of the stuff in front of it. So sometimes you gotta roll with it and then look, look at the blessing you get because of this mistake. You probably actually got a better take by doing it later with them and then you had this incredible look for the end of the movie that looked apocalyptic. If it had looked just clean, you would have actually seen that it was kind of a foam set. This made it look better. So I kind of let the universe push you where you're supposed to go. - I know. - This roll with it. - You gotta roll with it because you don't know what the grand plan is. You have your plan? Just know it's probably all gonna fall apart. It's just like the movies. You come up with your plan of what you wanna accomplish. That's like your script. Then you go scout your location and figure out what your project's gonna be. And you go try to make it as bullet proof 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 that work. Everything just falls apart in front of your face. Then that's when you roll up your sleeves and creatively figure out a way around it. You turn chicken shit and a chicken salad. And by the end you have a result. That's better than what you saw it out. But that's the process and that's life. And that's Washington's repeat. The rest of your life, that's what everything's gonna be like. It's just like a movie. 'Cause 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 gonna react to things? Well, how do you make your character react to things? You make him kind of superhuman. Why don't you just make yourself that way? You're writing your own story. And you start really seeing the more you get and the storytelling that life imitates art and art imitates life. But the process is also the same. So you write the story, the script, and then you have it collide with the chaos of reality. And in that moment, when you said you see the chicken shit, like you have to be able to keep your eyes open. - You have to do that. - Wait a minute. Okay, stuff changed. - It's disciplined. - Where's the, not to be cliche about it, but where's the silver lining of this? Where's the path to actually make something good out of this? And that's a skill, right? I call it, and it's one of my favorite stories. I was doing one of these talks. And they said, come talk about creativity. And I go, I understand 'cause a lot of people read my book, Rebels had a crew and told me, "Oh, it made me be a filmmaker." But a lot of people said, "It helped me start my own business." Because they just see how you can go be entrepreneur like that and go where no one else is going. And I'm giving all this talk about this kind of positive stuff in this one woman who goes, you're real positive. But what do I tell myself when I just wasted a year and a half of my life doing something that didn't work? And 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? 'Cause already her point of view is exactly what you're saying. She's not looking at all. She's just concentrating on what didn't follow her plan and not seeing the gift of everything else that's there. So she goes, very reluctant, so perfect. I wish we had filmed it. She goes, I learned good lesson the hard way. And I said, that's still sucks. And I say, when you follow your instinct, like if you follow your own instinct to go start a business or go make this movie or that, it wasn't someone saying, go over there and you'll make a million dollars. It was your instinct and you fail. Sometimes the only way across the river is to slip on the first two rocks. You fail, you have to really sift through, it's like the silver lining, but I call it sift through the ashes of your failure and you'll find the key to your next success is in there. But if you're not looking for it, you don't find it. I'm gonna tell you one that I tell 'em the four room story. I said, I made a movie called Four Room. I didn't make any money, right? When Quentin asked me, hey, would you want to make a movie with me and two other filmmakers? It's an anthology, it's a New Year's Eve, it's in a hotel, you have to use the bill hop. We're not gonna know what each other's making and we make it, we put it together. My hand went up right away just instinctually. It's like, yeah, I'll do that. I'll go make that with you. Now, should I ask the audience? I have to throw it to the audience and her. Should I have not raised my hand that quick? Shouldn't I have done a little studying first? or should I just go. instinct, or should you do instinct with some studying? Okay, well, I could have gone and studied, and I would have found that anthologies never work. Like even when it's Coppola, Scorsese, Woody Allen, they bomb because people can't quite rip the hand, or what is this? Twilight Zone, I don't want to see that. But that's not, I still said, yeah, I think I should just still go by instinct. So my instinct was to raise my hand. Were you gonna make that movie? Because I love short films. I made like bedhead and short films, and I thought, oh, here's a way, if this works, I can make short films in anthologies, and I can have the best of both work. And by the way, anthologies is when there's more than multiple one story in one story, yeah, one movie. So if you did the research, you would know that those very few people ever got that work. Yeah, the audience can't quite rip the render, and then it feels like the movie's starting three times, you know. So I make that movie, it bombs. Now I could feel real bad about that, but if we really think about it, you go, well, why did I sign up for it? Did I raise my hand because I thought it was going to go be this big financial success? No, I did it to work with my friends to do something creative to try something. But that's still not good enough. I need to really sift through the ashes. And if I look through the ashes of that failure, I find two keys to my biggest successes in there. While I was on the set, they said it has to be new years. So I thought, I'm just gonna do like bedhead. I'm gonna have two little kids that are running around in this room. And we have to use the bell hop as a babysitter. Well, it's new years. Let's stress everybody in Tuxedo's because it's new years. They're all gonna go out with the parents leave without them. When I saw Antonio and his wife, I thought, wow, they look like a really cool international spy couple. What if they were spies? And these two little kids who one of them keeps falling asleep on the set, he's so young, they barely tied their shoes. They don't know parents or spies. They have to go save them. Okay, there's five of those movies now, right? The other one was I really love making short films. I really want this anthology thing to work. What if it's three stories, like a three X structure, not four, same director, not four different directors? I'm gonna try it again. Why on earth would I try it again? Well, because I had already done one and figured out how I could do it better in that sin city. Those are by far two of my biggest successes that came directly from that failure. So I always say, follow your instinct. If it doesn't work, just go sometimes the only way across the river is to slip on the first two rocks. So what is 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 want. That's because the result might be something way bigger that I don't have the vision for in the universe is pushing me that way. By the way, a lot of people that look back to four rooms see a lot of creative genius in there. So you say flopped. I guess. Flopped financially. Yeah, but you know, there's so many ways to measure. Totally. But like I said, like I would say, well, it was successful because you know, even Roger, but said, hey, you furnished my favorite room. I was like, hey, that's I could take that. But now that I think there's something else still there. I keep sifting. And it's like, oh, yeah, two big successes came from that. It's an amazing lesson to have. Because it makes you feel better about failure. I think of like the thing by John Carpenter. You put that movie out the same weekend as ET. I think bombed. Critics were calling it pornography, you know, because of all the all the weird special effects. And audiences didn't go either. And he thought he made a great movie. So you know, it makes you question your instincts. Well, 10 years later turns out, oh, it's a class. So sometimes it takes the audience a while. So if you have some kind of failure on something you 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, 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 tell we just create. Stop thinking about movie, premiering, worrying so much about each one or project a project of your business person. Just commit to making a body of work like an artist would do. And you don't know what the masterpieces are going to be. Or which, you know, someone's going to come and say, oh, that one that bombed, there is some really creative stuff there. And it's not for you to decide. You just go into it. And sometimes I think it takes some time to process the failure to make sense of it. Like, at least for me, don't rush making sense of what didn't work. What lessons do I take from it? How do I assist through the ashes? As you said, yeah, like it takes time. You have to sleep on it a bunch of nights. Sometimes it's right there. And then sometimes you come back, revisit it, you know, later, because you might not have had some information you have now that makes you look at it a lot differently. Like, when I did, I just did the audiobook for Rebel Without a Crew. Yeah. Thank you for that, by the way. I hadn't read it since I wrote it. So I didn't remember a lot of the details. And you actually, it's voiced by you. I voiced it. So I was reading it real time. Yeah. I highly recommend people because you comment, you add additional comments to it. It's great. Most of the time I'm laughing. Yeah. I can't believe how crazy that story is. I forgot a lot of details. And when you're younger, you know, when you're 21, 22, six months feels like six years. I didn't realize how short that window was until I reread it. And how impossible most of that is. But you see some places where a set up falls in my lap and then pays off immediately in a big way, like magic over and over again. It's clear. I don't know what I'm doing. It's clear the universe is just pushing you places. So you can't fight it because I remember I was really disappointed. And it says in the diary, I'm really bummed that I go home that Christmas, not having sold it to the Spanish home video market, which was my goal. I walked home penniless. And I was like, Mary Christmas feel like a freaking failure. Good thing. I didn't sell it. Then, you know, with time, you look back and you go, wow, I got an agent the next month. He wasn't even going to help me sell it. He said, he can get 20,000 for it. Take it. I chased those people down for those contracts, Spanish market for months. And they never answered me back. And then Colombian ended up buying it for like 10 times as much as we made it. We released it and did a sequel and did another sequel. If you look back in time, good thing I didn't get my way. My way had had this for a vision. And it needed to do that, which you would never know, you know, you don't know that going through. So just if you don't have the answer right away or even in 10 years ago, maybe it's coming in 20 years, don't let anything slow you down. Just keep plowing for committing to making your thing happen. Don't don't get shook up by something that you might not have an answer for. Yeah. Every aspect of your journey is super inspiring. We'll talk about it. Let's go to the beginning. Sure. There's a few technical things that are fascinating about your beginning. So you started making films when you're very young. Yeah. Well, then old, super a camera and you were editing on a VCR. You see, I've met a lot of filmmakers who, you know, they start a certain way, but then they finish another way. They get to be big filmmakers and all that. I still do it that way. Like I still, I like doing things that way. I have a new company called brass knuckle films where the audience can actually participate by investing as moving investors in these movies that are done the same way. Their action films like we did with mariachi, but 10 to 30 million doesn't take a lot of money to start a billion dollar franchise. You know, like John Wick only cost 20 million. The first one. Second one was 40. Third one was 80. Fourth one was 100 because the audience kept growing and growing. By the way, you say, you know, 20 million, like it's not in a lot of money, which is not for an action film. Yeah. That's right. But also we should say the mariachi, the film on which the book, Rebel Without A Crew, is $7,000 movie. So let's put it all in context. But you know, you're going to hire bigger actors. You can get a big actor like a TNR Reeves for $20 million. You know, as Jim said, Jim Cameron, I said, you know, like Terminator costs $5 million. And he goes, I wish we had that much. He had less than $5 million for that. So you can start a billion dollar franchise using these methods. And with the audience investing, they get to make money on them. And this is what I'm going to say now about how I started. You see that DNA of how I give out, you know, I want people to know how I did things with Rebel Without A Crew or with these methods that I started with. You see, that's how we kept going. Hollywood spends way too much. And when you can make stuff for less, your profit margin is much better. So when I first started, I didn't have any money. So I still play like I don't have money. So I had super rate. My dad had a super rate of camera, but I couldn't afford it. I shot two rolls that you had to get to, yet to buy the film, shoot two minutes. I shot two rolls of that. It's another same amount of money that it cost to buy it, whatever that was, $12 or whatever to develop it. You get it. There's no sound. Most of the shit's out of focus, you know, but then my dad who sold cookware had a VCR, one of the first VCRs home VCRs for the market, that he would play his sales tapes to his salesman. And it came with a camera attached like this cable you got coming out. Imagine if that had to go into your VCR, viewed even see what it's shooting. And this is old camera manual, focus manual, iris and 12 foot cable. And I would start making movies with that instead. And now I have for $8, I have a two hour, erasable tape of sound and picture. So I got into digital basically really early. I was doing, which was really frowned upon back then and continue to be all the way to when I was using it for real in the early 2000s before everyone realized, oh, that's the future. Yeah, that's fascinating because you were rebel in that way too, using data. Yeah. Well, because of the means and the democratizing of that, the elite didn't like that. You could just go make a movie like that. But I started practicing. And it's much easier to practice when it doesn't cost any money. Like, if you want to be a rock star, right? If you want to learn how to play guitar really well, you're not going to just jump on stage and suddenly go to play. You have to practice to your fingers bleed. Well, the same with movies, you got to keep telling stories and cutting them together. And you just can't afford that on film. Nobody can't with two minute role, costing as much as a two hour tape. So I was moving all these doing all these movies. First, I would just cut in camera. And that VCR, that old VCR had a really good great pause button that they stopped making. That when you hit pause, it stopped right there. And it stopped with a clean cut. It didn't have all this color bars like the later ones had. So I, that was my, and it had an audio dub feature where you could add another second soundtrack to it. So if I have people talking, I could hit audio dub and add sound effects. So I could have two tracks on the same one. So I, that was my filmmaking kit for a while until I needed to start doing real editing. And my dad bought a second VCR for his business because I stole his other one. And I found that if I hooked them together, I could play on one and use that pause button on the second. And this was the limitation. This would taught me how to edit in my head. Is that if I shot a bunch of footage, I needed to shoot very little footage so I could find it. Because sometimes you shoot out of order. So when I cut it, I have to cut in linear order. Because if you push pause, it's a nice clean cut, but only it only holds for five minutes. You have five minutes before the machine shuts off. So you got to find your next shot within five minutes and do that. Otherwise, if you have to start the machine over, it added all these color bars and it would be all screwed up. So I'd have to sit there and not move for like all day while I cut, knowing what the next shot was. And once I had it cut, I would then add some sound effects to it. Memories have the audio dub function. But now if I want to add music, I take that tape, which has two tracks now into the first deck and put it into the VCR again, one generation of loss. But I have a little cassette tape player with the music and I do a wise blitter. So I can add the music and the, yeah, right? Just like that. That's like being resourceful with what you have. And I made a warrant winning short films that way on video. There were some festivals that would allow video, not many, but they would always win. And there were always funny is, I stumbled upon spike kids that way. Like I wanted to make these action movies my backyard. But when you're a teenager, you don't know anybody who can come be your action star. And if you just bring your high school buddies, well, they just look like high school kids. So I use my little brothers and sisters, because I'm one of 10 third oldest. They're just sitting around watching cartoons anyway. And I made them the action stars just to like learn. And I found those things would be a winning formula. They'd win every festival I'd send them to. So bedhead with my first time using a film camera was a wind up film camera. I got in film scrolling to film school for one semester and realized I already knew more than the film students, because they they taught you a whole other outdated way of doing it. So I'm just going to use that film camera to make a low budget movie, a definitive film version that I can send to all film festivals of these action kids, which is a precursor to spike it's bed. It's a precursor to spike kids. And we should say that bedhead was an award-winning short film that was probably a big sort of leap for you that probably opened the door to you too. Then it make all my action. Opened up your your your brain especially because those video festivals I would win like a trip to New York and a director's chair with a video of shorts that I would put in festivals. But I knew the film festival if I could get into film festivals, I could send that all over the world. So I made that little short film, sent it and it was winning all the festivals and I thought wow I made that with a wind up camera film camera filming just one take each shot. Just no slates because I'm the editor. And that cost 800 bucks. And it was eight minutes. I bet I can make 80 minute movie for $8,000 if I do the same method. So that movie I did six months later I was making Mariachi because it opened up my mind that I could try it in a feature. Can we actually pause on that because I think bedhead has a really great really unique story shot in a really unique way. I think what I'm trying to say is like it's very important to write write the right script write the right story. So let me tell you the trick to that. Yeah. And Mariachi is the same way. This really helped people. Like even Kevin Smith from clerk said wow Robert said when Mariachi was obsessed 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 is cousin owns this cousin is the brother has a brother in law has a bar and he owns a ranch. So the bad guy lives at the ranch. The fight scene is going to be in the bar. He's going to hit a bus at one point. He's going to the girl's going to have a dog and a turtle is going to cross the road. It gives you all this production value. So you write backwards. So for bedhead even did that with a camera. So I've been shooting video all this time and I'm one thing I wish I could do on video. I never could with slow motion or stop motion even. So when I got that crappy World War 2 camera they gave us in film school. I mean I was so pissed like this is the camera. I've been trying to get my hands. I could have bought this for 50 bucks at a bunch of old bill and how wind up. You couldn't even see through the lens. You were seeing through an approximation of the lens. But you could shoot slow motion. I could do reverse photography if I filmed upside down. I could do because if I do a fast push into her I'll never get the focus in right. So I started with it in focus. Went back, pulled backwards on a chair and then reversed it, flipped it and that looks like it stops on a dime in focus. I think a number of times I've seen you shoot backwards is incredible. Like to achieve a certain feeling, a certain experience, a certain certain effect, sometimes shooting in reverse plus the sound effect layer. You can create this reality that's surreal, that then results in the story that you wanted. You have to be functioning some kind of different space time continuum. It can start putting it together. So I've got this different camera. Now I go like I don't want to shoot the same kind of movie if I got a camera now that can do that. I can do stop motion. So that's why there's an animated title sequence at the beginning. I go, wow, I'm a cartoonist. If I set the camera up here, I can slow it down enough. It's not it's not a frame by frame. But if I get it down like two frames a second, I can just tap it and it'll maybe get one frame up. So I did 300 drawings by hand for that opening title sequence. Holy shit, that was you doing it by hand. Yeah. So you watched that. And this is a throw away title sequence. But I really want to just think to win awards. Okay. How long does that take to draw that? That's a lot. I remember I drew it over. Well, I was a daily cartoonist by then. So I was pretty fast. But still it's that's why it's only pencil. It's not inked. But it looks great. I mean, it's the cameras going around and all kinds of crazy stuff. But it's just all fake by paper. I took me all night to shoot it. Because I remember I walked into the film school the next day. I mean, like all sleeping. I told one of the fellow students, you know, wow, it was up all night doing this animated title sequence. Anyway, why are you putting so much work on this? They're not going to they're not going to grade you any differently. You know, like grades get an A walking in here. I'm trying to get out of this town. I'm not doing this for fucking grades. I got I want people to see what I can do now. And I want to see what I can do now with this. So a lot of the the story came from the limitations or actually the freedom of that camera. I couldn't have done that story on video. So when I saw, wow, okay, I can do reverse photography. She has to have special powers. So if she has special powers, then I can utilize I can really milk this camera for all it can get. There's one of my shots I love the most is where she's standing there. And the and the chair. She makes a chair come all the way up to her and it goes all the way up to her face. Now, if I do it normally where would I even put the strings for that? Right. So let's start here with the camera upside down. I have the strings in the back. You're not going to be looking at the back. And as it goes back, you pull it back. And then when you reverse it, it goes. And it looks so good. You can't spot the string. If you look close, you see the strings are in the back with your eyes. Yeah. So I did stuff like that. And then just heard like getting the hose. And then I just do stop motion for the hose turning on, you know, the faucet. That's why I gave her special powers so that and it made the story better. So sometimes the limitations you have with equipment or location, you can use it to make, you know, take chicken shit turn and chicken salad. Take this camera that everyone's like, what's this? And I go, I can do so much with this. But I tell you today, I look at that camera. I can't believe I ever made a movie 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. And Mariachi the same way. You have to think about it. I shot Mariachi on film and with a bar of 16 millimeter camera. I didn't know how to use it. I called up a place in Dallas that rented that kind of equipment and I said, I have an Airy 16S here. Two motor looking things. One has a 24 on one has a a bunch of numbers. Oh, that's a variable speed motor. That means you can do a different speed. I can shoot some emotion with this. Yeah. Oh, wow. Do you have a torque motor? I don't know. What is that? Is there something on the side of the magazine? Yeah. Now you can just look up on YouTube and it shows you how to use it. I was doing it by phone that way. And then I went and shot the movie right then. Yeah. And I didn't know if any of it was exposing or if the film camera was working until I finished the whole movie. So imagine you have to go down and make you go shoot for two weeks, come back, send it off to a lab. You want to talk about being nervous, just hoping something exposed. And when I saw it come back in the tape, they transferred it to a tape so I could edit it deck to deck again. I was so relieved. Some things didn't come out, but I can cut around that. It's like, yeah, I'm doing everything right here. You're doing everything. Imagine if you forgot to stop down and it's open all the way and one shot is blown out. You know, I'd have stuff like that because I'm moving fast and I'm doing it. Wait a minute. You shot, I'm ready. So. whole thing without knowing if some of the footage is damaged wrong without any of it. That's why I only did one take. So my idea was this I'll get yours. Wow. It was a test film. Right. Right. I thought it was I thought it was going to be a test film. Yeah. It's the only movie in history ever made where the filmmaker did not think anyone would see it and expect it and even set it up that way. I mean, why would I make an action movie for the Spanish market called basically the guitar player promises no action. No one's going to watch it. But I thought if someone actually picks it up and has the balls to watch this thing, they're going to be surprised I put a lot of action. It was just to learn from I just needed to make it firm as little as possible. See how much I could