Interview with Mexican director Robert Rodriguez
Discovering that Robert Rodriguez, director of such postmodern blood'n'guts classics as El Mariachi, Desperado and From Dusk Till Dawn, has made a children's movie is rather like finding out that Sam Peckinpah once had an option on the sequel to Bambi. It just doesn't seem right.
But after seeing Spy Kids, Rodriguez's Willy Wonka-meets-James Bond tale of the children of retired spies who follow in their parents' footsteps and end up saving their lives, it begins to make sense. All Rodriguez's films, even the ones where everyone dies at the end, suggest he's the sort of person who checks for secret doorways whenever entering someone's house. Spy Kids, now topping the charts in America and about to open in the UK, is simply that mind revealed in perfect clarity.
"This is the kind of movie I used to make before Mariachi for 10 years, from the age of 12," he explains. "I'm from a family of 10 kids, and I always used to put my siblings in my movies because they were there. And the films would always win contests - people loved the combination of little kids doing action and comedy. The only reason Mariachi was an action movie was that the Spanish video market, which it was originally made for, wanted action. Even then we made it goofy - it was about a guitar guy, not an ex-cop or a road warrior type. If you watch this and then see the other movies, you can see how similar they are in tone, in the way that nobody could take them seriously."
Rodriguez's career sounds a lot more fun than that of most Hollywood directors. Having rented his body for medical tests to fund El Mariachi while still at film school, Rodriguez shot the film in a Mexican border town with no crew and no professional actors and relied on a lot of favours to make it happen.
For the opening sequence, set in a jail, the warders took all the prisoners outside so he could shoot inside the cells. (One prisoner made the most of the situation and bolted.) He says the whole thing cost $7,000. The Spanish never bought the film, but Columbia Studios did, and since then Rodriguez has resisted the lure of the big-budget movie to make films that cost next to nothing, on condition he has complete artistic freedom - almost unheard of in Hollywood.
"Even with Spy Kids, the same approach I took with Mariachi applies," says Rodriguez. "Inspector Gadget cost $90m, 102 Dalmatians was $85m, and this was $36m, with more than a third of the movie being effects. The first person you usually hire on an effects-based movie like this is an effects supervisor. I didn't - I wanted to figure out how to do it myself. It's just a case of being more creative: it looks like an expensive movie, but it's all magic tricks. I edited it in my garage, and it had to feel personal or it would be like one of those studio-made kids' movies that are just awful. It's a big home movie, basically."
Rodriguez is still determined to keep it personal. On his second movie, 1994's Roadracers, he got a crew, and didn't like it. "I thought, why are all these guys standing around doing nothing? I'd rather have the money to buy more time and get rid of them. And even though I produce my pictures now, there's still too many people. But now the studio just gives me the money and I go make the movie, and I use so little of their money they don't gripe."
When El Mariachi came out in 1992, Rodriguez was asked how on earth he could make an action film for $7,000; now all he's asked is how he could make Spy Kids for $36m. It all comes down, he says, to growing up in the kind of family where every cent was accounted for. "We always figured out how to get around spending money in our house - it was in our blood. Now I can't even spend other people's money."
When Columbia first signed up Rodriguez and gave him a $2,000 weekly allowance for a smart Hollywood hotel and expensive restaurants, he asked if he could sleep on his office floor, eat burgers and keep the money to put his brother through college. "Film-makers screw themselves when they think they need to get as much money as they can," says Rodriguez. "The studio starts changing things to make sure it gets its money back, the film-maker ends up compromising it so much that he hates it, and the audience thinks it sucks, so it's no good for anybody."
Rodriguez has turned down a series of big-budget movies - X-Men, Superman Lives and Planet of the Apes - because "they weren't going to be fun", and gone back to his roots. El Mariachi was always intended as the first film in a series of three; Desperado was the second in 1995, but since then nothing has been heard from the music man. Finally he's coming back. "We're making it - I was writing it in bed this morning. Antonio Banderas is in it, and it's kind of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of the Mariachi series, a big, sprawling movie called Once Upon a Time in Mexico. It's awesome. I can't wait."
Even El Mariachi himself, Carlos Gallardo, is to return to star and direct in a film Rodriguez wrote for him. "It's called Curandero, and he's a Mexican witch doctor. It goes into the bowels of black magic in Mexico City. Anything goes there - it's so cool."
All this from the mind of a big kid, who admits freely that the little boy in Spy Kids - nervous, physically awkward, lost in his own world - was based on himself at that age. Rodriguez is living proof that never growing up can have its advantages. "I'm probably the only guy who really enjoys being in the business, because I get to make my own rules. I cut my own trailers, make my own ads, live and work at home in Texas... It's ridiculous. What did I do in a past life?"
Spy Kids is released on Friday.