#2310 - Robert Rodriguez

Joe Rogan (0:03)

The Joe Rogan Experience. Trained by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

Robert Rodriguez (0:12)

Oh, man.

Joe Rogan (0:13)

Very, very nice to meet you.

Robert Rodriguez (0:14)

Incredible to meet you.

Joe Rogan (0:15)

Fucking gigantic fan.

Robert Rodriguez (0:17)

Man, I appreciate that.

Joe Rogan (0:18)

I just love what you've done, because anybody who could start their career off and make a movie for $7,000 is a hero. That's just an incredible accomplishment to make a movie that people still watch and talk about today for $7,000.

Robert Rodriguez (0:35)

It was an experience, for sure. I had a really good plan, and it backfired. So I tried to right away, when it worked in a different way, I wanted to share that experience. I wrote a book called Rebel Without a Crew that really inspired filmmakers.

Joe Rogan (0:52)

You did the audio for it, too.

Robert Rodriguez (0:54)

Just recently, I couldn't believe it. I hadn't read it since I wrote it, and I had forgotten a lot of the details. Now I can see why it inspired so many people, because when you're in your early 20s, six months feels like six years. When you read it now and go, oh my God, from inception to making it, penniless by myself, to toast to the town. It's like that. It was unbelievable. I couldn't wait to shout from the rooftops to all the other filmmakers like me who thought they couldn't get in. How I did it exactly. I wrote a book about it. And I'd read it now and I go, oh my God, this is an impossible story. I keep laughing during the audio book going, okay, what you're reading right now never happened before. And it never happened again. It was like lightning in a bottle. And you would see every time I thought something wasn't going my way, and I was really bummed about it, within weeks, an upshot beyond. And it really taught you that you just got to follow your instinct. If you have an idea, go. Even if you know no one else has ever done this before. And you'll end up someplace different. I want to ask you about that, because I know you end up doing the same thing a lot. Where it's not manifesting so much in that way. You're just kind of following your nose. You're doing something that just sounds ridiculous. Even when I try to tell one of my teachers what I was going to go do that summer, I said, I'm going to go try and make a movie. And he goes, oh yeah? Who's going to be your director of photography? And I said, I didn't want to tell him I'm the whole crew. And he said, I'm the DP. Oh, the actors are going to hate you. You're going to be there setting up your lights all the time. I'm like, okay, I'm not going to tell him I'm the rest of the crew. It was just because I had read this advice that meant to be good advice, but it sounded really depressing. It was someone had written, if you want to write screenplays, write three full screenplays, throw them away. Your fourth screenplay will be it. It's okay if you're writing a screenplay. It's very hard to write a screenplay. It's hard to write. It's like three huge meals that you're just going to dump. Why not? Okay, write the script, throw it away, but while you're throwing it away, why not also shoot it and direct it? Light it yourself, do the sound yourself, so that you're training yourself on each one. So I thought, where can I do this where I can get paid to do that? Like my own film school where I get paid to learn. So I discovered that there were these straight to Spanish movies that are action movies. You go to the, you've seen the H-E-Bs around here. There used to be a video section to rent movies, and there was a Spanish section. The Spanish section had movies like, they were just action movies, they had a soap star. They were made for 30 grand, 40 grand. Shot on video, no action, but it had a title that looked kind of like a US title like Perros Ravillosos Dos, written like Lethal Weapon 2 And you would rent it and be like, just crap, people in an apartment talking. So I looked at the back of those and I thought, we can make a better one, probably for like $5,000. Because I had made a short film called Bedhead by myself with a wind-up camera. It was 8 minutes and it cost $800. So I thought, multiply it times 10, I could do an 80-minute movie for $8,000. But with dialogue and everything, I bet I could get it for under 8, probably more like 5 or 6 Let's go shoot a movie, write it, shoot it. I'll be the whole crew. So I learn all the jobs and then we'll sell it to the Spanish home video market. No one will know it's me, because it's Robert Rodriguez, a bunch of Robert Rodriguez's. I'll make three of those, because I was so young, I was winning a lot of film festivals with short films. But I thought, if someone sees one of my short films that's winning all these awards, they're not going to hire me to do a short film, they're going to hire me to do a feature, and I've never practiced that. So I need practice. So I'm going to practice three films, take the best scenes from them, have a demo reel. With the money I make from them, I don't know how much I can sell it for, so I got to make it really cheap. Let's just do the first one, then we'll know. Then I'll take that money and make my first American independent film, and that'll be more serious. Because I threw it away like that, I just thought, well, let me just make something fun.