sell it for. If I could double my money, great. I can make another one and just get more practice. It was just I just so intrigued by this idea because you've heard advice about screenwriting. I heard advice back then I thought was ridiculous. It said it's going to take you a long time to be a good screenwriter. So write three scripts and throw them away. The fourth script will be the good one. It's like it's so hard to write a script. Who's going to write three full scripts knowing they throw them away? Wouldn't it be better if you write three scripts and then shoot each one and be the cameraman, be the sound guy, be everything because that way you're learning not just writing, you're learning how to make a movie. So that was my idea. I'm going to make three of these. Hide it on Spanish video but make money back. That's like my own film school. Pain me. Pain me to learn. So the first one I thought let me just shoot it one take each because my friend Carlos lives in Mexico. If we shoot two takes, most of the cost is to film. I've just doubled my budget. So let me just shoot one take. Some of it's going to not come out but I'm not going to know what I'm not going to shoot a safety one that doubles my, let me, let me see if something's might come out. I expected like 70% of it to maybe be okay but 30% of it might have to come re-shoot. Which is fine. I just drive back there and then I just re-shoot just those shots, right? So I just want to shoot. We stop. We come back. Then I send it off to develop because we're shooting two weeks consecutively to get film shipped back and forth from Mexico to see if it came out. I just couldn't do it. I just had to, you know, double down on it. Do it. One take everything. I remember one time I was still in the actor and I told you to run through that shot and you go, oh, let me do it. No, one take. Just think about next time. Do what I say. I didn't think anyone was going to see it, so you 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. Because if I was making a movie that was going to go to Sundance, I wouldn't have made that movie. I would have thought, okay, I got to get serious. But because I made this movie that is just entertaining myself like bedhead, it entertained audiences. So that naivete is really important when you're starting out or at any point in your life, be naive about what thing's going to and just do something for yourself. That taught me a very valuable lesson because I didn't want anybody to see it. I just thought one take, one take. When I got back home, a bunch of stuff didn't come out, but I'm like, I'm not going back to Mexico. I'll figure out a way to edit around it and make the movie shorter. And that's just going to be the movie. And then that's the one that went one Sundance. That was your first feature film. That's one you made for $7000. You mentioned your friend Carlos, that's the star of the movie, everything one take. And you know, I highly recommend people go back and watch that movie. It's just incredible movie. It's fun. And it's an action film. Movies 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 role. They weren't actors. That's right. Those friends of ours, which is why and because, and this was the magic of not having a crew, they didn't feel like they're making a movie. It's like this, you know, we're just here. Me with my one camera. In fact, the gal Carl said, this one craw for how she's in town. Maybe she would work because we're trying to get a soap star. She backed out. So we got that scallop where she goes, but I don't know how to act. And I said, here, let's watch. I want to show you some on Mexican TV, telling novella was on. And you see someone, you know, all over, over I said, that's acting. I don't want you to do that. I want you to just talk like you're talking. Oh, wait, that the love interest, the woman in that, that's what you're talking about. That's what you're talking about. She's amazing. She's amazing. But because I got a video of her, I said, I want you to just do this one line pretend like you're just talking to your boyfriend. Yeah. And I showed her. I showed her the video. That was cool because I couldn't show her the film because we 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 a closet, this red dress you can wear in that and everyone just brought their own clothes. She really had like a sexuality, attention, like a romantic tension. That was real. Those isn't, it was a, it was in part a great love story that I mean, as ridiculous as it is to say. Yeah. And yeah, like a dramatic love story. Yeah. The idea was that, you know, I thought a guitar player, you know, the real usually what I wanted to do was like road warrior. I said, I'm going to guy with a guitar case for the weapons going from town to town like road warrior. But that don't have enough money for the first one to do that. That'll be the second movie I do. How are 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. So that 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 a million dollars one before. You know, it's like this is the key to your next success cards. Because you know, when you go see a therapist, you're not going to them for the answers. You're going to them for the questions. You got the answers inside which you don't have for the questions. A lot of times we ask ourselves very unempowering questions. Like, why am I such a loser? You know, I can think of 10 answers right now. But if you go, what three things can I do today that will not just change my life but everyone around me take steps to that. Take out your cards. You start writing them down. You won't come up with three. You'll come up with 15. I'm like, wow, because you're asking yourself to and you'll see him. So when I was doing that movie, I thought, okay, he's a guitar player for real. And he gets mixed up with the guy with a case. So how about he walks into a bar. So right there, then he walks into a bar, bar, trying to get work. Bar tender looks at him. We don't hire him. I actually just get that out of here. So he leaves. After that whole scene explaining who he is and what his story is, then the shooter comes in with a guitar case full of weapons. He's also dressed in black and he shoots the place up. Now, that was a short film. That's how you start a short film. But this is a feature movie. So shit, I got to figure out how to tell a feature. I'm going to need a few more cards before that. So I'm going to need, well, who's this bad guy? How about he's in jail? I'd read a story. It's a crazy story about a guy who was in jail, Mexico, and he was running his drug business from the jail. It's protection. You can walk out anytime. But it was to have the cops be as enforced as basically. So introduce that guy. He's in jail, making phone calls. And someone puts a hit on him. So we have action right away. There's a hit on him. He kills those guys because it's his operation. He's not in jail. All the cops are working for him. And he tells that guy on the phone, the main bad guy, I'm going to come to town. I'm going to kill all your guys and I'm going to come kill you. So then he gets in his truck and you see them bring him a guitar case full of weapons. He passes the mariachi on the way to town. And now it's his story. The baton gets turned to mariachi. Mariachi is doing a voiceover. Easy to shoot. We can do the voice later. We don't have to do sing sound. There was even a scene when he walks into town where we saw these coconuts, a guy cutting coconuts and we go, let's go film over there. So we film the guy giving him a coconut with a straw in it and he walks out and I'm like, shit, man, you forgot to pay the guy. Well, let's shoot that. No, one take. I'll just put in the voiceover that they give away free coconuts in this town. And for years, people and other countries would go, they really give away free coconuts because we forgot to show him paint, you know, little happy accents. So now look, you're already building a movie. So it's like, now he goes in the bar. Now he's mixed up and the bad guy says, find the guy with a guitar case full of weapons. Then he goes and meets the girl. So you just start your movie visually. You can start seeing your movie. And I've used this for business things. I've used this for ideas for manifesting stuff. It's really like, are you doing this alone usually or are you coming and it comes so fast? It's like free association. Maybe I have the ending. Oh, I know I want his handshot. He's going to get his handshot because he's a musician and those ballads are always really tragic. So the girl has to die. The girl has to die because it's going to be a tragic song for his songbook. Each movie should be like a tragedy. That's going to be over here. You know, you know, you got the ending and then your brain starts filling in the rest because you're asking yourself, these prompt questions that you already have answers for from a past life, from a vision you had that you don't even know are there. This prompts it. It's kind of a puzzle that you're figuring out. What happens if you get stuck? Like, this doesn't make sense. Like, some aspect of the structure doesn't make sense. It's all there. You won't, yeah, you just start, you just start writing in the ones you do know. Yeah. Like, okay, I know, I know at some point she's going to betray him or he's going to think she does. She betrays him. Okay, that's in the middle somewhere. Uh, the other ones will come. Yeah, those are all like crossroads for the story. Doesn't that? Like, how do you know she has to die? Can that, can you change your mind about that? I can, yeah. But for now, I felt like if I really went, the story's telling me now what it is. I didn't know I was going to make a Genesis story. I wanted to do the road warrior guy, but the road warrior, he lost his family. So really to propel him to become a guy who has a guitar case full of weapons, he has to lose everything. So he needs a ghost. So this is a Genesis story of a character. Well, look, Bruce Wayne lost his parents. You get to say, well, does a parent have to die? Well, no, but it's not going to propel him like, it's not going to drive him like that thing. So it's just, it's just coming to me. So this is my other trick. And this is the main thing you got to learn about. If you take any way, this isn't me doing it. I totally believe it because when you start doing this, you go, where are these answers coming from? I'm asking the right question, but why, how come the answers just keep coming like this? I believe, because I do so many different jobs. I've learned this over years that marijuana wasn't 2002. I was like, how is it that I'm the production designer, the composer, which I don't even know how to read or write music. And I'm writing orchestral score. And I'm doing the editing and I'm doing the cinematography. I haven't been trained for any of these. I never went to school for these specifically must be something about creativity. So I went on Amazon 2002, I look up creative books. I think it has creativity in the title. I just ordered it. And I've got a bunch of books on creativity. And I was reading them through. One of them was like, really speaking to me, yeah, that's, that's it. That's the process. And then it says gels and mediums. And I'm like, Oh, this is a book specifically about painting, but it applies to music, editing, cinematography, writing. It's all the same. So that's when I realized that creativity is 90% of any of those jobs, the technical part of setting up the cameras, of writing that script in format or reading or writing music. That's 10% of that. How many musicians, you know, don't read or write music and they're fantastic. It's because 90% of what they do is creative. Now, I believe that that same person, even if they only do music, could literally jump from job to job creatively and do a superior job than most technicians. 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 then there's all the experts almost talking down to you and telling you how things are supposed to be. Everything is wrong. I talked to somebody about like soundproofing a room and they said, they gave me prices. They're insane. And like the amount of effort is insane. And this, the, the, the, the, I'm telling you something. The dynamics of this room are all wrong. I'm like, why can't I just fucking hang up some curtains? Like what? It seems like that kills most of the echo. Like I don't, I don't understand. And they're like, no, this is all wrong. There's, there's corn. The corners are going to have some, and I'm like, fuck it. I'm just going to try and I see what it sounds like. A and B. Okay. Here's audio with curtains. Here's audio without curtains. It seems like this is fine. It's a move on to the next thing. I think that when you say creativity, some of that is being a rebel, like not listening to the experts. Yeah. Well, you're going on your creativity, which is what is that? That's like an, do you consider yourself a creative person? I think you like a dark guitar piano? Yeah. Guitar piano, yeah. I don't care. Do you could, but would you call yourself a creative person? Yeah. I think so. Good. You should. I think that's a positive way to just anybody is just own it. Own it. And just say, like when I do so many different jobs, it sounds crazy when they would introduce me. He does this, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I was like, I get tired. He's hearing that list. But when I think about it, there's really only one thing I do. And I live a creative life. And when you live a creative life, I mean, anything that has to do with creativity, whether it's filming or piano or guitar or sculpting or you can just, 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 this jobs because when somebody just does one job, they barely know that job. You have to do more to learn about creativity. And this is the main thing I learned was that I'm writing music, you know, for an orchestra. I'm like, how did I, I don't even know what I'm doing. I was like, 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. So this is what my belief is. And because I hear it in different realms, like you ask Keith Regis, how do you come up with these riffs? He goes, I don't, I don't, they're floating around the sky and I pull them out first. You know, yes, I asked, you know, Jim Yvonne, how do you play guitar? The solos goes, it's like a radio. You know, once you get it tuned, just right, you can't even believe what's coming through. So I believe I call it the creative spirit. There's a spirit assigned to all of us. It's creative that doesn't have hands. It needs you to pick up the pen, pull out the cards. And then when you start getting in the flow and you're like, whoa, it's writing. That's that. And if you can have that mindset, you take your ego out of it and go, all I need to do is be a good conduit for this thing, be a good pipe. And it's going to come through. So you don't ever have to get hung up on that question you had, well, well, what happens when you can't come up? It wasn't me to begin with. If it's not coming out, it's because I'm blocking it. And if I were to do this, and I'm flowing and if I were to say, wow, I just wrote 10 cards. I don't know if I can write more. How did I do that? You just shut the pipe because your ego got in the way. You just clogged it because it gets pissed off that you think it's you. It's not you. It's like, dude, just open up. Let me pick up the fucking pen. And I learned this. And when I was 19, when I had a daily cartoon strip, I had to draw a comic strip every day to get paid. And I would be like, I'd have to draw like one drawing, draw another drawing. Then it's like, okay, these kind of go together. It was a process, you know, and sometimes I just felt like I wish I could just envision it. Sit back. I'm going to try that method. I went home and I would sit back and try to get in my sofa, try the sofa method. I'm just going to try to picture the comic strip. And as soon as I got on, I think it's funny. Then I'll just go draw that, right? Don't be done in half hour. Why waste three hours? I'd sit there and sit there and sit there and sit there. My deadline would be coming up. Got like 30 minutes. I'm like, oh, shit. I got to go sit and draw it out. And it's like, okay, I got this drawing. It's kind of, 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 if you're doing this. Yeah. It needs your hands. And it's not going to reward you for sitting there, wait for it. You have to jump in and do it. And people when they say, oh, well, I'm not ready. I'll pissed off, is that spirit? It's waiting for you to feel like you're ready. It's not you. Just start doing the action. And the ideas will come and the answers will come because it's not even if you can take your ego out of like, you'll be blessed with this never ending flow of ideas because don't take ownership for it. And know that you're, if it's not coming out, it's because you're just clogging it because this thing's got endless ideas. And you give that same advice for making films, which is, you know, don't plan. If you want to be a filmmaker, don't plan like the movie don't think about making them would just go in and start. Yeah. I would meet a lot of people who introduced themselves as aspiring. I'm an aspiring filmmaker. And I wonder how, what would you tell an aspiring filmmaker? It's a stop aspiring. Because if you, if you call yourself that, you are that. And you're always going to feel like you're not ready. And you don't, you just jump in before you're ready. You don't feel like you're ready. So I didn't feel like I was ready to do Mario. Actually, I was probably in my last few days of filming. You became ready as you went. You didn't know all that stuff. I couldn't have figured all that out in advance. When my kids worked with me on a project that we did similar by the end, they realized they did an interview with my son who after just two weeks of doing one of those projects, you're a different person. He suddenly waxed and philosophical about the creative processing going, I never knew how my dad did, Mariachi until we did this project together. And I realized he didn't know either. He didn't know I was going to do it. He figured it out day by day. Every challenge that's got the don't had him, he had to figure it out. And that's the biggest lesson. Most people never start. And that's the biggest thing. Don't wait to you ready. Or that'll be on your tombstone. Here lies so and so. He was never ready. And you don't want to be that guy. Jump in. No, it's not you. You just got to be the hands. And that that that relieves a lot of pressure from you. Because then you don't have to ever have to do anything. Really, you just have to be the hands. Can you talk to some of the hats, some of the many hats you wore with the El Mariachi? That's an interesting case study. And you've done the same thing over and over and completely different innovative ways and all the films. But El Mariachi is such a radical leap for you. I was crazy. I was stuck things held together with Scotch tape and rubber bands because of the camera I borrowed. You directed. You did cinematography. You did the sound. It's better to just say what I didn't do. I didn't act in front of the camera. Everything else I did. Everything else. I was the whole crew. It's just like you're doing here, except you've got sound recording right onto the cameras, right? Or do you have it to the system? Separately, but it's synced. I mean, it's all the model. I didn't have sync camera. So I had a camera there. Yep. It was not it was not a sync camera. And the thing was it was so loud, I would have had to blimp the shit out of it. I didn't have a blimp. And then I would have needed a sound guy. Just to be clear, so if people don't understand this, you're shooting basically no sound. Because the camera sounds like this. It sounds like all your money is going away first of all. So I would go like this action. You start running. Yeah. And I shoot my edit. Cut. Yep. You know, they were still running. You know, like I'm only using this part. And there's no slates. There's no nut. There's there's guys holding up their fingers at the beginning of roll. Like this is real seven for just a few frames. So I know which real it is. And then that 10 minutes of film is just one shot after another. And I use almost every frame of those shots because I was cutting in the camera. Now, after I shoot like, let's say, you know, tell me your name. Lex. What's your last name? Friedman. Where do you live? Austin, Texas. I would do the whole scene, then I would get the sound, bring the mic and close like that. Say it again, looks. Friedman, Austin, Texas. - That'll probably sink. Now, if you were going on and on, there's a place where it'd go out of sync. I hate rubbery lips, so I would cut away to the dog, or to the knife, or to the girl, and then I'd cut back when you were back in sync. And since these were non-actors, they'd say everything the same way each time. They would say their line, just like they weren't, they weren't performing it to where they didn't remember how they performed the thing before, they were just talking in their own rhythm. So a lot of the times it'd sink. Any time you see anyone on camera talking, they're in sync with themselves. And as soon as it cuts away, they're out of sync. And it created this really fast cutting style that I probably wouldn't have had on such a low-budget movie, but it was the only way to keep things in sync. So when I would shoot two people talking, I would make sure I'd film a couple shots of like the dog, or a stuffed cat, or something, just so I'd have something to cut away to to get them back in sync. - That's so good. - But it's fatt of color is just resourceful. - It's just being very resourceful. - You allow it to get maybe a little bit out of sync sometimes. - I didn't allow it, but oh yeah, I would let it if I just didn't have a way to cut away. And I would try to think it is best I could. - But we as the audience, like do you understand where the threshold is, where we notice something? - Yeah, it seems like you can get away with a lot. - You can get away with, I'm just particular about that. I just don't like seeing a dub movie where it just feels canned. It makes you not believe in it anymore. So I just cut away where the lips are just way off. I just didn't want any of that. I just felt like, I wanted it to just be believable and they could be really believable there in sync. But I didn't shoot two takes of film, or even two takes of audio, just one take. We just went through, and what's cool is that because I just had him go through the whole scene again. So I would go ahead and record them like grabbing the bottle or any action they did, opening the suitcase. I have all the sound effects too. I just had to sync it by hand. That's a lot of work for me, but I got great sound that way. 'Cause if I had had a sync camera, the mic would have been so far, we would have had to go get new sound effects. But because the camera's off, I could record everything close up. So there was some blessing to that. - You and Quentin Terrentino had a great conversation about a lot of topics. But one of them is how to bring out the best in the actors. Like what in that "Emory" actually? How do you bring out the best in these non-actors? And then maybe what's the thread that connects to your future work too? - What really helped for those non-actors was that they just look across and it's me filming. They didn't feel like they're, so they're being so natural. And I think I who played the bad guy, I met him in the research hospital where I was sold my body to science. He was my bunk mate. And I said, "Dude, you look kind of like Rudger Hauer." And then it's like, "We saw another movie." "Man, you look like James Spader. "Shit, you should be the bad guy in my movie." And it'd be cool to have you as the bad guy. He goes, "But I don't speak Spanish." So that's okay, all right. And I'll teach you it phonetically. And you're gonna wear sunglasses. And if you look close, he's holding the lines here and he's looking at the lines like that. And just smiling. So can't believe he was getting away with this. He's smiling and he's got the sunglasses on. - I read that somewhere in the pool. There's a casino in the pool. He's like, "Oh no, no, no, no." - With the sunglasses on, with the, oh man. But when he was doing it phonetically, and I tell you what, he was so great that guy, right? - Yeah. - When we do this, Bruno, I brought him back. Didn't even have to do any dialogue. Watch that movie, when he shows up in the opening scene when Desperado, he's playing the guitar and they open with the credits. To tie it into the first movie, he shows up again. And all he has to do is light a cigarette. And you see this. 'Cause he's so nervous, 'cause 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. So how do you recreate that later on a big movie? Is just building a report, making a safe zone for your actors. Quentin once told me, sometimes being, we're talking about directing. You say sometimes being a great director, it's just being a great audience. You know, being a great audience for them. 'Cause 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 gonna enjoy it. Or if your, you know, makes you cry. You know, so sometimes you just, you don't have to tell them a lot sometimes. And if you do have something very specific to tell them, they usually, you know, go with it. But I always just like to see what they do. And a lot of times they just are in the zone. 'Cause again, they're getting that flow too. You create the right environment. Everyone's getting this inspiration. But it's all tied together that you never could have directed. It's just like you just create that space where we're all gonna be open to it. And it's gonna drop in our lap. And I'm gonna 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 in the more important part. That's the part we're gonna discover. And when it happens, I'm gonna point it out and it's gonna be like magic. And we're just gonna go, okay, we're accepting it. And we do it. And it gets people in that kind of head space. And then we're all open to it to where the character's supposed to go. What it's supposed to sound like. Instead of me being very, you know, manipulated to get a certain thing. I don't know, it's just, whenever it feels good. - Yeah, there's such an intimate connection between the actor and the director. I've seen some of the behind-the-scenes footage with you. You are just a fan enjoying the scene when it's done well. But I think there's an aspect if I were to put myself in the head space of the actor, they won't use the audience like to earn that happiness, you know, 'cause when a director approves, well you're a performer and you want, and there's no other, you know, it's not like a live show where you get the approval of the audience and you're like, oh, wow, they like that joke. I mean, do more, you know, really the director is it? And a lot of times the director's way behind him on it or somewhere. That's why I still like to operate the camera. 'Cause when I'm operating the camera, it's like this. We can have a hundred people here, we wouldn't know. Because they go away, it's just us. They just disappear. When it's the camera guy, it's the director. And we're going to do that again, city. There's a shot and I'm lighting since the city and myself, there's about my crew setting lights and I have this great shot of Clive Owen, where he's holding down Benicio's head and the toilet. You know, Benicio's not there, it's just a close-up of him at this point. And I'm practicing my shot. I'm zooming and slowing his face. And people are still walking behind him on the green screen setting lights. And I'm like, I'm rolling, we're ready to go. We're getting this. I can already tell, we're already in the moment. What you're doing right now, just keep holding that look. Now, one jolt, like he's starting to fight back, but you don't even flinch. Cut. Never mind, you guys can stop moving. That's you've already got a holy shit. It's like that. Wow. Wow. That's a great scene, by the way. Great, right? And it's only shit. If I wait for these guys, this moment will be gone. And then another one was Mickey Rourke. He had so much freaking dialogue. He had just done this whole big dialogue scene. He had another one that said, let's go ahead and start with a wide shot. We're at the two actor. I'm the camera, you know, Mickey and Elijah are here. Let's get a two shot, and we'll come around on Mickey close up. We don't, we'll turn Mickey around for the close up. Let's start with the wide thing, get used to the lines, and most of it's going to be sold in close up. We sit down, Mickey starts delivering the take. I'm like, hold on, hold a second. I brought my camera over. Zoom in. Just adjust that light real quick, because I'm the DP. Because if I had another director of photography, they'd be like, oh, no, no, we have to relay it and all this stuff. It's like, no, no, let's just do this, let's go. He's doing it right now. And I go, and that performance is just right then. So you can feel that when you're also you're operating and you're the camera guy and you're the DP. It's like high tech, real a filmmaking. Yeah, we're on a green screen, but it's like, all the crew needs are, you know, marching orders. Just put a light back there, hitting them harder. Like, that's a, this is a 5K make that a 10K. It's gotta be stronger. They don't need to know that I'm gonna make that a lamp post later. They just need marching orders for the moment. So I can just kind of tell people, do this, do this, do that. And then I know what I can accomplish with the actor and then everything else falls into place later 'cause I'm gonna put all that in later. You know, things, once you know how to do a lot of jobs like that, you can just move at the speed of thought, which is where the actors love being creatively. 'Cause they, nobody knew what green screen was back then. They're like, what is this again? So I explained it as, well, it's kind of like doing theater, but instead of a black curtain behind you with a prop, it'll be a green curtain. And you might just have a cup or just a steering wheel, but it's just you and the other actors, just like this. 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? And the more it was so fun to do those kind of moves. To this day, you try to be close to the action connected with the actor that's important. 'Cause it's like a dance, you end up that's so-- Like to hear. I remember on Dustel Dunn, Michael Parks in the opening scene he's talking about, the two guys that are running around killing people just before he gets shot. And I just start doing the slow zoom. I remember this take eight. Start doing the slow zoom on him. And I'm like, I hope I get all the way up to where it's stop zooming when he finishes that speech. 'Cause there's no set way, and I don't know how I was gonna say, but you're just locked almost telepathically. And it has these deliveries, there's no edits. He's just going, yeah, they killed four angels. Two hostages. It's just like, wow, and you're just so pulled in. I'm just like, oh my God, and then it stopped. It's like I ran out of zoom right as he finished that speech. So how can a director, 'cause there's a lot of great directors that stay in the-- - In the back, I don't know, it's in the back of the bathroom. - They just trust that whatever they get from their crew, they just accept it. Just like, you know, you would get to take the-- - There's so much information. - 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 gonna know. You have to feel it. You have to be in there. It's like a dance. It's like trying to do a dance with a partner in your across the room. You know, it's like, no, you gotta be there up close, feeling the energy, and it's the creative spirit's whispering to your both. You know, it's not your own ideas. You're capturing a moment that's magic. And this true magic that happens on a set, and that's what brings you back. 'Cause you know, I didn't direct that. And they didn't act that. That came through us, and we just had the cameras rolling, and we captured a ghost. - Just like you said, though, yeah, - The pen and hand and the new one. You were there. - It's like that. - It's crazy. - It's crazy. - All right, your friendship with Tarantino is just fascinating. And just the whole timeline of the history of movies and the two of you collided and met is just a fascinating part of the story. You first met him in 1992 with the Toronto Film Festival. Can you just talk about meeting Tarantino and-- - We both had films at the same time with first films, guys in black, action violence. In fact, I had seen his movie already. My first film festival was a few months before that. The Telluride Film Festival and Dreservoir Dogs was there, but Quentin couldn't be there. He was at Sundance earlier that year. And the guy who became my agent, he saw it. He said, "Hey, you don't like this guy, Quentin Tarantino. I told him about you. You're going to meet him. He's going to be in Toronto." Oh, cool, cool. And so I went ahead and saw his movie in Telluride. And I was like, "Oh, shit, this guy's in black." Again, just like the mariachi's dressed in black and action. And I said, "Oh, we're going to like each other. He's going to like me when he sees me." So then in Toronto, we met, and we met first on, 'cause I knew I was going to be doing a panel discussion with him. They asked us to do a panel discussion about violence and movies in the '90s, even though it was only '92. So we're on a panel together. And that's where I met him. And he's like, "Hey, Robert, you're Asian, don't mean a bunch." And I was like, "Yeah, I saw your movie Dreservoir Dogs." And he goes, "Oh, where you got to come to my screening?" And I'm going to come see yours. So he came to Mariachi and I videotape the audience reactions because they were insane, insane reactions to it. But I have the first screening he saw of Mariachi sitting next to me, laughing, he's laughing at everything. He was just the best today. So I have his recording of the first time he saw Mariachi. - Oh, no, really? - Yeah. 'Cause I tape it all so cool. - He's so loud 'cause he's right next to me. - Well, just like you, but he would 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. So he loves, but the actors did. And it's like, that's the kind of energy you really love. But I tell you what happened. I'm not a very shy person, very shy, I'd have to go talk. I'm sure you probably feel like you're not an orator or anything. Just have to go do it. I thought, well, man, I'm going to have to introduce my film and talk about it afterwards. I'm afraid of that. What am I going to do? I don't know how to talk in front of more than five people before. So I went to see this other movie and it was good. And I was watching and then the director comes up at the end and goes, yeah, well, that was my movie. And I'm, you know, he was the writer. And he's like, I don't like the movie anymore. It's kind of a dick. So I cannot do that. I'm going to have to go be who they imagined made that movie. So I wrote out my whole intro. It was like a 20 minute intro. There's no one had ever heard of anybody making a movie for no money, much less about a crew, much less. You know, the way I did it was just very new. Nobody knew it was possible. So my whole intro is like, you'll see the Columbia logo slapped in front. It's probably cost more than the whole movie. And then I go through. This is how I made it with a wheelchair for a dolly eternal. You know, I wrote around things I had. I mentioned the turtle, the pit bull, the bus, the ranch, all that stuff, right? So then when they see the movie, in fact, my wife was in the audience, she said in Sundance, people were laughing so much at your intro. They just wanted a year's story like this, so badly. I heard someone next to me say, I'm going to vote for his movie. I hadn't even seen the movie. Just because the story was so good, they wanted that movie to be great. And when they see the turtle, big cheers. When they see the pit bull, big cheers. When they see the school bus, cheers. But then when they see how we use it, and he slams into it and falls in it, they freaking lose their minds. Because they know how I put it together. They know that the rubber bands and the popsicle sticks, 'cause I already set it up. And so that's why that audience, I just taped the reaction. They're so with it. The context is so key. Like you can watch Mariachi and go, "Hey, yeah, this looks like a $7,000 movie." But if you know the story behind it, suddenly, I was curious, I hadn't seen it in a long time. I was watching it for the 20th anniversary we did a screening. And the first few shots come up and I'm like, "Oh yeah, well, it looks like a $7,000 movie." And then it keeps going. And it's in the, once we're in the jail cell and the shooting's happening and I realized, "Oh my God, we had these blanks that only fired one shot into a jam." So I had to show it going, use the sound effect, cut to the other guy, cut back, to have another one go. I had to do these editing tricks to make it look like and then repeat a few frames, so it goes, so it looks like a machine gun. All these stuff that I'm starting sweating is I'm watching it going, I can't believe I made this movie with that freaking camera. I don't know how I did. I couldn't even see. I'm there with this long lens pulling my own focus. When I finally had to do a real movie, I was operating the camera in my first real movie with a crew and I get the camera and a guy comes over and he focuses for you. That's your job, you focus? Should I have to do my own focusing on the last movie? I didn't have so hard, you're trying to focus on a guy while you're filming, you don't know where you are. And it's just, I couldn't believe how much easier it is when you have a crew. It's extremely valuable to know that the pain of that, the spectrum of creativity that's allowed within that, even just the focusing, like how focusing fucks up on older cameras, on newer cameras, what are the different artifacts that come up just to know the battlefields? In order to be a great general, you have to know how to be a soldier on the battlefields. Yeah, yeah, it's good to know all that stuff, but you know, it's like the end of the day, you could shoot something on a phone and if you have a great story, no one's gonna even notice, I'll be, oh, we shut that on a phone and it looks, you know, so sometimes people get cut off, I know, what kind of camera should I have? It's not the camera. That's just the tool, that's just the pen. That's just like, yeah, you can have different paint brushes, but you can go, I'm gonna, I'm gonna limit my palette. I'm only gonna use a fan brush and a detail brush and I'm gonna make a painting. Do you think that painting's gonna suffer? No, it's gonna take on an identity that you wouldn't have had if you had all the other tools. So sometimes the limitations help you, because when you can do anything, you come, that can be crippling. When I knew I could only use those things from mariachi, it's like, all right, well, it's very, it's very simple now. Let me show you how cheap skate I was. Like I did not spend on anything. So when you see him walking around with a guitar case, it's a shitty cardboard one, you know, like I got from home. I had to get a heavier one to put the guns in. So we borrowed one, but it had this material ripped off the top so you could see the wood. It's just the wood on top. So it didn't match the other one because it wasn't all black. And I was too cheap to paint it black. I didn't even want to spend money on paint. So you see that cardboard case, he puts it down. And when he goes to open it, I cut to the other one. Once the wood is, is watch the edits, you'll see it open. Now it's a completely different case for the guns. And when he goes to cut it, we can close it. It cuts to the other one and he goes out. That's how I did that whole movie. Again, it was a practice film. I don't want to waste any money on it. I don't know if it's going to be able to, I won't be able to make five bucks from it. Yeah, but you're one of the, one of the few great directors where both the movies, genius and the process of making it is creative genius. It's like, fun to watch both, to know of both. You know what I believe. Right. It's like from somewhere else. I have to say that thing is freaking, I didn't get in its way. This basically would help. And people say that, you know, don't get in your own way. This is a little bit easier to understand. It's like, keep the pipe clear. Don't block it with your ego. Don't say, you're 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 if you begin with, except 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. 'Cause sometimes they start to towing around as an artist going like, oh shit, now it's my second film. My first one didn't 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 were in a hesitant like that. You were just, so try to keep that very naive. And that's why I say commit to a body of work. 'Cause I know a lot of filmmakers get stuck on their second one and then go further because they get crippled by the success of the first one. And they start asking, oh shit, how did I do that? How can I do that again? And you get deeper and deeper in a hole you can't get out of. - I think you've spoken about the filmmakers, especially early on in their journey, critics and the audience can destroy them. Meaning like it creates too much of a burden, too much. Just wear them down to where they're almost scared to be creative. And you just speak to that how to ignore the critic. - I'll tell you something that my best advice ever got. Very early on, it was so fortunate. From an unlikely place. 'Cause he said, he sounded like Clint Eastwood when he said, it was funny when you said that, it was fun. But I got, it did Desperado in Antonio Benditas. I brought Antonio to be in it from Europe. Big action movie. And so Spielberg saw it and he said, hey, I want you to do Zorro with Antonio. So we're working on it for a while, I did. I was working on the pre-production. I got to work with Spielberg during that. It ended up stalling me as there was like two studios and while the ambulance was moving or it was some weird thing where, but I got to work with him for about five months to him. And I started getting really nervous 'cause it's like, oh shit, you start thinking about, even movies of his that people would say, oh, you know, Temple of Doom sounds as good as Raiders. Try anything Temple of Doom. And I could kill the fucking do that movie. If I could make Zorro as good as that one, the one that people said it. It's like people don't know how good they had it with that guy. But I started thinking, I even said, man, I just rewatch Temple of Doom last night. I don't know how I'm gonna do this Zorro, but he's like, I'm just never done anything like that. You start getting, you know, afraid 'cause you go, the second thing, he said, oh, you're gonna do fun. But then I started thinking this guy at that time, be nice. know the era but this was like mid-90s. He was making the biggest, best movies of all and people would shit all over this guy. They would throw something like that. They were so jealous, press, audience. Everyone was just like, "Hit set them up. Just throw in rocks at them for everything." Yeah, you can't imagine it now. You had to been at that time. Now everyone has respect for him but they made him run a fucking gauntlet and they were like, "Dracick, par, man, you can't imagine it now, but you should have seen the climate. It freaked me out because I'm like, maybe I should just stay under the radar or not poke my head out so much because this guy has the head out and they're unwarranted. You can't even fathom it now because you weren't here at that time. It was crazy. You would never even think of him that way. I'm glad it changed because back then it was just, it made people not want to be successful. And I made me be worried. Like, maybe I shouldn't be going making a movie with the asses name on it that's going to put my head out in a whole different realm of filmmaking at a studio level because even if I make a good movie, if I make a great movie, he's making great movies. He's getting this dog shit. I don't know if I could take it, you know? So I asked him, because you don't know how resilient you can be. So I said, "You am in pain. How do you do it? How do you? What do you do when people just throw rocks at you all day long?" He goes, "Oh, Robert, you just don't blink." And I was like, "Whoa!" Now I see how he got through it. Just don't blink. Just like, "Pah, pah, pah, pah." You know what's coming? Don't blink. And to him say, it's like a Clint Eastwood line, right? But it was like, you could see he was telling the truth and you could see that's how he did it. He just avoided all criticism by just not blinking. It's like it's designed to make you blink and you're just not 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. And that was like the most, and it never bothered me again. I just like always kept in mind, I tell that to my actors. I tell that people that story has traveled. I even had some little actors who were like starting to get up. And I said, "Remember, tell you a couple of things. Some people have told me, you're never as good as people say you are. And you're never as bad either." So I just cleaned it all out. I said, "Remember that." And then the second one, Spielberg, don't blink. Don't blink. But there has to be a kind of vision for yourself of what you're reaching for, what you're trying to do. Again, yeah, sort of, I think if you just told me what would be my vision for the future, just committing to a body of work, which I've just kept doing. It's about as far as you can see. Do you have a sense? Do you have a vision of the body of work you'll make in the next 20 years? Or is it just as far? I did. I wasn't sure. Because you don't always know with it. You might not have the vision yet because you don't have the information yet. So if you just commit to a body of work, you'll start figuring out more reasons to keep doing that body of work. So when I turned 50, I was like, "I guess I could just keep making movies." I mean, I guess it's been good for me. I guess I could just make more. I kind of done that already, but it's always fun and it's always new. I guess I could make more. But it wasn't a lot of drive, right? It's just like, I guess I could just keep doing the body. That's not as much as I can't wait to keep doing it. But I didn't know how to get to that point. So I said, "You know what? I got at this job so early. I wasn't in the 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 up and I didn't believe it, but I literally bought jobs for dummies. Nice. I was just like, "I don't even know what I do have a basic job doing out there." Turn to the page. "Oh, yeah. Don't want that job. Don't want that job. Don't want that job. Just going through." And it gets to filmmaker. There's a little icon for telling these jobs. This icon is a guy like this. Literally, you look it up and it says, "This is the best job ever. You get to just be creative with your friends, sit back, watch the money roll in, cross the desk." And I said, "But 99% of film students don't get this job, so give up that dream." So I was like, "I guess I got the best job." But then I started working with my kids when we did a. I had a TV show called Rebel Without a Crew based on that, right? I found filmmakers, so it only made a short film. They hadn't made a feature. I picked this diverse group of filmmakers, gave them $7,000 and we documented them making a feature two weeks like I did. You can bring one person, like I had Carlos Guy out of the producer and star Barriachi, bring one person, maybe your cameraman, maybe your sound guy, whatever. But it's only that for the shoot and you'd have to do the whole thing. And I saw those guys by the time they're like, "I don't know how we're going to make this movie." By the first week of shooting, they're already talking about their next feature. They became so confident because their idea of what impossible is drops really quick when you do that. Yeah. Anyone interested in unlocking their creativities? They're not even just filmmaking. I highly recommend that show. And I highly recommend the kind of the follow-on show, which is where you make Red 11. Yeah, so that's the one I did. So then it came time for me to do one. So I made a movie called Red 11 based on my experiences in the medical hospital. But I'll turn it into a sci-fi thriller just to use that so that I can use like somebody getting stabbed in the eye. So I'm going to have more elements to show how you can do camera tricks and stuff with no money. And the old days make it for less than $7,000, which I think we're like $5,000. Many because you had a lot of actors I wanted to pay. But the movies itself can make it for nothing. But I brought my son aboard as my number one who hadn't been working with me in a while. I mean, he wrote Chuck Boyn Lovergo when he was seven, but then he hadn't really been at working on my crew. So he didn't know how to operate the sound equipment, the separate sound system and all that. I didn't show him until the day of filming because I knew we were documenting it would make a better tutorial. So by getting them working on the movies together, they came to be super excited by end of the day. I thought for sure, oh, they're going to hate this. Even though it's only two weeks, they've got other interests. Then I want to be filmmakers. I thought they were going to be like, all right, I'm out of here. After one day, but instead he came to me and his brother who acted in it. Ain't my dad. The actor didn't show up after the first day. The location didn't match the script at all. We asked you how we're going to solve the problems and you're like, I don't know, figure it out. We thought, that's stumped for once. He's stumped finally, but they might be in the day. His eyes were all white. We figured it out. They went, oh, they don't realize this is the creative process every day. He's like that. And in life too, every day, you don't know your machine's going to not work or you're going to get a flat tire or a fire that day. So life is very unpredictable, just like a movie set. So I realized, I'm going to make them work on my movies now because it's teaching them about life. I'm teaching them very little about the filmmaking. It's about life lessons about how you take on something impossible, turn chicken shit to chicken salad and make it work. And that's the story. That's life. That's the process of life. So many people say, well, I'm not ready to make my projects like, you're not ready for life either. You're like this all day. You're your dodging shit that's going on. How come art has to be perfect? It's like it should be the same. Life and art should be the same. And I think filmmaking in general is full of unpredictable things. And in a short little microcosm too, within one project, you've got a whole blueprint for how you're 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. And so like, there's so many ways to fuck things up to learn from but fuck any of the disciplines. If you add those to it, like I teach my actors to paint in between takes. We'll go and we'll take a picture of them and character. I show them a canvas. I show them paint. You don't need to know how to paint. This is to show you the brush is going to know where to go. You just got to pick it up. Pick the colors you want, no matter how crazy they are, whatever speaking to you. You lay it down. I'll show you some of the pictures. You're not going to believe the master works these actors did like in a day. They just start doing it. Lady Gaga had her fingernails in there. You know, Josh Brolin's doing this thing. I take a picture of them and character do a line drawing of it. We project it on top. And mostly it's the painting coming through. They're line drawing with a little bit of their ice painted in. You're not going to believe these things. They couldn't believe it. But it teaches them that that thing about that the creative duties income through. So even though they're already acting, they're already being creative. We're already making a movie. Like you said, that's already a really great creative endeavor. When we would sneak off and paint, you could tell it's firing a whole other part of their brain. It was funny. I think Josh Brolin's girlfriend said, Josh said, Hey, my girlfriend just said, she said, his wife now, but at the time, are you guys doing drugs? You leave the set and you come back and you're all like, no, we're painting. We're painting. But that makes sense as you say that because when you get your creativity, firing is more powerful than any drug. And we would come back and he'd be on the set going, he said, "Bathard, I'm still thinking about the painting." No, I think it's good. I think it's all good. But you can tell us opening a whole other part of the creative brain. So you can be doing acting in a movie. And the painting's still going to tell us just how much untapped potential your creative brain has. So the more you can do, the more you're firing off them, and it was so cool, like I'd remember we did one with Joseph Gore and Levitt was painting. We came in and the table was like this. And they said, we have a problem. You want them to throw the cards out, the playing cards out, but it's so slick they go sliding off the table. We both look at it and we both got the solution at the same time. Oh, we just just haven't just haven't thrown them wherever they go. And then we'll play some and then digitally it's even better that he looks like he gets them all perfectly laid out to show what a card shark is. That's what we have to do. We're not going to, we can't put here all day, we're trying to get, if we're going to worry about where they go, just go, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And then we'll place the cards down and everyone will pick them up. and then we'll marry the two in post. You just come up with creative solutions better, easier because you were just solving crazy creative solutions in the other one like, "What paint meet him do I use? What kind of gel am I going to use?" So when you come back to your main job, which is filmmaking, you're like, "Oh, I can't figure this out in two seconds." So it helps you create a problem solve. So that's basically 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 on the age I was when I made Mariachi and Desperado." And their ideas are really sharp. So the mentoring goes both ways and it's like the greatest parenting you can do because you're building a project together and in the same boat together figuring it out. And it's family time, you're like checking all the boxes. So I thought my filmmaking going forward is going to be checking all the boxes in life. So I'm not spending time with my family. We're actually giving them lessons that they can go do anything they want in their life because they're going to have different interests. But now it's kind of like going to college. And this college is like the best college because it pays you to learn. You get to do these crazy skills. Like my son is, you know, conducting the orchestra, the James Bond orchestra in London for the Spy Kids score, the score he wrote, because I can't write at his level because he was always our best piano player. And they get, you get the charge out of working with them. And then by making a label, there's a weird phenomenon that happens. You guys want to take your game to another level, I stumbled upon this idea. My son that was my counterpart on that movie, racer, he was my sound guy. Like I said, came up with a short part of Lava growing these little, he became my writer, co writer, co producer. He had come to me and said, I want to do VR type movie. And I said, oh, let me show you as an example of creativity and manifesting. And so let me show you how it works. Let's let's make a company. We'll make a company called double R, double R productions, because we all have a double R names, all the kids. So if anyone ever wants to do anything, we can use our company. So let's make a logo. And I'll make t-shirts and notepads and stuff. Because once you have a company, you have now have to make things for that company. Just like the advice I gave to people, stop aspiring, make a business card that says writer, director, cinematographer, I did editor, because then now you have to conform to that identity. So now if I create a label like double R, we're going to come up with ideas. We'll call up VR companies and say, hey, we have a company, a VR company. Would you like us to make you a film for your soul, your headset? So yeah, they gave us a budget. They're dying for content. They gave us a budget. We shot a 20 minute action movie called The Limit with Michelle Rodriguez and Norman Reedus, where you're in an action movie with them. And it was killer. They made us a big double R logo animated logo. Later that year, we did Red 11, same logo. That movie went to directors Fortnite and Cannes. Festivals were paying us to come talk about how we made that movie. That's when we're doing the cards, throwing the cards out because they wanted their audiences. They knew they would love that. So we could have had a whole gig just continuing to get paid to go to the fed. Usually paid to the feds go to the feds. You don't get paid. That's how what a success that was. But then we had to make we can be heroes. So we had to stop. But we can be heroes was a Netflix movie where they asked me to make a spy kids type thing. And so I thought, Oh, okay, I'll just do it with super heroes. That's there. I wrote it with my kids based on some of their personalities. It's the most watched and rewatched movie in Netflix history. Like nothing in touch. Because kids just keep watching it over because this kids was super proud. No one's ever done that before. And they couldn't believe it. Like I'd hurt anecdotally. That's how the spy kids. People said, Oh, that kids watch it over and over on video. But you can't keep track of that. You can't on Netflix because their biggest thing is people completing the movie. A lot of people don't complete a movie and it still counts as a view. They may watch five minutes and change the channel. So do you complete a movie? That's really where they, you know, really value not only a bit of complete, but rewatched, rewatched, rewatched, rewatched, per household so many times. And that one has a double R logo as well. And my kids are like, dad really worked. I was like, I know better than I thought. I didn't know. I didn't know that me manifesting that company was going to turn into that. And we've just keep making stuff. So I want to do that with brass knuckle films now with the audience because it works. So I said, as soon as you have a logo and a company, your brain starts coming up with all kinds of ideas. And it's a filter. Like, like I said, sometimes the freedom of limitations is all freeing. When I had to do four rooms and it's like, we have to use one hotel room. Oh, then there's going to be a dead body. There's going to be you can do a lot with limitations. They said you could use the whole city. We've been harder to come up with something. What brass knuckle films has a filter only action action movies because that's the stuff that there's always an appetite for. If you ask Netflix right now, what do you need more of? They'll say action action action. We don't have enough action. The last regime didn't leave us enough action. We need action. They'll pay a premium for an action film that we can make at a lower cost. A $20 million action film is very cheap. Studios don't know how to make them that cheap. That's why they'll pay for an independent to go do it. And right now, that's the key is to be independent because a lot of studios that can't even greenlight anything because things are so expensive. They don't want to lose their ass. But they need action films. So let's make something that everybody needs. And let's make it at a price. We'll make it in my studio because I am my own studio and I can keep all the costs down because we have all the costumes and props and sets from 25 years of filmmaking to keep the costs down. And we'll have the audience gets to invest. It's not crowdfunding or kickstarter. You're actually an investor. Anyone who puts money in can pitch their idea for an action film to me. And I'm going to make one of the four films in that slate from one of those ideas because I want the audience to win. I want the audience to win and be a part of it because the audience is an afterthought in Hollywood. They make a movie. They show the audience the movie. Go tell your friends now. So y'all spend money on our movie. What was your cut of that? So I want them to be successful. So if any of the movies in the slate do well. They make money off that one and then sequels or anything. But they're all going to do well because everyone needs an action movie or we're going to keep the cost down. Can I actually ask you just to focus in on action. You've created a lot of epic action films. What makes for a great action film? It comes down to the character. You know, like if you think about one of the best action films, one of your favorite films like die hard. He's a cop so he's still capable but he's not Superman. The fact that he's like in over his head and you're rooting for him. That's a great character. You know, John Wick. He is Superman but he's retired and now he's pissed off and he's going back into a job. You know, so the car is comes down to the character really being very important because the action will then have a character to it. I think Leon the professional. It doesn't work. That's all about the character. Now that when I say we're going to action movies, I mean movies that are really action first. Like there's some movies that are more dramas that have action. Where's the boundary? So John Wick is action. That's more action but it has character in it but it's action driven. What about like predator? Predator is the sci-fi action films. That's kind of a hybrid which I like but sometimes it's hard for the audience to know what they're buying into. Like they focused a lot on the action and the trailer, you know, and then they felt there was some otherworldly thing which you didn't really know but it's a great movie. So die hard is a good example. It was a good example right. I think I've right off where there's a character that really made the difference and then everyone repeated that. You know, for a while there's like under siege. I was like a regular guy who's really actually has some training on a ship now. And then on the bus you got a cop. He's a cop but he's not super cop. So that's why you root for him. You know, that became an element that people repeated a lot. What about taking? That's a great one. That's a great character who is super human who's also retired. You know, so there's like a superhero type character in an extraordinary circumstance. Like that's now his daughter's taken right. And then there's ordinary people like the terminator. Not the terminator. He's a villain but Sarah Connor who is a waitress doesn't think her life's going anywhere and 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. You know, suddenly she has to become someone else. Those are cool movies because it's a genesis of a character and you see a character go from waitress to revolution and you step up. Yeah. What about mob movies? I mean, some of them like godfather's really not about is not action movie drama that has some action. Right. I mean, John Wake is a mob film in some sense. Good fellows. I mean, there's a lot dynamic action but there's really not action first. That's really a character type piece. Okay. Great. Really amazing. And it feels like action. By the way, he does it. It's just like that. It's like fast pace, fast talk and fast movie like escape from New York. One of my favorites since I was a kid because every movie you'll notice this now that I tell you even like a romantic comedy. There's a timeline. Every movie has to have like a ticking clock. So the audience knows this story is not just going to take over a period of years. Though 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. You know, it'll be just like that. Escape in New York has the best example of a ticking time clock because he's literally got bombs in his neck and he's got a watch that shows him. He's constantly clocking it. How little time he is and he gets you so like, oh my god, is he going to make it? That's like the best use of that and no one's ever top that ticking time clock. All the other ones seem artificial in comparison. Aliens, we got to get off this planet now because this whole thing's going to blow up. There's a timeline. It's already urgent, but now there's an extra timeline on it. This is what happens. As you're talking, you're just making me fall in love more and more with action films. I sometimes forget how much you love it. a really good action film. Yeah. In fact, like the Terminator. The original Terminator just came out in 4k. I'm going to watch it again. It looks like better than most movies look today. And that's a $4 million movie. It looks incredible. You can see every beat of sweat in this movie. I was watching it again with somebody, a female. And there's always a point when you're watching that movie where she'll turn and say, "I love this movie." You know, a point that is the point where Michael Bean tells her, "I came across time for you, Sarah. I love you." Which is, you know, I always have. And you're just like, "Oh my God, there's like a real emotional love story there that he put into Titanic, that he put into Avatar." He figured out that thing that makes those movies work. By the way, I should say that. I mean, there is an aspect of El Mirachi that is the love story. To me, it was a rough story. I don't know if you see it that way, but I got it. Yeah. Yeah. Just rewatched it. I was like a tragic love story. I was like heartbroken that she's dead. I got heartbroken twice. Let me tell you the second time in a moment. One, that you're making that and you go, "Okay, this is how it has to go." But then now you're invested in this person. You go, "Oh my, she has to die. It's going to be really sad." In fact, the studio even, when they said they were going to remake it, a 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, said, "We need to show this movie to an audience because they might not like the fact that we killed a girl before we make it." All right. The show to an audience liked it the way it was. 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." They go, "No, no. You got something. No, no, no. If I knew anyone was going to see this, I would have shot it completely. Give me $2,000. I'll go re-shoot half of it. Just knowing people are going to see it. I want something." The head of the studio is really smart. He said, "You don't know what you have here. It's very something real special. Let's just take it and tell you where I'd see what happened. Tell you right. Toronto did great." He said, "No one's sending it. So now we had to put it out." I was like, "I would have said don't show that movie." They also questioned the ending and didn't come into play because we ended up making Desperado. The girl in Desperado doesn't die. We didn't do that. We didn't kill Sama, but that's what needed to happen to Murray Hatch. I'm quitting, calling me one time. People would always say, "Rest of our dogs, he borrowed from this movie. Hong Kong actually called the city on fire. Not these guys. They're all criminals and they kill each other with her." He said, "Hey, they're showing a double feature called East Looks West and West Looks East. They're showing reservoir dogs with city on fire the one they say I part from." They're showing Mariachi with a Hong Kong film called Run where they ripped off Mariachi. They just took the whole story. It had two Chinese actors in Mexico with the guitar cases. They just followed it beat by beat. They were watching it and it was like seen by scene. They just rebated without getting the rights or anything. It was so fun to watch. We saw Mariachi first and we watched that one. I'm like, "What's this big brothel scene though? This is in my movie." The bad guy, "Oh, there's this scene in my movie where the bad guy has two girls in bed with him." They figured that was a whore house, but it was just this apartment. They got this whore house, but they're really different. They have helicopter shots and all kinds of big thing. The action was awesome. Then the girl's really good. Then 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 who's really great and they have a really great love story. I go, "Well, I hope they change that part." No, they kill her. I felt bad twice because I sealed her fate. I sealed her fate because I have a line in Spike 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 because there's a line that was making a character that Steve Busemi plays in Spike 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." 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 them. He's hiding. The kid's fine. I'm hiding." He says this one line that people keep coming. It's on the internet. This meme about this. Why is this line, this movie? It's so wild. I thought I wanted Steve to come up to the camera and he's lost in his own creative world and he says, "I can't even go outside because my own creations are going to eat me." Then 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 your own earth?" It's like really just for a moment. This thing and it's like because you feel like that way when you're creating stuff, you're creating something and then now it's taking all life in its own and like, "Oh no, now this character has to die. I didn't want that. This domino effect of creation." You start thinking, "What best must be what creation?" Maybe he is hiding up there because, "Look at, he didn't expect all this shit to happen, giving us free will and all that." This particular context that you are the creator of this story. For some reason, it makes me feel good to know that you feel the pain of this character dying. Yeah, absolutely. If I'm writing it, but if it's not coming for me, I'm as surprised sometimes. And Quentin would say that, "You just get two characters talking when I'm writing my script and then suddenly they're just talking to each other." I was like, "What does that mean?" No, no, I know what that means. He just gave them life and now the dialogue's coming through them. Let me just ask you, you're the perfect person to ask about the genius of Quentin Tarantino. What makes them special as the director, as a creative mind? What do you see in him? That's beautiful. That's brilliant. 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 out. What's that? That was something I was starting to write and I'm not going to finish anyway. I take these and go turn it into like whole trilogy of films. What he throws away, all his mortal men would kill for. You meet people like that. I tell people, you know, your parents say, "Watch out who your peers are." When you're younger, that means one thing. But once you get older, surround yourself around people who swing much farther than you. That's really true. Just by being around him and working with him, you get by how's Moses you learn stuff. It just ups your game because they're just 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 barato and I went, "Hey, I just took a 3-A city cam course because I can't afford a city cam operator. So I'm going to operate a city cam myself on this barato." Now, if he was just my peer, he'd say, "Oh, I did the same thing." I'm going to do the same thing. That would be like hanging out with somebody of your real. But you don't want somebody who's above that. You know what he said? He goes, "I bought a city cam, but not to operate it. I'm going to take it apart and design a better one." Us mirror 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 by those kind of people. That's when you learn things like, "Don't blink." Like somebody who's really swinging for the fences and accomplishing so much. And Quentin was like that. So I met him at the festivals. He's so mariachi. He loved it. We came up. We talked and he said, "You know what? My next film I'm writing right now, Pulp Fiction." So I thought, "Man, I'm going to put this guy. He's so funny. I'm going to put him in, I'm going to write him in my Desperado script, which I was writing." So I always before Pulp Fiction and all that when I had cast him. I didn't know he was going to go become such a household name. I just was drawn to his energy. And I'd already ridden him in. And I met Steve Busemi there. And I was like, "I'm writing a character for Steve Busemi." Then I went back to the Sony lot where I was working on Desperado. And Quentin and I ended up having offices right next to each other on the Sony lot. By accident, I didn't even know that. I just met him. And I go back. And he was, because originally Pulp Fiction was for TriStar. Because Danny DeVito was a producer and he was going to make it for TriStar. So he was there writing Pulp Fiction. And I was writing Desperado. So I'd go show him like storyboards from Desperado. He'd come act out scenes of Pulp Fiction. And we got to be really good friends that way. We'd go eat lunch at Versailles across the street at the Sony lot. And then Sony passed on Pulp Fiction. It's too weird, too long. $8 million movie or $7 million. They're like, "Yeah, we're going to go make the next polyshore movie instead." You know, like, we don't understand this thing. And Miramax got it. They had just been bought by Disney. So they produced their first film with Pulp Fiction. And then that thing went to Cannes. And it was a whole thing. But what I loved about his story is that when he made Pulp Fiction, he had a director screening. He showed it to some directors. I wasn't able to go. But anyway, I had dinner with him months. And it was in my journal, because I keep it journal. At 2.40 a.m. when after he dropped him off at his house, I said, "Oh, wait, how did your movie come out?" You know, Pulp Fiction, he just finished it and he went, "That's dumb." 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 does it mean?" It feels like one of those movies I would make, like Rizavard Dawson. And I was trying to be the support of friend and going, "Oh man, he was so excited about this movie." You know, he's bummed about it. And I was like, "Well, it should be different. It should be like." He's like, "How did it happen?" it drove off so I don't know I guess that wasn't the one so I went home and I called some of the directors that were at the screening and they go yeah this isn't the one for him it's not they had none of them saw it none of them saw it but that you're like surprised yeah but that happened with George Lucas too with Star Wars everybody saw that movie and was like poor George we showed it to all his director friends for George but he's waste all this time with his four only Spielberg was the one who said it's naive and it's gonna do really good because it's naive and kids will like it but everyone else was like what's he doing we're artists we're making our film what's he doing this garbage for because nobody knows it shows no one knows anything not even the filmmaker when you're being groundbreaking you don't know what groundbreaking is not you or anyone around you except maybe one or two people so he said there's one person like oh yeah who is your Spielberg goes Catherine Bigelow without a doubt she's the only one who said there's something here no one else was seen was saying that he said in fact because he remembered suddenly he'd forgotten the story but if it wasn't in my journal I would have forgot it too because in fact one of my friends same and said I want to sit you down and tell you all the things that are wrong with your movie but I'll wake you get back from the can film festival and he goes and he wins the palm door then it's friends like oh well I know I only made one movie myself so I never mind I guess I guess over all wrong so even he didn't expect that at all so that was a shock you know even to him so think about that yeah that means what do you do commit to a body or just do that so you don't know you don't know what's gonna be a pulp fiction what's gonna be a Jackie Brown what's gonna be you know you don't know and they and you like to think they know but they don't know either they feel it like ask Jim Cameron I said do you see your movie really clearly like can you see it like with hyper focus because it seems like that and he goes it's like really far it's out of focus as you work on it your kind of starts coming that's okay guys well that's that's normal I thought maybe he had laser vision or something but no even him he doesn't really know but he feels that he can make decisions and he understands what a creative drive is and how to just keep being relentless about it but it's not like they have all the proximity is huge proximity will change your life did for me just being around those guys they didn't teach me hey I'm gonna teach you how to make a movie just being next to them being in their world just ups your game and you just you're able to do things you weren't able to do before you get ideas you didn't get to do before I did I'll show you uh one of my painting things you're not gonna believe this freaking thing I had a painter friend in Germany Sebastian Krueger he gives a workshop once a year so I'm gonna go there and I bet I'll learn more about directing by watching this guy paint than I will by watching another director because that's just now I know how creativity works you're gonna learn lessons outside of the box by doing that and I try to practice before going out there I was doing a Danny Treho I'll show you the before and after you're not gonna freaking believe what you see but this is how it really tells the story of how important proximity is so I'm I do this painting it's like oh second looks garbage I'll show you it's looks like garbage I'm not used I can't do paintings that are just like see I you never should say I can't just cut your leg off but I could into the time paint just paint brush into paint and then right on the canvas like that without using some kind of medium which this guy Sebastian Krueger would do so first I did a digital painting of Danny Treho like just to get the framing and all that that's just like that's like an awakened tablet but then I did it with paint and it's like oh it's all credit and the phone it's too thick the paint and it just looks it looks and I just gave up right away I was trying to pre-practice I wouldn't be a total buffoon there because I was going the next week and I thought he's using a different brush obviously he's using a better paint the stuff just is clogging up and it's crap I'm sure when I get there so I get there and he's doing a Mick Jagger and he starts with a 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 and he I'm like why why you why you concentrating so much on the cheek first and he's like stuffing every time and go why do you what what paints are he using he's like it was regular acrylic paint what brushes do you have regular brushes I'm like how come mine doesn't look like yours let me try what he's doing I mean you start with a midtone I'm gonna do that Danny again yeah start with a midtone I'll start adding some highlights and I did that and everybody kept coming over going like did you just do that I was like yeah I don't know how but it's very cartoony still he's doing a very realistic Mick Jagger how real that is and you just watch and he doesn't teach you anything so he just starts painting so this is the photo he had as a reference but then this is his painting right yeah and because I'm there he's not teaching you how to paint through osmosis you're like learning some of your scene there isn't a trick yeah I thought he had a trick and that's why I couldn't get any further he's using the same brush and the same paint well how come I can't do that and you go you do it I'm gonna try and do something realistic I've never done realistic before because I'm a cartoonist and everything I was cartoony and that was just easier for me because I thought I would need too much training I did another trio I started doing a realistic I finished out just one section of his face and put the pen down because I did that yeah the same day nice I got out of my way because seeing him get out of his own way I think that's why sometimes people need to go to school for stuff like that because then now well I just did four years of school so now I must know now you're giving yourself permission but you could give yourself permission right away and it's gonna come through and drawing day in a trio of all people it's like there's so much going on there it's like he's so expressing service presence I mean you've worked with him a lot and you've I mean he's one of those badass humans on the screen you've created that can you just talk about what it's like creating those characters it was exciting about Desperados I went to go make it and there were no Latin actors working in Hollywood because no one was creating roles for them so I thought wow I got to go create my own stars we'll bring Antonio from Europe because they kind of know his name from the lot more of our movies and I saw him in time me up time me down when I was in the hospital writing Mariachi we're watching TV while I was a patient there's a scene where he like headbutts Victoria Abel you know he just said get his head buddy goes like that I was like whoa I bet that guy would want to be an action but he's got something inside so I called him when we were doing Desperado and I said would you ever consider doing an action oh man I'd love to do action so I said I got a movie for you I got a movie for you it was sequel to Mariachi and so Salma I found in Mexico television you know doing she couldn't get work in the US because of the world I mean this is one of the craziest or one of the best stories I was really determined to hire a real Latin especially Hispanic and then she's Mexican actress to be the Mexican character that's like as authentic as you can get and there was no one who was getting any jobs because no one was creating any so there was no one that had any movies be under their name because there was no one it was a whole systemic problem right this was 94 93 so I was watching a Paul Rodriguez show on moony vision because he I was trying to practice my Spanish because I was having to do all these Spanish interviews because Mariachi was in Spanish I was the other part I didn't tell you I didn't speak Spanish when I made that movie we didn't grow up with it so I never I left that part out of that Mariachi story because I thought people already didn't believe I made the movie by myself they knew I made it in a language I didn't speak I should have said it because it'd be even more inspiring like now you have no excuse yeah I would wrote the English subtitles basically I wrote the titles what became the subtitles and then we take it to the actors and the actor would translate it for me and I was like that is so and I'd be like I would try to speak Spanish let's say "Vamos a recordad" like let's record and they'd be looking at me like that means let's remember the recordad doesn't mean record that means good I'm out now I know back then I know so I'm watching moony vision and then there's Sama as a guest and she's a big soap star down there in Mexico and she comes out she's beautiful she's funny everyone's laughing she's Sama everyone that we know now and she starts talking about you know what I gather from what she's saying that she's having trouble finding any work in the US because of her accent and then uh part of you you said we'll say something in English that she says then she sounds just like she does now and he goes that's great she goes I know I know and I went I think this is the go so I called her in my office and I videotaped our first meeting together so I have that somewhere that's awesome telling me about and it's Sama it's Sama yeah with her energy with her passion and funny she became instant friends with my wife you know before they walked over your wife and her best friends she already was like part of the family she's godmother to my kids um and I thought I'm gonna help you you're gonna help me I need to have a mixing actress in this and you're gonna be phenomenal the studio didn't see it they were like what she hasn't done it once she's hired somebody else who you know already has a name so well 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 mother movie with her in English called road racers was my second film for showtime really cool little rebel that it caused type movie um and she's and I give her a role and that's we have an example of her doing English and they still were like we need a screen test we didn't have a screen test with a bunch of other actresses you know so it said sure let's do that so I went over to her house the night before before the screen test and we worked on the scene, which is the best scene where she's operating on his arm, and they've got all this chemistry. I was just directing her through it, like, completely down to when you pick up the water, you hand them the water, don't scream, "Oh, hot water, just be like hot water." And while he's spitting it out, and it's going to be a vigramatic action with like a very light delivery. And so we got it down to the science. The next day we show up, Antonio does a scene with all the girls coming. He does it with her. Clearly, they've got an amazing chemistry. She just nails it. He's great. He loves her, too. Studio is like, "Okay, you can hire." Reluctantly, like that, right? But once they saw the footage come as we were shooting, and they saw it on the big screen when they're watching the dailies, then they were like, "Oh, my God!" And then they saw it. Then they saw what I saw when I met her. But sometimes you, like you say, what do you do when people are like, "Hey, why come we're using this?" 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 just slipping on the first two rocks or whatever. But follow your instinct because you can, everyone's going to have an opinion. And that's not necessarily the right one. And when you're an independent filmmaker, you can make those decisions to change people's career, the change of the world. And that's why you want to remain independent. That's why what's happening now in the industry is great. Because I have to make movies like the way I started, which is why I always like to do. Which is just doing it where we create our own destiny. We go, "Hey, we're going to make a movie. We're going to make it for this budget so we can make it. And the story is going to be so character driven and cool. We're going to be able to get big actors to be in it because they're going to want to be in it." So Danny Treo, you asked me about Danny Treo. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Get Danny Treo. We're doing Desperado now. I'm casting all kinds of people. Now, I have this character that I want to have a bunch of knives. He opens up his vest and he's a bunch of knives. So bring me all the coolest-looking Latin actors we can find. And before he even walked in, there's a picture of him. He already looked like the guy, but he was younger. He always just played prison inmates. There was a picture of him as an inmate and a prison. I want to give him a cool role, you know, just wherever this actor is. He walks in and I see him. It's Danny Treo. He sits down and I had the prop knife already made. And I say, "You need to have this in your hand and look like you sleep with it. Just practice flipping it around your hand." And I gave it to him. You got the role. Just start practicing with it. He gets up and walks out. You don't have to say anything because there's no dialogue. He walks out. We get to the set and he keeps saying, "Put me in court, give me a line. Give me a line." He's just such a nice guy. You're in a blow the whole mistake. I went 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 dusted or not. But one thing I noticed was that the town we're shot in, the Mexican town, which is the same town I shot Mariachi. We went back there because I wanted to pay back the city. So we had this big movie there and they didn't really know Antonio because he was in European movies. It sounded like I hadn't come to this set yet. But they saw Danny Treo there in his vest looking like a Mexican icon. They would go like this. Everyone thought he was a star. And I just know magnetism when I see it. And I went, "This guy's got something." So I went to him and I said, "I got a movie we were going to do someday." This was '94. We didn't make this movie for 15 years. Machete. You're going to be machete. I had an idea for machete then. It wasn't the same story. I had seen a story, actually Mariachi then, a guy who said this funny story. He said, "Hey, look at this story, that the US DA and FBI sometimes would hire a Mexican federality to come do a job for 25 grand that they didn't want to get their own guys killed on." And I said, "That's machete, the guy that they pay." But he's not doing it for the money. He turns out he has to get this guy that escaped Mexico and that's the twist. So that was a reasonable story I had. So we're going to do this someday. And we talked about it for years and never did it, never had it got around to doing it. So when I did Spy Kids, I put them in Spy Kids and I said, "Hey, let's pay tribute to that character we never got to make and you'll be Uncle Machete." He's a gadget guy and he's got a mysterious pass. But then a few years later, Quentin and I were doing Grind House and then he'd already done Dustle Domino. I was building my own Latin star system. Salma showed up in a bunch of my movies. Cheats shows up in every movie. Danny shows up there. I brought Cheats out of retirement, put him in my movie. I needed to create my own Latin star system because all my scripts, because when you write in your own voice, you're going to write probably somebody that's Latin, you know. So you need to have a star system that matches that, so that you don't have trouble casting and people are like, "Well, you can't hire this person." So I built up my own star system. So Danny was one of my stars. So after we're doing Grind House, we had to do fake trailers for Grind House. And I told Quentin, "I know what trailer I'm going to do for the movie I never got to make with Danny. Come to Cheatty." That'll be so fun. And finally, get to our other system. And doing a trailer is so fun. It's two days of shooting. Just still being that resourceful guy, we asked this company that had a digital camera we wanted to use. Can you let us send it to us for a couple of day screen tests? I mean, camera test? Instead of shooting a camera test, we shot the trailer, we got a free camera. Shot the trailer with him. And it's just the money shots. Him opening his vest full of machetes, you know, him aiming that gun, him in a waterfall with two gals. And I just came up with this really funny trailer and we shot it. People were screaming at the premiere. You can't even hear it. They just wanted that movie so badly because there was black exploitation in the 70s. There was never an exploitation. It felt like this should have existed, but it didn't. It's Mexican superhero. I just never seen anything like that, you know, now you know, but like even his mom calls a machete. Like he just became this guy and I've had 250 movies that he's been in. Machetes is most famous one. So for five years, five years, people would come up to us and say, where's machete? Where's the, when's that movie coming out? We're like, it's not a real movie, but when it looks real, we want to see that movie. So we finally made the movie because people were just asked for it. And I used, I wanted to, I was adamant about being resourceful again. All those shots that are in the trailer are really great. I got to reverse engineer the trailer into a movie so that I can use that shot that's in the trailer, like this girl in the waterfall. Why would this girl be in the waterfall? Don't have a really clever way that he gets the bad guy. Her hair's kind of, her face is kind of covered by this hair. Well, cast Lindsey Lohan there or the senator will switch it out for Robert De Niro. Well, I just reverse engineer it so every time there's a shot in the trailer, it's in the movie, but I shot all the footage around to lead up to it. It's another fun creative exercises to reverse engineer something you just did like this on the day. You just threw a bunch of cards out basically with that trailer. And now you got to go make a movie using all those cards. That's like a creative exercise that I thought so satisfying. So fun. Yeah, that was beautiful. You're actually known in part, maybe you can correct me, but do pretty unexpected surprising kind of interesting casting. So Robert De Niro is an example of that and that's just a great role. The second aspect of that, I heard the story that you can just get an actor in and out in just a few days. Really fast. The Robert Rodriguez experiences, they call it. How do you make that happen? Like can you just tell the story? Well, I'm the editor. I'm the cameraman. I'm the DP. And so when I call him and say, I got you as the villain in this whole movie, but I swear I'm gonna shoot you on four days. You come down four days. There's a scene where he's in the hospital. He just smiling. He was saying such a good time because he couldn't believe it. I said, guess what? When you wake up from your hotel room at the Stephen F. Austin, you just crossed the hallway. That's the set. The room next to yours, we turned into the hospital set. So you're just gonna come laying there in your pajamas. Really? That's what you do. Well, yeah, we had to save time. We only have four days. So everything had to be very thought out to be like, boom, boom, boom. Let's shoot the money. Get him out of this. We don't have to spend a lot of money on him. Book a room in a hotel. Get that up to look like a hospital room. Yeah. That's our set. And it's real. You don't have to dress it. And it's just right there. All you do is put like a little tube there, you know, like a, for his IV and then you have a couple of nurses and it looks like. Just genius. It's not Virginia. It's resourceful. Resourceful. Next story. But I said, you're gonna think about me when you're on your next Meet the Fockers movie and you're on there for six months where they have you sitting in a trailer. I don't like to do that. So you know, I gave Lady Gaga her first two movies. After Michetti, she said it publicly, she said, I saw Michetti and my song Americano should have been in Michetti. I thought, she saw Michetti. So I called her up and I said, Hey, I'm making a sequel and I would certainly use your music. But if you ever thought about acting because you're an amazing performer, I think I've worked with a lot of actors who are also musicians and they're always great because I already know how to be a person, a beyond stage, being in front of a bunch of people which most actors can't do. And she said, actually, I studied acting before I became a singer. So well, you'll never be able to be in a movie because you know what? They don't know how to shoot people out the one six months of your time. And you're always on tour. But if you come be here, I have a part for you. I can shoot you on half a day, this whole section of a movie and I'll shoot you a movie poster. It's just 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, she's just going awesome. Robert put me on a grease. I was throughout that whole movie, I don't know how we did that. It was half a day. She was there half a day. It did the same for Sin City too. I was like, I have a set here, waiting for you. If you're on tour and Houston just driving to Austin, I'll shoot you on half a day. You get to be in a scene with Joseph Gordon Levin. Sure. She came down. So wait, how do you take Robert in here? How do you take Lady Gaga? And like, solve the puzzle of all the scenes that have to be in. How do we shoot them quickly, efficiently, conveniently? You have to edit your own movie. I have this analogy, a food analogy that works really well. Script is like your grocery list. Filming is like grocery shopping. Getting the best performance is getting the best bean. get in the mess ingredients right? Editing is like the cooking. Too much of this and not enough that. You fuck the whole thing up. So so many filmmakers do not edit 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 souffle and he makes something else. So by doing that job, I mean like I've worked on some big stuff and I realized finally after many years because I've always edited I realized this is why movies cost so much. There could be a hundred and fifty two hundred 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 isn't a room somewhere useless. Calling after the fact we still need to get this close up or you 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. So I kind of stumbled upon it. But and 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 it's a cluster truck. Let me show you. And that's how it's in city. Bruce Willis nine days. Well pretty Murphy's in all three stories one day but he's still a Toro three days. It's just like you're just shooting this stuff. Mickey work is in a sequence with Red Grower. We shot eight months apart. I didn't have Red Grower. And so I was doing Shark Point Lava girl. So I just shot Mickey acting with me and then I shot Red Grower acting with me and I just kind of together. What's weird is like editing exercises are like I used to do these editing exercises where I went to my VCRs together and I would cut my movies but sometimes I would just cut a music video and I cut a music video once because I was a big fan of Red Grower and a big fan of Mickey work. So I want to make it look like they're in a movie together. So I cut this music video together. But so it shows like lightning on Red Grower in the hit show and then lightning on Mickey from Rumblefish. But Rumblefish is black and white. So I made the whole thing black and white. I was like 19. I was 19 years old. Wow. And then years later I'm making Sin City. I shot Mickey not knowing who the other actor was going to be until I cast him eight months later and it was Red Grower. I'm cutting them together to look like they're in the same movie. It's in black and white and I'm like done this before. Oh my god. I found that old video. It's like oh my god. I already made a movie of them in black and white. That's more shit, right? That's the magic of creativity. It's like sometimes when you have a vision it's not clear but it's coming to you from the future. So you got to just follow the voice. No matter what anyone says about your curtains. Just follow the voice you got in your head because you don't know and you're not smart enough to know and you don't need to know. You just need to do. You just need to be the hands. So this is like what you can do with no time or money when you know all those jobs. It's the benefit of knowing those jobs. Like I said, the more you know those jobs, the more you know your main job, which is being creative, not on the day, thinking on your feet. So I'm going to show you this, um, this test. Okay. So for nestled on the TV series, I would always shoot the first episode in the last episode of like a seven or eight episodes season. There's three seasons by the time we got to the third season. I was doing a lead us. I couldn't do the big finale episode in my actor who plays the George Clooney character, DJ Katrina. He's somebody who fucking one there be a writer was writing. He's wrote fight and flight. This is a movie that's going to come out with Josh Hernandez. That's his. He wrote it after we're doing this. He was like, man, hearing you talk, you know what? I got this what I love about you. You inspire people. The feedback loop inspires you back. He said, man, hearing your talk for red 11 and the cards and I've got a script that's partially written. I'm just going to go. I'm going to go crank it out in 3D. I'm going to cut off the phone in 3D. I'm going to finish that thing in 3 fucking days. And he came back and he said, I finished the script. And I read it and I go, when you read it in three days and go, I wrote something before, but I just kept thinking I wasn't ready. And then you told me the thing about not being ready. And you said that really resonated. I went and I finished it in three days. I go, man, I'm going to do that. I'm going to go do the DJ method. I call the DJ method. I've a bunch of half-baked ideas that I'm just going to go turn off the phone and finish the thing in three days. And I'll fix it later, but does three days. There's going to be pure pipe. It's just going to be coming through because you're just going to be picking up a pen. So anyway, he came to me with this idea. He said, oh, man, I was hoping you'd do the last episode of Dustle Dawn because I had this great idea for scene. We're in a zombie town, western town. We have those guns where you have to pull the trigger, you know, the hammer back before you can fire. So I thought, what if I have a gun that's empty? And I got bullets in the other hand. And I bump into a zombie, the bullets go flying. I jump and I catch all the bullets and shoot the guy before I hit the ground. Okay, that's kind of a real cool, like, desperate out of time thing, but dude, this is a seven day shoot for these episodes. Every one of the crew will have a different idea on how to do that. It's done guy will put you on wires because you have to do all that action or the DP isn't even operating the camera. It's a camera. The director doesn't know how to shoot. He's not operating the camera. Your editor is in a room somewhere. VFX guys aren't there. She ain't going to be able to ask them how to do it, but I am my own VFX. I came up with how we do it. All the shots in Cincinnati and all this bike and we go, we need one guy to come do it. I'll come do it for you. I'll come do it because I'm already going to be there because I have to shoot a second unit fight scene for the other actor who wanted a cool fight scene. So I was already doing that. When it comes to your scene, we'll switch places because it's got to be done quick because you've got you got to shoot it in 20 minutes because you got a ton of other shit you got to shoot and you'll just never get it. You won't even get it in a film schedule, you know, 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're on the set. I'm going to show you the footage and I'm going to show you the scene. I have to show it to you a couple of times because you're not going to believe what you're about to see. So if you were on the set, this is what it would look like. So I get there, they said, we're ready for that scene. So I get over there to the set and I go, okay, where are you coming out of this building? Where you get in the bullets from that body. Okay, bring that body closer. Okay, Stunk 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 that before you hit the pad. He starts to jump. He's barely starts jumping. He's already hitting the pad. I was like, okay, that ain't going to work. You get out of here. DJ, you're going to do it. I have no idea how I'm going to do this. I haven't thought about it before. But now you're there. It's just so awesome. And now the options are very limited. You're very, 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 three jumps. And I'm going to cut it to look like one jump. All the bullets are going to miss. Only one is going to go in. So here, just follow what I'm saying is we don't have time. What cameras do we have? What's on the A camera? Along lens. That's my camera. I'll operate that. What's on the B camera? Study camp. Leave it on study camp. No chance. No time to convert it. At one point, I want to lower it. So just flip it upside down. We'll flop it later. Give me the main camera. DJ, start running towards that bullets and grab it and pretend like you get shot out of your hand. I shoot it in slow motion when 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 just want you to commit to just jumping out and just look at the barrel. Just look at the barrel on your hands when you're jumping because that'll look like you're looking at the bullets. And just don't even think about that you're going to catch a bullet. Don't think about that you're going to start turning. Just stretch your body out. Get a really graphic like that. How cool that looks. And then the side view, it's shot this at the same time. You can already tell it's going to look like bullets are missing, right? Okay, now I need, now I need this part though. I need the part where he's catching the bullet. This little window there. How am I going to do that? With the lens that long, it's going to be all I have focus. It's not going to be slow motion enough. He even knows me. He's like, what the hell am I doing? So just lay on the pad and rock up and down. And as you're coming down, that'll look like you're falling as I'm zooming in because I'm operating the camera and I'm cutting this in my head. Yeah. And I'm saying, just do it again. He's like, what is it? Rock up. And then as you go down, it's going to look like you're falling. Well done, bullets. Okay, well done. You've caught a bullet. One went in. Now, second jump. When you do the next jump, as if we just pass those other moments, you've caught a bullet already. So now you're going to snap it close and start your turn. It's all you'll get before you hit the pad. Snap turn, right? So like, okay, this is, I went the cameras to feel like they're dropping with them. That'll give you more of the sensations. So let's actually lower that steady camp shot. Flip it upside down and get a low angle. See, I look at the suns right there. It hasn't gone beyond that. And then my camera, I lowered my camera down and I got it angle. Right? Okay. Now last jump. I bury a thin. I said, just bury me. Bring me a thin mattress because I want him to do it all the stunts. I don't want to stun guy because he does this himself. He just did it in three jumps. If the audience will know, they'll just be like, we believe that this guy can do anything. I want you just to finish by turning and cocking the hammer back and firing before you hit the ground. I'll give you two takes for that. Almost gets it there. Now we do a second thing. Boom. Now the other one was probably a little better, even though you don't really see it. I've got to go do everything now. I got to cut it. I got to add the sound effects myself. I got to put the music in myself because music guys would just end up filling it with music and ruin it. Sound effects guys would just fill a full of sound effects and ruin it. I went all the sound to drop out. So as he's jumping all year is the wind. We're in his jacket. The clinking of the blitz as they're bouncing off. So you have this breathless moment. No music. Cut the music and that moment you cut it so that you're like, I wonder if he's going to make it. Right. So I go home, I cut it before I even have the visual effects in. I just cut it that night because I cut my own sound effects. I cut my sound effects in. You can already tell it's going to work. You can already see, with even with a bullet's not there, you can tell by the sound where they're going to be. It's going to work. I call them up and say, "Dude, this is going to work great." So then I go to the effects guys and I go, "Okay. There's bullet in this frame. The next frame is here because I used to animate and the next frame is there. Then it hits the barrel and then it starts bouncing this way. I went at that clear so we can follow that a bullet was supposed to go in and then it bounced way over there and then this bullet bounced way over there and then they send it back and a bunch of bullets come down. No, guys listen to this and I'm going to show you again. I'm going to drive to you again. Just the sound will play like there's multiple bullets flying. I don't need to see all those bullets or the eyes not going to know where to go. So then they got it right brilliant and then check this out. I'm going to show it to you twice because I'm going to believe. Wow. The changes direction. Wow. Wow. Crazy. Well done. You don't even see that in a feature film, much less a TV shot. And just as a director, well done. Oh, man. Here, just one more time and I'll show you something you didn't notice, both times. That's amazing. Just those decisions coming together. Perfect. I'll come in and like this, you got you got minutes just moving the camera like you decided to do really worked really well, the balancing of the matches, whatever. And it's not like you have this whole plan figured out ahead. You're literally in the moment. It's coming through you. But you're seeing it. I'm seeing it because I've done it enough. That's why you really want to learn all those jobs because it comes. It comes in a moment like this when the shit's fucking in the fan. You got to know how to pull it out. You could have gotten all those people together and they never would have figured that out. You had one person had to see it all the way through. You're seeing the bullet hole is going to go in the in the result. I've done enough times to know that if you don't do it, just right. You're going to lose the image. You're not going to know where to follow and you'll miss the point. And I'll see. Yeah. I love that you're thinking about where the the eyes of the audience will go. And that's like he like I feel like too many people might think about some more general concept of a scene versus like the audience. Where's their eyes or what you're drawing. You're drawing it through sound to picture. I'm going to show you. If you notice without the sound, you don't really see him clip everything back. The sound is so sensory here. Watch this. You don't really. Right. I thought I saw it. You think you saw it, but you hear it. And so you feel like see it. But watch it. It's actually he's already finished. You don't really see him do it. You know, but you swear you saw it in a close up because the sound is in a close up. I mean, the sound in a close up. Now here's nothing you didn't notice. He hits this ground in the first shot. Watch. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, you didn't notice it because I didn't play the sound there. So if you don't hear it, you don't see it. And if you don't see it, but you play a sound, you hear it. And you see it in your mind, right? So check that out now with the sound on. And you'll see both of those parts play completely different now. Now you hear it. I know you can get away with that because I know editing and I like, I thought I'm playing a 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. And that comes from you said directing, but it's not directing. Like people can direct and say, this is what I want. But to actually execute it, you need to be a craftsman. And to be a craftsman, you have to learn all those crafts and not just with the visuals, but with the sound. With the sound too, the sound is so important. Sound is half the picture. Sounded. And if you cut sound, you realize how important sound is. I would learn so much by doing those movies like Dust Brow actually moves where you go, wow, the sound, I can add an extra sound effect of an extra punch, heat, and even throw. And it sounds like he's beating the shit out of this guy and you only need to see one or two hits and you can hear five. You know, you know, you know, where you can push your limits because you've done it. You've done it and you've got the experience. It's so amazing that you can use sound to make a person believe they saw something that wasn't actually there on the screen. Yeah, your brain fills it in. That's crazy. And that's why that's so important because if you don't know that, you'll be on the set shooting 10 takes of that. Because you're like, no, he didn't, you know, I didn't see him click it back. I didn't see, 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. When you say sound close up, was it? It was a way. So the sound, all the other sounds dropped away and all you hear is like the sound like the mics right on that thing so that you hear it so big in your ear that you swear it was in close up too, but just the sound was close. How do you, so I just to give an insight into like that process of sound design, what are you like listening to the sound and just like experiencing the feeling that creates? And then you're like, that's just right. I'm playing in post a lot. So I have a whole library of sound effects from all my movies. So I can pull up like the gun sound we created for Bruce Willis and Sincety and use that and mix it with Antonio's gun from Desperado. You know, I remember in four rooms, there's a scene where the bell hop goes into the hotel room. Jams is key into it and clicks it and I used all gun sounds for the sound of the key instead of key sounds because it wasn't sound close enough. So if you listen to your ear, you hear like all these sounds from gun to do the key is it's like that conveys the sound better. You know, I'll use different kinds of sounds that just have impact and put it somewhere like when he hits the ground or so I like playing with all that in post when I'm editing because it makes my editing job easier. Sometimes it's like, oh, the sound is covering me. I don't need to keep trying to massage this. The sound is actually selling it. And so I keep those sound effects into the final movie. So it's just all part necessary. It's like, it's like being a chef, you're cooking and you're going like, I know the recipe says this, but I think it really could use jalapenos and some extra pepper or maybe a little more salt and then it needs an acid of some kind, so I'm going to add some lemon juice. Yeah, you made me realize, I'm not sure where I saw that, but you were talking about making sort of a little like home films for fun and like you mentioned, how exciting you can make a very mundane scene by just adding salt. Oh, yeah. There was, I think there was like a little kid for this car. Yeah, one of those little and but I added a motor sound to it and it's like, wow. And it sounds realistic somehow. Like I don't. And then we're playing and then we're playing with these little cars filming ourselves playing with the cars. But then I replace it with real car sounds. Yeah. And it's just your brain released the reality of the real thing. It's crazy. And you realize how unimportant the visual is and how important the sound is actually sound is everything. That's what I was really lucky in Mariachi that my camera didn't work for sound because then I got really good sound that I would have gotten with a shitty mic out of frame because that's the first telltale sign of a low budget movie is bad sound. Bad sound right away. You can already hear all this hiss and all this mic was too far and you're like low budget movie before your eyes even tell you the sound gives it away. And then amazing. The audio is first sound is first really even though it's a visual medium. That's so crazy. Just on the what's the plan with the with the four action films like what what what are the next steps? I'll probably direct more than one because I've already several that I want to do. But I was I'm going to direct at least one but I'm producing all three all four there at my studio. It does draw you in. It draws you in and it makes you go now think of ideas you never want to thought of for mainly because it has a filter. Well now I don't have to think of all these ideas. I can only I actually have like that like me on that set. There's only very few things I can actually come up with that are just action driven first with a have a great character. You'll get to it a lot faster with a filter. That's the beauty of a filter. As a now you've just shrunk your your target and now you can hit that target and people are coming up with ideas because now they've got proximity and 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 is have a deadline because when you have a deadline you can freaking move mountains. You know I had a spike his in the theater every year three years in a row not being pre-planned every year there was a spike his now the third one was the biggest one biggest cast mostly green screen video game and the first digital 3d movie ever so getting visual effects companies to make that we realized oh I shot it with two cameras that means each effect shot has to be done twice from a different angle so I went to the studio midway through that and said there's not going to be a movie in the theaters in time you're going to have to push the date back and they said okay we've never heard you panic we'll push the date back for you they call back 10 minutes later I was like oh thank god it's really complicated I know it's going to be this complicated but I wanted a challenge and they said McDonald's will sue this for 20 million dollars if you move the date you have to have a movie in the theater we started shooting that movie in January of 2003 it was in 3d in theaters by July that's the fastest any effects movie has ever been done that's because you had no choice so deadline makes you do things and make decisions really quick and it was the biggest of the three deadlines are good and it's hard for us to self-impose a deadline sometimes because we know it's a bullshit deadline and your brain knows it's a bullshit but why do deadlines work because when when the deadline's coming up. what do you do? You start 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 on a rush but you had to get out of your way because your deadline was up and you had to come up with it. So many people are gonna come up with always extra great ideas at the last minute. They've already but I look like everyone who's already signing on because they didn't it's cool they don't know when the deadline is they keep writing and saying when is the deadline for this and we say well when when we close the funding in May but we didn't say when still so I think that gives them like a sense of a deadline like shit it might be May 1st or maybe May 2nd so we better get my idea going. So I think it works in your favor because then you come up with stuff and you're gonna feel so enriched by doing the idea that you're not gonna care if it gets picked or not. You're gonna love this idea so much. It could turn into ten 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 had come up with and put a lot of time in are now like oh I can do these now. I have I know how to finish it now. I have to ask you about Olieta so if that's so many incredibly innovative projects this is one of them and turn out to be this visual masterpiece. There's a bunch of complexity beautiful complexity about it and that it started out as a film that James Cameron was supposed to make. And then you started to collaborate with him on it and these two I would say brilliant directors but with different styles like you were talking about and so plus there's the complexity of for people 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 the performance not just the motion but the performance of this actor put them into this with the power of technology into the real world. So convey all the emotion the richness of the human face. Can you just speak to the process of bringing that world to life? Sure I mean why I never would have attempted if it was in Jim because Jim has his figured all this out. So just to get you again remember like I said hey Jim I'm operating a study can what do you think of that? Well I'm designing a new system that's always how it is between him and I. So when I went to show him just brought it when it was done. He said you might not want to sit through 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 treatment scripts you know called scriptments to sure it goes half Spider-Man and I got Avatar. So this was in 95 he was showing me the scriptman for Avatar which there was no technology for that. He was already doing stuff that didn't exist. Yeah and I was reading it going like great story. He was like I don't know how the fuck is going to do this. Some posses is not even he'd just done you know terminator two a few years before. It's like that was the thing to the art. So Alita was gonna be the movie he did first to prepare for Avatar and so he'd already done some prep work on it was based on a manga but before they did that they just started doing some test for Avatar and then as they got deeper into the test for Avatar to prepare for Alita they went I guess we're making Avatar first. So Alita got kind of pushed to the side and they ended up doing it which ended up becoming such a journey to make that movie to get the technology to build it to make it. So I remember visiting him on the set. I mean I've known him so long I was on the set of Titanic this along I've been around this guy. I was on the set of Titanic I was on the set with Sarah Connor and Arnold Schwarzenegger and Eddie Furlong for the 3D ride he made for Universal a few years later so I mean I feel like I've been around him a lot of his career and to be able to visit the set you know of Avatar and remember him showing me like artwork they did very photorealistic and he goes curious to see how photoreal it'll be when we're finally done with this process because you don't get to see it till it's almost done and I was like wow he's just shooting blind he's really talking about me shooting Mariachi not seeing the footage he's making this whole movie not even knowing what the end result is gonna look like at all because you're not gonna 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 it's just seeing him do that and have that success really made it easier for me to do a lead 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 gonna do it we're gonna start and anything that I would come up with on this movie in his team because he had all his way to people working on it he had them all working on it too I do a fast version of his process because it's a lot of live action avatars mostly CG I have live action sets you have to come to my studio because I still have the whole elite of city in my back lot well here the troll maker studio yeah that's where it was yeah it was shot here so when you go see my city I built it very resourceful this is weird it looks just like the town for Mariachi my backyard I'm like you look better than the town for Mariachi yeah 90,000 it's the biggest largest standing in the country because sets are always mode down for the next movie but I just kept it there so we should shoot it all the time for Mexico or South America or Europe or whatever it's seven streets and we added digitally above it the ceilings are 20 feet high you gotta come see you don't believe that it's here it's unbelievable where is north of Austin it's where the old airport was so it's like on 51st Street you know it's like really close to town I would love to see you're not gonna believe it all my props all my stuff from all my movies so the people who are you know investing in brass knuckle it that's why they say it's like a really wonky movie because they're gonna get to come check out all that stuff and and and be in proximity and see oh like me with that painter it's not a trick he's just doing it I then you realize you can do it too but we thought let's shoot mostly live action and we'll just replace her but we still have to figure her out you have to cast the right actress and when I saw Rosa Salazar she was just amazing you made me cry and audition the first time I was like oh my god this person has some of we can capture even a a fourth of her facial expression it'll bring so much life and they got it one to one and it really helped Jim on the next avatar and weta because they got to try out a bunch of things that's why avatar the second avatar way water looks so much more refined than the first avatar because of that middle step of doing elita it was training ground for them can you actually educate me on the wetter process is this like a performance capture technology you have her in a suit before capturing her body movements but also 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 and everything else is real and we're just replacing her but with someone even smaller in size so you have to erase everything behind her it's like a bunch of technical things you do but the idea is to whatever performance she gives she's such a great actress is to capture all of that because then this character that doesn't even exist will feel very emotional and you have to you have to be tied to it you have to feel it's hard she was the heartbeat of it so she's acting with all this acting with all that but it just disappeared you know she's not even like it's not even they're like we don't notice this is here it's like that she just performed through it what was some interesting unique challenging things about you directing her performance in this in this kind of world I just I just knew she had to be here it was gonna be just so easy with her she's just so great she everything was just so real and everything was just like she's that character she becomes that character who's seen this world for the first time no special effects gonna help you with that if the performance isn't there so it was all about getting the performance and casting the right actors that's why you get Christoff Walts there and you get Jennifer Connelly you know these masters are all in the set Marshall Ali you know you've got an amazing cast of people and that's really the heart the heart of it so that the technology kind of goes away how hard is it to get the actors to act when like the full world is not around you we put so much of the world around them like when you see the city we put like a blue screen way in the back to just make the city keep going but we built the sets there the town we built the real set so everything was very tangible and real and that way she had to fit into that world and be as real as that because if it was all done in CG well they know you can fudge everything but if you put her in a real environment that's a real challenge and that really helps an avatar because that whole place is created an avatar you can get away with a lot but they wanted to commit to that kind of detail and on the next avatar it's why it just feels like you're really there it's just stunning and you get there by having something to work on like this to take the technology of the next level so it was cool to be able to help you know knowing this should be helpful to him in his process and not just distracting him but then also he liked that his artist had something else to work on besides just avatar to just work on something you know different to freshen up the perspective on things and methodology and so yeah that was a really exciting movie to work on and that we got to shoot it here Jim Cameron movie here and awesome that was the best having him here and that my whole crew who's worked to me 25 30 years everyone had an extra spring in this step like we're working on a Jim Cameron movie I mean that's just like a high bar of achievement for everybody you know working on it since we talked about it you know the directors can you speak to the genius of James Cameron like what what makes them special you talked about some of the difference in your approach in his he's created some of the most special movies ever also what's behind that what would you say is interesting about the way his creative mind works I think he's guys George Lucas you know him you know We've got a last scenario we need to pick, sir. It's a mix of and I was got really lucky. My first job was a Photoshop, 'cause my dad had a friend who owned a Photoshop. He said, "You're a summer job and I was 16. "Goer from my friend, Mario." I got a Mario's Photoshop and I'm developing pictures and you know, think you develop photos from film and he said, "Here, take this camera home. "Give me one of those cameras. "Take this camera home and some film. "I need you to learn how to use the cameras. "You can only sell the cameras." So I went home and I have a bunch of siblings and I was like, "Well, the star's a bedhead." Taking all these pictures of everybody, I take it back and he looks at the pictures when he develops, he's like, "Whoa, these are really creative. "You're a creative person." This is when sometimes people tell you something that you can't on here and he goes, "That's a gift. "What you need to know now and 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. "And if you're both technical and creative, "you'll be unstoppable." And I was like, "Stop it, wow." So here, once you learn zone photography, I guess I wouldn't learn this technical part of it. So that's why I didn't take a crew of Maria cheese. I knew if I'm just a creative person and I need a crew to go actually technically make the movie, I'll always need something. And when you want to really change your life, you wanna get your I need list down to little's possible. 'Cause if you're like, "Well, I want to shoot my movie "but I need a cameraman and I need somebody "who knows how to lie to you. "Your I need list keeps growing." That's further and further and further you will be from what you need to accomplish. So I kind of went down there without any help so that, remember that script analogy where the guy said, "Throw away three scripts." I said, "No, I'm gonna write three scripts "and then shoot each one." So I get better at which one of those jobs so I can learn to be technical. My technical capability was so little like I literally called the guy on the phone. How do I use this camera? You know, that's how little I knew about it but I knew by doing the job I would learn. By being both, that's really the key. So Jim Cameron is like that. Jim Cameron, when you see those guys, George Lucas, very technical and very creative. John Lester, very technical but very creative, Pixar. Jim Cameron, very technical, very creative. Putting those two things together is really what sets you apart from other technicians and other creative people. And it's very, very powerful and a lot of creative people, again, it's against their nature to be technical. They don't wanna do it, make yourself do it. Read the manuals, take the lessons. It frees you up because then you can go do like, you know, I just showed you in that demo. You're able to now be a technical person and creative and then you're in trouble. He's one of the best at it. And he just knows how to craft a story. He's very analytical as well. Like, we bounce off each other in a funny way. He goes, man, he came down to visit my studio before I did a lead. And he went, you only surround yourself with people for like you. Like you exude creativity, you know, from every poor. And so does everyone at your studio. And I go, yeah, I didn't hire them that way of purpose, but I think if you're not that way, you kind of know, you know, belong there and you kind of lead. And then I went to his studio and there are a bunch of Jim Cameron's there. (laughing) I was like, oh my god, they're all very technical. You can't get all kind of fuzzy with the logic or the, you can't get really creative with the physics or anything. They're like, no, that's not how work would be like. And they're just wow, super great at what they do. Bar is sky high and they're all like that. 'Cause yeah, 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. - I heard a story where the guitar case being a rocket launcher, where to you, you create this real world where everything's possible. The magic feels real. And for Jim Cameron, he has to know how a guitar case would work that would actually be in the double as a rocket launcher. - When I show him the trailer for "Granhouse" and he sees the machine gun laying all that, he goes, whoa, that's unbridled filmmaking from the it. It makes sense only the second you're watching it, not a second, 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, one of the tables, like do you have those papers there? Imagine him that thick, that thick, that thick, all script, script, what are these? He goes, this is a whole, you know, space opera version of this movie. We're not making that one. I was like, he's just cranking out all the stuff. Like again, can I take this and go, - Yeah. (laughing) - Yeah, we bounced off each other 'cause I loved his analytical part of his brain. I'm not that analytical. I'm just kinda like, hey, I'm really creative feeling. And I'm like, woo, we'll go this way and then woo, we'll go that way. And he likes that about me. But I like, I want to be like, I think about things too much, like, you think about things like what makes a movie a billion dollar hit? What are the elements that you need? And I'm gonna analyze that, and I'm gonna make sure my movie does that. And he engineers a submarine that can break the world record. He engineers a movie that can break the world record. You know, he has that engineering mind, but the creative part, that's very rare. So that's very rare. And he's capitalized on both. He had this submarine model like this being on his desk to one that he broke the world record board going and just seen it and knowing he even have kids and stuff and a wife and I'm like, weren't you afraid going down? There with, you know, something gonna happen? It's like, no, wasn't afraid. Like, why not? And he was, 'cause I designed this to keep you. (laughing) Yeah, was any other pose though I'd be afraid, but he designed this to keep you. That kind of confidence, that's him. He just knows if some other pose though are designed this to keep you cool, I would be afraid. But total confidence, 'cause he did it. The confidence of extreme confidence is brilliant. Just to get you excited about how creative this stuff is. So Desperado was the only movie on the Sony lot being edited digitally. Not only was I editing on a computer, I was editing in my house, which in 1994 was just unheard of. So I'm there in my house and they made me cut an L.A., 'cause they were, 'cause at first I told the studio, I wanna edit Desperado myself, 'cause it's important that I edit it and they go, no, you can't. Why not? We've never had a director edit his own movie here. So we don't wanna set a precedent. 'Kay, so I thought that we'd give you too much power. It's a, this is the power of precedent. I said, well, you bought Mariachi and I edited that. So I said, okay, but you're gonna have to edit in the L.A., so we can watch 'cause we don't think you know what you're doing. We saw the footage and the shots are really short. It's too short. I was like, shots are too short. Oh, 'cause I was shooting my cuts. You know, like they're used to seeing footage on Tonyo walks into the bar and it's gonna be a dialogue scene. They expect the whole thing done from a wide shot. I would shoot the wide shot, he walks in, cut, move the camera, let's get over here 'cause we went into, 'cause I'm not gonna use it for the rest of the scene. I know we're gonna get into coverage 'cause I've already cut it. So I said, oh, that's interesting. So I cut the first scene. If you ever seen Desperado, the first scene is the best scene. Steve was saying he's telling the stories, talking about the myth of the Mariachi. - Oh yeah, great scene. - It's crazy. - It's crazy. - So then they come over. I say, hey, you come see my first scene. So they come over to my house. They watch it. Okay, you know what you're doing, anyway. But I was cutting Desperado in my house that I rented there. And then we shot Desperado on at the same time. So I was cutting Desperado for rooms and Desperado on myself. I'm the editor. I don't have an editing. Other than the ones who imported into the machine. So, Del Toro came over, Soda Burke came over. We were gonna borrow if it's Getzavilus. No one had heard of somebody having an avid in their living room. Jim comes over and he goes, "Hey, are you having an avid in your living room?" And I go, "Yeah, come check it out." I'm just like, "I roll out of bed." It's like, some's unremarkable 'cause that's what you do right now. But back in '94, it was unheard of. I'm cutting three movies at the same time myself. I roll out of bed. I come here, I can cut Desperado, I can cut Desperado. And he went, "That's it, I hate working with editors." You know, when I was doing Terminator 2, they wouldn't even let me put the bad to the bone song in Terminator 2 'cause they didn't think it would work. And I had to sneak into the editor room at night on the weekend to cut it in and then show him the next day. He was like, "That's your own movie." He gave that kind of power to people. He said, "I hate working with editors, I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna tear down a wall in my house. I'm gonna put it in an avid. I'm gonna cut my next movie." And he did. He got an Oscar for editing Titanic. 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 to his own cuts when he shows me like footage. He's showing to me himself on his own machine. And it's like, again, it gives you all those tools to be able to really find your vision that you're looking for because you can't always explain it to somebody because you don't always know yourself. It's part, you kind of come up with it as you do the process. - It's just a small tension about the different software and the technologies involved. So you mentioned avid, this Premiere Pro. - Premiere was still in its early stages then. I think Soderberg looked at it and it said, "Yeah, I can't afford an avid for this movie. I'm gonna go do it." And I think he started cutting on Premiere, but I'm sure it's all better now. I just have always used an avid 'cause I just always ran it back to the same production. I think I just, I don't have to buy a new one, but there's lots of goods I've heard about all kinds of systems. I just use the same one. - I guess that's the question I have for you. It's just interesting for people. It's very interesting to me just the details use avid. Like what do you like multiple monitors, one monitor? - I have a couple monitors. - And then I'm one big monitor to watch it if I'm watching the scene back 'cause the monitor's just a little wacky. I mean, I've ever designed my own system. I've probably designed it differently. But I'm literally, I've worked on that thing since '94. I still don't know all the shortcuts and all that shit. I still use it like my tape deck. Play, rewind, pause. And I can cut so fast with that. Just, I don't use the mouse for shortcuts. I'm just like, but I don't think. - So you've found your way. - Yeah. - Preferred way the workflow of using it. And now you can sort of let go of the technical and then be creative. - Yeah, just be creative. It's just a tool. It's just a tool and it's like it doesn't matter what system it is. I have you again here at the top. work for you. Great. There's a lot of problems I have with it that I know are probably fixed on another system, but that they'll have a whole other set of problems. So it's like, well, why bother with that? There's limitations, I think, that it has that would need to be fixed, but not for what I'm doing. I mean, I can still do what I need. It feels like part of the artistry is every system has limitations, and you learn how to work around those limitations. I mean, my first VCRs, those things were I was always known for taking what little basic equipment and milking the shit out of it, what it could push in the boundaries of what it can do. And now it's flipped. Now you're working on a program and you can spend 10 years on this thing and you're scratching the surface of what it's capable of. It's totally flipped the other way. I'm not milking anything anymore. I'm barely getting the smallest capability of it because I would have to spend a lot of time to figure out all the stuff that he can possibly do. And I'm sure it's all great fantastic stuff, but what a different world than when I grew up, where I was like, okay, let me splice these two sound things together, and it was so hard to get it to do. People would be like, you got that movie out of that equipment. We're now it's the other way around. You know, it's like all this equipment is great. So when people come to me and say, I've got, well, I've only got this camera. I was like, did that camera's 10 times better than anything I had for my first 15 years of filmmaking. So you have no complaints. This is like, you can just start now and just start making stuff. I have a lot of friends who are huge fans of your movies. So one of them asked me that I'm absolutely must ask you, do you know if there's sequel of a lead upcoming? We're working on it. We're definitely working on it. Demon and I both want to make it. Let's use them when we meet. We talk about it. I gave him something to read. He's a little busy with Avatar movie, but I'm going to get I'm going to see him again soon. We'll see where it's at. But we would love to make another one. We have ideas on how to do it because it was always built to be a trilogy. And he sees that there's a lot of love for it. It was just weird because it was a Fox movie and then got bought by a Disney, you know, and then they weren't really making Fox movies because they had enough that enough work with their Disney movies. But now they're starting to make some Fox movies like they did Deadpool and some Fox movies are starting to get made. So time might be right for us to come back and do it a little. No, I hope you do soon. But it is. I mean, you do so many different kinds of movies. That's a whole different kind of puzzle, right? No, but it's not a bad one. It's a good. It's a cool. It's one of the few like usually I make kids family kids movies or our rated action horror movies. And that was the first time I got to do a PG 13 movie, which was kind of like a hat on an action, but it was for our families could watch it too. It was kind of like the best of all worlds. Have to ask your boss in city, one of my favorite films of all time. It was a visually stunning world. What are some maybe interesting detailed aspects about you creating that world? This is why you just got to follow your nose and go do something. You know, Jim and I were both in the 3D early on. Like I visited his set for the Terminator 3D ride. Dustle Dawn, I wanted to be 3D. Actually, when they got to the bar, if you watch this from that point on, everything's kind of set up for 3. Everything is shooting into the camera and all that. But the cameras they had for 3D and film were those old shitty ones that were so bad that I went, okay, we can't do it. But I really wanted people to have to put on glasses when they got into the bar. And it was going to turn into a 3D different movie. I got to do that on Spike It's 3D. So when I did Spike It's 3D, I thought, oh, if I get Jim's cameras that he's done for these underwater 3D, you know, documentaries, I can make the first digital 3D film for theaters. And so I did it. 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, we shot all the actors on the green screen for all the game stuff. And we can do a lot of 3D stuff coming at kids' faces with their region. My 3D is not like the kind they have in theaters where it's very polite, minds like theme park 3D for kids doing like that, trying to grab. That's why I was such a big hit. Nobody does 3D like that. But I wanted that. I wanted to follow people's laps, you know. So you remember to go, okay, this is why I'm wearing glasses. I'm wondering why. And when I went to go make my next movie. So this is how crazy is what we shot Spike It's 3. Remember how fast they came out. That was in the summer of 2003. A few months later, once upon a time, Mexico came out. Two number one movies, both were finishing trilogies of mine. And each one starred in Tonyo, Danny Trejo, when I was adding those at the same time, you'd be like, whoa, when they're killing people, they're like with the kids going, hey, family. So it was really fun. It was fun to do very different things and to do like two action movies, or two family movies at the same time. But I was like, okay, what's my next movie going to be? Oh shit, how crazy is this? Okay, so Tonyo is on the set. I'm going to shoot him out in half a day for Spike It's 3D because he's only in the last scenes. On the green screen. Shoot him to lunch. Okay, now go away, put on your desparado outfit, because we owed some shots for one spot on time, Mexico on the green screen. He finished two trilogies in the same day. That's got to be a first, if ever, if ever finished two trilogies in the same day. And it's just kismit. You know, it's just how it happened to happen that day was just luck or the universe or whatever. But I needed to make it 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, oh my god, I already have like three copies of this already. And we just always grab me by the throat. And I like that he was a writer director in a way, because he would not just wrote the comic, but he drew it too. A lot of times it's a different writer, a different comic artist. He's like a real, like a 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 scene. If I shoot this on green screen, the actors on green screen, I can make the backgrounds look just like this. And I can contrast up the actors. And I could get this very graphic look, which sometimes for a window, it's just a white box. So it's even got a sliding scale for budget. If I run out of money, just put the actors in black and white, just put like a white dot behind them for a street light. And that looks just like the book. So I'm going to bring the book to life. So I'll show you how fast we go from development at troublemaker. It was October. Once upon a time, Mexico had come out. I was like, oh, shit, I know how to do this now since city. I'm going to do a test. I want to my green screen here in my studio. You'll see my green screen where I shot all these movies. And I shot, you know, my sister, myself, put it black and white. It looks just like the comic, but it's moving. So I call a comic book artist friend of mine, my gal red. And I said, do you have Frank Miller's number? And he goes, yeah, I do. I'm going to call him up. So I call Frank Miller. Hey, he's Robert Dries. I have a test. I'm going to shave since city. I'm going to be in New York tomorrow. And he's like tomorrow. Okay. Yeah. Sure. Come by. Meet me at this bar. Okay. Book a flight for New York. I fly up there and have my laptop just like this. Yeah. That's good. I go to the bar. I show him what looks like an image from his comic and it starts moving. And he's like, wow, how did you do that? I say, I got my own studio and all this. And then I start, oh man, let's make this movie because no one had the rights to it. He never gave the rights to a studio. A lot of comics. Oh, Warner Brothers bought this a while back, you know, or then you 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 can never be made into a movie. So of course I call him. He's making a great movie. I was like, show him how we can do it. And I go, I know you don't know me. And you're like, you're going to have to, I have to earn your trust for you to give me your baby. But we can make this right away. And he's like, he's all excited for about two seconds. And then he goes, oh no, then we got to write a script. And then the studio is going to have notes. All that shit he's been through before. And it's not like that. I have a whole different set up. I got my own studio in Austin. This is how it's going to be. If you like this idea, I'm going to, you're not going to have to take any risk. Let me take all the risk. I'm going to go write the script myself next month. It's going to be unremarkable because I'm going to write it right. But I'm going to just go to, I'm going to edit through the stories down. I'm going to just take stuff out. Really, I might add a few things to connect it. But I'll write the script in December of myself. No money involved. Then we'll call some actor friends of mine. We'll have him 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 get me the rights then. If you don't like it, keep it. It's a short film to show your friends. It'd be really cool. So he's like, all right, there's nothing on him to do. It's all on me. I write the script in December. January, Josh Arnett, Marley Shelton, come down. Fly Frank in. We're shooting for 10 hours on my green screen. We shoot that opening sequence. Incredible opening sequence. Record his voice over right then, in my little voice over booth. Marley Shelton comes up, why did I hire him to kill me? I don't know. Let's go ask Frank. He's right here. Let's go ask Frank. I want to know myself. So he tells her, and he's like, I want to do this movie. He's already, as I tell you 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 or phenomenal, the shots you do or like beyond any DP's ever done. And the visual look, we've never seen that. I want to just take this and make it move. I just want the comic to move. Any other studio would just go make it look like any gritty crime movie. They would they would miss the point that it's the visuals half of it. I want it to look just like this because it would be the boldest movie anyone's seen because that's how it reads when I read the book. It's like if this was moving, it would be the most phenomenal movie. In fact, Aston do you ever feel like directing? Any any of these short ones. I thought about directing the big fat kill. Maybe it's a short film You should come direct down with shit. You should direct all of them with me because I'm really copying it right I but you should direct it with me. All right, let's go So then January okay, so remember I met him in November. I wrote it in December January we shoot the test took me a couple weeks to do the effects. He loves it I make a meeting with Bruce Willis show it to Bruce Willis But so cool about doing that opening scene is that any actor I show it to now I show him the book which is awesome You'd be playing this character, but look at this test. Let me show you the book what it looked like before I turned this test into a test Watches it Josh our net voice over music titles come on First name on the screen Bruce Willis and you look you're in the credits. You have to do it now Man, if I stay in it, right? He's like shit, man. This is great. I'm in he said wow go get everyone else from that was just easy to get And we were filming the movie so February Right Building the few little sets we had like the bar. I told Frank. We don't need to build a bar But I'm gonna go ahead and build a bar so we have a place to go have script meetings Everything else will be green screen will build fake steps and things out of green So we're doing that and I'm casting the first one. We're shooting the movie by March the beginning of March and I remember because my son was born March 3rd and I was in LA for his birth because I was also Recording the orchestra for the score. I wrote somehow in the past few months for kill bill - That's how much stuff was going on. Yeah, you know, that's like when you just Let it flow You're just riding the wave. You're not doing any of that So that's what's by staying in that like urgent there's always the deadlines are just pushing you to create stuff And we shot the movie so fast and record time now not only that I shot a whole other movie that year I shot The adventures of Shark Boy Laver girl with kids that came out two months after Cincinnati the next year within less than a year since it He was out just shooting and then parallel with Cincinnati. That's hilarious. That's great Yeah, like sometimes we be shooting with the kids and then the afternoon Redgar Howard come and some of the Cincinnati girls to finish You know shooting stuff that we needed to film. It was just insane how fast we had to move. I was doing it my I was editing. I just edited it and then I would scan the artwork into the computer and I would edit the storyboards with the sound effects and and I would do the voiceover I would imitate Mickey and I would imitate Bruce and lay out the house fast it was gonna move and you were like wow So now we have a template with the real drawings and the lighting on how we're gonna do it It was funny as I I could do pretty good and Bruce Willis because I know his career so long If you're doing his voiceover and he would hear my guide voice for the timing He'd be like That means that you can't tell That was me but just do that I mean it sounds like me first of all why haven't films like that been Made was 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 and one of the notes to descend because it felt like you were descending in this dark world And you don't come out to the end of the movie. You're just like in this world where all these layers of unreality Like water doesn't photograph that way snow doesn't for but it's there and you're seeing and you're seeing the actors So you're just really it's like a dream world. Yeah, so I was really into it And I did test for the most difficult shots first like how do I get his His tape to glow in the dark like in the comics with still in the shadow and I realized oh He's fluorescent tape and a fluorescent light that way I can keep it we can still key it like I started just doing my own visual effects like that early on because I knew Technology was changing so fast that I would need to just know how to do it like I'm like a magician Shooting digital nobody wanted to touch digital back then DP's were all afraid of digital They didn't want to learn something so so I had to D.P. It so me photographing it and like so fun it cut because I mean to to light like you have to have that light out of frame right now But I could bring the lights in right here as long as it was they're not crossing it I'm just gonna take it out of the green anyways. I could have the coolest light on everybody cool edge lights You can have an edge light back here an edge light back here a fill light here Like in any eraser. I just take him out. Can you educate me and people curious about this? Oh like what was the power of light? When you're telling a story when you're creating a feeling of experience like what's the artistry of that? Well, if you look at the drawings - sometimes it's the absence of light like you would see this face But then this would be completely black, but you would still see my eye. Yeah, which is like impossible, right? But you believe it when you see it because it's there so things like that were a lot of the tricks I tried first because I like that about it. It's like you have a guy completely backlit So there's no light on his face, but yet his glasses are glowing white Yeah, so we'd put florist and tape in there hit that was a light then we could turn it white later The black and white really helps and then just up in the contrast But I mean, it's just something that you have a feeling for but you're able to try it In fact when I took it to George Lucas who George Lucas said this to me early on because I was worthy only guy shooting digital He said man, it's so good. You live in Austin That's why I'm in Marin County Because when you live outside of this box the valet Hollywood you think outside of the box automatically You're just gonna stumble upon innovations and he was right. It was like we're yeah What's this why why are we shooting digital? Let's shoot digital. Why are we shooting digital 3d? Let's do that Why don't we just use green screen for the background? You just start innovating because you're away from any month saying Hey, you can't do it that way, which they would say if I was in LA So we just came up with a whole other method So I took him since city to check out the first thing I was gonna show at Comic Con. He said um Now this will really show people what digitals capable of this really shows how I'm on guard You can get with that you that you can never have done that on film, you know, and so by me versus myself in that technology early I was able to make a movie like that and then everyone had to play catch up, you know, so you should always just follow here That's why some people say don't use those curtains as I'm gonna work just blow past those guys go innovate your own thing because Sometimes not knowing is better, you know being too naive to Like don't you know you shouldn't have been able to make that movie that way people with people would say like that That's how did you make my right for seven thousand dollars? You know, it's impossible I was like why do you keep using that word because it can't be impossible if I did it because I'm not that smart And it's like saying how did you get to the topic Mount Everest? It's impossible. Well, I just kept walking I didn't realize it was kind of how to slow but I didn't realize it was going up that high Yeah, you've talked about like a big part of your approach to filmmaking to life is manifesting Manifesting the reality you want in fact, I should sort of comment and I'd love to ask about manifesting that You ask me at the beginning of this conversation do you consider yourself a creative person? Just sort of reflect on that because I was very uncomfortable answering that yeah, I noticed a little bit and I was like I'm gonna free you up so you're never uncomfortable again. It's scary just to say that about about yourself There's a lot of people who go you're not an artist. You're not a creative but none you're just saying I'm an artist I'm a creative person, but that's an artist too, isn't it? Artists isn't necessarily the guy with a The French mustache and the funny. Yeah, that's not necessarily one art artists are regular people Yeah, and regular people relate to art that's imperfect if you can make art that's perfect don't want to relate to it So when you think about it like that you go well, I can make him perfect art So yeah, I'm an artist and if you have doubt You're an artist that's an artist real artist. I always wonder if they're good enough So you are an artist just by the fact that you had uncomfortable saying it you're a real artist Yeah, and there's some degree. I don't know if you could speak to this, but um You know, there's a fear of creating shitty things, you know, I've created a lot of really shitty things in my life and it always feels like That's really important to do. Okay, but you're judging something that did you have no business judging right like I have so many people That's why I like making movies on purpose that have less money and less time on purpose Like the biggest movie I said all time and Netflix is we can be heroes I told them I don't want to spend more than $50 million. I know you all want to give me 80 But I want to be a hero and come in 50 because one you don't make it better and then two you you'll make three of them instead of just what I don't want to just go spend the farm and how many filmmakers will do that don't try to get as much money as they can But when they're spending less it's a win-win situation And you have more creative freedom because they're gonna leave you alone you do whatever you want So I I like the creative limitations that come from less money. That's why I like brass knuckle films like we're gonna make him for less So that they are better not because they're not to make them shitty So many people have come up to me and said um You know what part I love in your movie now tell me some scene. I'm like oh, well, that's because we ran out of sun And we had to like do that jump with just Him jumping on a pad three times or whatever it is It's something that you fumbled together and that's what they're drawn to they're drawn to that imperfect thing And so I wouldn't judge it because somebody's You know if you called your movie shitty, that's like John Carpenter say yeah, nobody liked the thing and 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 if you words we use on ourselves are very powerful So if you say well, you know, I'm kind of an artist sometimes and I make a lot of shitty stuff Well, that's kind of that's kind of be your lot in life You know, I'm pretty good shape for a director. It's not because I'm operating the camera because I work out right But I always hated working out. I was not into sports I was a filmmaker. I was a cartoonist In high school. I was really tall. They would say come work come be in our team. We need so small school We need you know, I don't need a lot of planning these things. I'm an artist. There's a line in the faculty That's what was my line to my coaches when they would say you got to come run with everybody I would say I don't think a person should run unless he's being chased I get that to learn so the life would character because that's the guy I identified with. He's there with this camera and that was me. So I hated it and then because I had it was a cartoonist, you know, drawing like this for hours, four hours. My back would go out. Like out for a month. It would just go out from being so tall and crunched over. And then when I started making movies, operating the camera into instead of camping, every year would go out to where I would need quarters of those shots to get up again to from filming or just be out for a month. And on Spike Kids 2, Ricardo Montelbun had bad back surgery that 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 and standing goes, you have to work out, Robert, you have to work out. I was like, yeah, okay, yeah, I know, I know. And so then I thought, okay, next year I'm working with Stallone, last Stallone, last Stallone, how do you get in shape? Because I need to get in shape. My back's always going out. He goes, get the trainer. Anyone we ever saw in Hollywood got in shape? They had a trainer. I say, even you, everybody, oh, I need a trainer. He has a trainer. He's like, well, shit, if you can't even train on your own, then what would it was mortal men have? So I got a trainer and guess what happened? Heated it. I would feel sick when he's coming over because he hates working it. And then some years of doing that, I just can't stand it. I know it's good for my health. So the desire is there. So if you can't accomplish something in your life, it's not a lack of desire. Like if you want to be more creative, it's not a lack of desire, it's a lack of identity. Like you're like the fact that you went, you're comfortable about saying creative, it's because there's a lack of identity there. You have lots of desire. You got to get the identity up and then suddenly you're making, you're making shit. So a friend of mine from Mexico, she comes over, I have to stop smoking. My doctor said I have to stop smoking for my health. So I have some not smoking right now. So I've been smoking since I was eight years old. I said, well, you're going to go back to smoking because you just told me your identity is a smoker. So right now you're a smoker who's not smoking. What's going to happen eventually? You have to say I'm a non-smoker, you know, like just that lesson I've forgotten. You have to say I'm a non-smoker. I'm a non-smoker. What does a non-smoker do? If you believe you're a non-smoker, you hate smoke. Start choking at the smell of smoke. Okay, I'll try that. She walks off and I go, shit, I forgot about my own. I wonder where in my life I'm going to apply that. Working out. Of course, my God, I hate working out. No wonder I am so miserable. I'll tell my trainer and anyone to listen. I can't stand working out. I don't understand sports. So that day I said, I'm an athlete. I'm an athlete. That's the last thing I would ever call myself all through my entire life. This was 2012. I'm an athlete. By the next day, not only did my life completely change, and it's easier if it's opposite day. Like if you're just doing it by degrees, that's bullshit. You got to go complete opposite. Because if there's like a donut, you know, if you say, well, I'm going to only half of it, you got to go, no, I'm going to get an apple. Absidate, much easier. Not only did I change my life working out, I didn't ever need it a trainer. I've not had a trainer since all these years. Because I'm an athlete. I'll just do what I didn't do. What does an athlete do? An athlete loves working out. An athlete will make time to work out. And they'll eat right. I would never be the person that would call themselves an athlete. But that's how much it can change your life by changing your identity. So if you want to be more creative, you've already got that in your that desire. You've got enough of that. You don't need more desire. You need more identity. So you got to say, I'm a creative person with a straight face. So when I say, hey, are you going to be a creative person? 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. It doesn't make sense to me how manifesting works, but it does seem to work. Like basically visualizing, visualizing a path towards a certain kind of future. I guess everything around you, everything within you kind of makes way for that, makes way for the possibility of that. It's weird. It's weird, but it kind of it's a kind of a nice to know that you can do that, but you have to just have that conviction and just say, start with a label. Yeah, the star, the double or the label you just gave yourself, like I changed my label. My label was I hate working out. I'm an athlete. I'm an athlete. Not a non-lathlete anymore. I'm changing my label and you get so inspired. You know what to do because 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 had to go get hypnotized or anything. It was literally, I just told myself, if I could do that, go from a guy who doesn't want to work out, hates it, hates it. I had the desire. I was already hiring the guy. I lacked the identity. As soon as I changed my identity, boom. One of the things for me like that is probably music, just playing guitar. Are you a musician? Yeah, I'm a musician. I would definitely not. I'm going along with it now, but if we're honestly for just. You wouldn't have said that. I wouldn't have said that. But I heard you rip. I'm fricking guitar. And I've heard you play kind of amazing in all different kinds of context. But I should be like freaking centennial because I've had a guitar in my hands. I was a kid, but since I'm not a full-time musician, I don't get to play it that often. So I'm not as good as I should be. But you know, when you apply yourself to just rehearse for a couple of shows, you book some shows. This is me just like playing our first arena show opening for George Lopez. That was crazy to be on the stages where you hear rows that you saw them. Now you're seeing what their point of view was. It's a pleasure. 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 like terrified because you're playing pretty complicated things. I've seen you play live. Yeah. And I messed up a bunch of times because you don't want to focus on that. And you just go like, okay, I got it through it because when you're up there, it's not that you're like screaming nervous, but your hands will just won't work anymore. Something will happen. But that happens there, everybody. If you really watch even the best in their live performances, watch really close. And you see they screw up a couple of things, but you just want notes that just go right through it. It's like it's about the live performance. And that's how you know it's real. So I think if you can really just lean into it more, really work on the identity part because you've got the desire. You want to play guitar. But as soon as you say, yeah, but I can't play live, you just chopped off your leg at the start of the race. If you say, I don't know, you just chopped off your other hand. You're doing this to yourself. You're literally doing this to yourself. I mean, just you, I mean, anybody who pauses, who hesitates, you don't have to have doubts. Why would you have a doubt? Because you know the process now. It's like, if I don't know how to do something, I know how to figure it out. Like 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, you 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 follow my lap. I trust the process. You don't have to, you don't have to know. So if you trust the process that you'll figure it out. But here's the thing, like sometimes you fail and there's audience. Yeah. Then you get four rooms. Yeah. Yeah. And then what happened? And then what happens? Right. Don't blink. It's the don't blink. And then you go sip through the failure. Exactly. And you go, wait a minute. What did I get out of that? I've done that a bunch. It was great. Look, what's the worst that can happen? You go on a stage and you bomb. It's not going to be the first stage. And it's one of those you can talk about so that when you do the next one and it all, sometimes they all go right. I've had a couple of shows. We did, we did a couple of shows where we had video cameras set up for the second day. I said, let's not film the first day because we're going to be fine and just fine in our feet. Let's film the second day. First day. It's fucking flawless. Uh, flawless because no cameras. It's like you just go. Second day, we were in his end of it because we had just done it. It felt like the second take, you know, it just didn't have magic. And that's the one that's recorded. And we're like, oh, kicking ourselves. We didn't film both nights. We should have filmed both nights. I love how much of a mess this human existence life is. Yeah. Uh, you've talked about the importance of journaling because living is really living. I love that phrase. I came up with that because it's like, wow, I see so many people who get it after you for like filming a concert and they go, live in the moment. I'm like, dude, it's counterintuitive. The moment goes by like this. Yeah. We're not going to remember this. In fact, we taped it. Thank God. Because later on, it's going to be a file photo of me remembering you three pound me computer. All I'm going to have is a file photo. You may be in a suit. And you picture me in maybe a black t-shirt. And the metadata narrative is going to say how to great talk about if we remember creativity. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, like a brain doesn't remember. But when I pull up old home movies, like show my kids that I just found and they're like, they don't remember it. I don't remember filming it. And it's like new adventures of it becomes iconic. And it sticks in her head and all their jokes are based on old things that we used to do and say, so reliving is reliving. So keeping a journal is very important because I found that anything at past 15 years on, it's like I'm reading someone else's journal. I'm like, I didn't even, no, that's where I got that guitar. I thought I bought that guitar. It was given to me at $10,000 Santana. It was given to me my birthday by the studio that I made that movie. Actually, I now remember that. It's like crazy, which you don't remember. And it's the brain is very, it's not a very reliable computer. It's made out of vegan butter. That's a really profound idea that so much of our life is lived through replaying our memories. And then watching stuff is one of the ways to sort of refresh, give some more, you know, texture and details. Makes it iconic. It makes it iconic in your life and part of your life. Otherwise, it just went by. It went by. Like I'll ask people like we just had a relief what do we do last week? What do we do last Wednesday? like I can tell you because I wrote it down when I'm going to remember and then when you see when you go through your journal like I go back and I find wow life changing thing happened Friday another life changing thing I didn't know at the time till now I know that that really sent me on him happened Saturday and another big freaking thing happened on Sunday like they come in threes sometime you start being able to predict the future a little bit because you see the patterns and it's pretty wild to do that and I've talked to people big group of people 500 people how many people here journal two hands three hands I couldn't believe it it's like man you guy if anything I'm going to part on you is journal your life is way more interesting you think because it's not going to feel like anything while it's going by but in retrospect you look back like I can just go through I keep a journal one file per year so I started a new one in 2025 if I want to look up like I'm going to do a directors chair episode I look up Michael man Michael man Michael man all the conversations we had since 1994 that I wrote down that I felt and it's like oh my god I can't believe we said that that's how I knew about that thing with quit and I forgot about that story with quit and saying I pull up this and I'd forgotten that because from the moment I asked the back question to the success it can 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 he thought it wasn't he didn't think that was the one for him yeah and there's a I don't know when it when it's private journaling there's an honesty there's an innocence that about like the dreams you have about the future the conceptions you have about the future I mean that's what this thing is journal is a journal it's just a journalist like but the profundity like he's out of it it's crazy yeah you didn't and so much I figured out then I'm I'm talking like a professor by the end of that like I've people come up to me and they're asking me all these questions about stuff I wrote in there and I'm like I wrote that in that book shit I was smart back then what happened I don't remember half of that but I think that it's the same thing when you go to teach someone your mouth opens and stuff comes out I'm always taping myself like when I go to give a talk because that's also the pipe working someone else is talking through sometimes so the act of sharing that's why I've always liked to share information because the feedback loop is insane like me inspiring Daisy DJ to go right he writes the script in three days comes back tells me now I'm doing that method and it's like wow people come back with their version and I love telling my kids stuff that I learned that I wish I could tell myself but I can't take a time machine close to thing is telling your kid because then they can take that information process so many times they've come back and said wow dad the lesson you taught us about this is really it's really become big in our minds yeah what was that they tell me I'm like I never told you that they said yeah you told us well I told you maybe 10% of that all the rest you added oh yeah well we embellished it over like they they turn it into something else and it's like wow that's so cool but yeah that thing about reliving like that was what one of my favorite was just yeah my mom turned in 75 and not winning to do anything for 75th birthday I said why not she goes the whole family's gonna we have 10 kids they're all gonna want to do some for your 75th birthday nothing can top my 65th they're like what we do on your 65th I can't remember even I'm going to orchestrate it all she goes oh you flew everyone in from all over the country you give me a car I gotta have a journal of that so I'm sure I video I go back 10 years I see what tape I had it on find the tape pop the tape in forgot about all this stuff so I cut together a 10 minute version of it showed it at her 75th birthday just watching the old one everybody was like oh my god look how young everybody was like oh small beneath this isn't if you 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 gonna mean that she's gonna 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 that you know my kids just love watching their old home movies they they hardly remember any of it but even a VHS to them is virtual reality because compared to our memories it is virtual reality they're like leaning into the screen to see what's around the corner and they're remembering the place and the sounds and they say oh he left the we left the living room it's like we're there like wow I was always afraid they would see this old footage you know the dog shit kind of camera was that this is the limitations of you know you put up one of those files on your screen it's like this being on your laptop now that's how low res shit was back then that didn't matter it's like compared to our memories that stuff living is reliving like pull up that's shoot as much as you can take as many pictures but bright the journal because you'll have a picture swear you're not gonna know what it's from even 10 years from now you won't know what that picture's from you read the diary you go oh that's what that is oh my god you can piece together all these things that are important to you or that become more important with time actually and you know it's important later compared to what's been happening at the time to add on top of that so journaling is the kind of raw or like home films is a raw projection of what's going on in the moment I think it's also really powerful because I've done that it's to do a high effort description of where your life is for you just for yourself so sometimes journaling is like low effort yeah sometimes it's just I just want to mark that you know we have this conversation I had to go do something in five into that met somebody that I know last night I met somebody that's gonna be life changing I'm gonna write a little bit more on that because I can just now I know but I'm gonna just record it so later if I look it up so one of the cool things you could do is you know like for example somebody Jamie mr. Beast does does these videos which are great I think I think it's a great exercise to do for yourself which is a video here records for himself that he doesn't look at to be published 20 years from now this is a message to myself 20 years from now here's where I hope you end up you're basically a younger version of yourself speaking to an older version yeah and then you get you know time flies and like you get to a point where it's like holy shit it has been 10 years it has been 20 years you get to listen to a younger version of yourself like you it would have been hilarious if you shot videos like that to yourself because I was just like the incredible junior year career has been on and just to think about that like the delta the difference between what your dreams were where you ended up usually you outdo yourself in many ways sometimes your life goes in a totally different trajectory that's and the result is kind of funny it's a it's a nice it's a nice illustration of the non-linearity of life I would film stuff like I have my kids I couldn't do it but I would film my kids saying hey turn to the camera now I'm saying hey Rebel it's me Rebel I'm gonna Rebel in the future yeah so you have shot something like that yeah and then they show them like cool like that 10 years later and they they're like whoa just to see it talking to them and saying yeah and I'm gonna do this thing where I would film them watching it and then pan off so that 10 years later I could get hey Rebel him reacting pan off to the new Rebel watching it it's just like keeps going so I have one like that where it just keeps panning and they're watching themselves within the movie within the movie within the movie it's like an ongoing project you know it's just so fun to just play with memory and make you realize how fast time moves and to go they go like I kind of remember that but I don't remember being that tiny yeah I had that memory just like wild how time moves and it makes them feel much more precious about how quick time moves and how important every little moment is because you see the fragility of it too you know does it make you sad break your heart that you know the number of memories we get to create is finite this life ends eventually the story is over I had this theory but I'm gonna put this in the movie I don't think I've ever seen this before because I was woke up from a dream and it was like trying to remember it you know you're like kind of so so real but the if you don't write it down right away right it kind of fades away but you while you're dreaming it it's really real and it's like come see the walls but time 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 and your consciousness after you die you wake up and your next consciousness getting ready to move into whatever your next body is and you're like wow is a filmmaker had five kids and oh well it would be a fish now you know it's like it's like a dream it's like that gone that way and it's like that's what past lives are they're like distant memories like a dream that's faded away that's why you barely feel remnants of it do I feel sad about the when I tell people they flip out when I tell that like I say I want a character to be like that like he's dying he's like I don't want to forget this dream I don't want to forget don't let me wake up don't let me wake up but you forget especially the moment you try and tell somebody you tell the next fish oh yeah the next thing you'll be a fish next but uh uh yeah yeah it feels like I'm almost sad about it but that it just makes you even more double down that be precious about the life you're in now waiting to be recorded recorded what do you think is the meaning of this whole thing of life why are we here oh wait I mean I really feel like uh my kids and I were just talking about this last night we were just blown away we did this a staring astrology thing was the oldest former astrology just nails each person and it's like yeah because when you have a kid you realize right away this isn't my kid this is not my I'm just in charge of him it's a completely different soul he's a different soul that ended up in my hands. It's not there's physics. physical characteristics to get passed on because of just how biology works, even sometimes posture and movement is the same, but the actual person is somebody else, and all the kids have five kids and have nine brothers and sisters, they're all different. And you realize we made a pact in the past life to gather together because every time it's like, it's so good. You were born in this family because you were given free reign to go find who you're really supposed to be, and you find out everyone is doing what they were supposed to be doing, but it's cool. Almost like this clarity you get by just saying it. They now know that they were always supposed to be like this creative person, and now they can double down on it because they know that's who they were supposed to be. They don't have to have any doubt anymore. They don't have to wonder, well, am I supposed to be more business-minded or can I be creative? And that's kind of frivolous. Is that a real job? Can I do that? Now they realize, no, you're supposed to be doing that for these, these, these, these reasons. And now they can double down. You can skip all that and just decide, I feel like I want to be that person. So I'm just going to declare I am that person. And as soon as you say it, you are that. And tomorrow your activities will conform to that. That's how powerful that decision is. So when you walk out of here, it's going to be with a complete commitment, I'm a technical and creative person like my first boss. I'm unstoppable. Because my boss told me that and he was right. I became a technical and creative and you're just unstoppable. You can just keep going and you just go, I'm unstoppable. That's me. You're going to use your powers for bad, but you've just changed your life by just declaring that. And I'm also a creative person who lives his life creatively. I'm going to find creative ways to use that technology. If somebody says, you're not the same kind of artist I was expecting, that's their own opinion. Don't blink. Just keep going, you know, all these things that you've learned that people were supposed to tell you along the way, they're telling you for a reason. Anytime you got pushed, like if you go back to your life at your really critical moments in your life, where you went that way instead of that way, there was probably somebody there who said something to you that kind of pushed you. I there was a, it was one guy when I was in high school, it was like senior year, I wrote a paper. There wasn't a great writer at all. I wrote a paper for Latin Americans that he's class gave it to the teacher. And he said, wow, you you're going to be rich and famous in four years, it's based on what I read, because I really flight home like 17 or 18, four years later, I didn't Mariachi and I went to him later at a reunion and I said, you called it, you said, I was going to be, why did you say that? And he's like, I said, you look like he would never say that to someone. You think he would own it and say, oh yeah, I knew it. I told you. No, he was like, he's like, I didn't even know who that was, he was like asking, I feel like he never would have said that in a million years. So again, sometimes things come out of our mouth, it's not us, it comes through us. So 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 closing the pipe, but I don't know if I'm really creative, I don't know if I'm really a businessman and you're just closing the pipe, you're not going to let it flow. Just be a good pipe, just say, I just want to be a, I just want to be a good pipe, clean, open. And then that's when the magic happens. And no matter what, don't blink, don't blink, no matter how many that dude was getting so much shit thrown at him, I wish you knew that time period, because then you wouldn't, you would go like, yeah, that's right, it was unbelievable. I can't even convey. There was no internet and stuff back then. This was like literal press, reviews, public. It was like, why are they targeting this guy, you know, they just did not like, he just had unprecedented success and was a really great guy and was making amazing shit. So it was the triple threat of make people jealous, you know, pissed off. Well, he's one of the great artists of all time. So are you. It's a huge honor to talk to you. Thank you for everything you're doing in the world, for creating the world and for inspiring millions of people to also be creators in the world. And for your new project that's bringing people in Robert, as I told you, I'm a huge fan. I appreciate that. I just talked to you about it. So great talking with you. Great questions. You're going to change your life. Thank you, brother. Million dollars. Yeah. Right there. Thank you for listening to this conversation with Robert Rodriguez. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Alfred Hitchcock. In feature films, the director is God. In documentary films, God is the director. Thank you for listening. And hope to see you next time.