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Adventures in fun raising

January 10, 2004

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Game boy: Robert Rodriguez.

Renegade DIY filmmaker Robert Rodriguez tells Stephanie Bunbury he doesn't want to make movies if it feels like work.

Famously, Robert Rodriguez does his stuff on the cheap.

El Mariachi, the film about a killer with a violin that propelled him on to Hollywood's it-list in 1992, was reputedly made for a mere $US9000 ($11,700). It had no stars, was shot on video and largely on the hoof, using such locations as a Mexican prison where the inmates were moved into the yard so that the persuasive young director could shoot in the cells. One escaped, but that's another story.

Anyway, El Mariachi had a kind of vitality you don't get in a Hollywood studio film. Columbia bought it, cleaned it up, transferred it to film and watched it gross a couple of million at US box offices. Robert Rodriguez, the tyro from Texas, was on his way. He was the instant poster boy for every aspiring filmmaker with no money and a flash idea.

In person, there is still plenty about Robert Rodriguez at 35 that suggests a big, cute, fleshy kid who wanted to see if he could make a movie. He arrives for an interview in Venice wearing one of his extensive cowboy hat collection - he has bought some new, soft ones that can be squashed in a suitcase - and chuckles a lot more than directors are usually inclined to do. And he is the only director I have yet met who breaks into his own flow to draw a cartoon strip. At school, he is explaining laconically, he was the guy sitting in the back, working with such quiet concentration that nobody noticed what it was. "I'd be making flip cartoon books. I'll make you one right now!"

He grabs a press kit for his film Once Upon a Time in Mexico and giggles naughtily. "This is exactly what I'd be doing all day in class," he says, drawing a narrative from one page to the next. "The guy would explode somewhere around here. Then his head would go bouncing." Thumbnail heads move across some more pages. "Then on the last bounce it would just splatter and the blood would be very slow motion. There you go! You videotape this and add some sound effects and you'd have my first movies. I was very meticulous about it."

Even now, with three semi-splatter westerns about the vengeful mariachi and a trilogy of Spy Kids films behind him, Rodriguez says he feels like he's making films in much the same way as he started. On Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over, his latest film, he served as writer, director, editor, producer, cinematographer and composer. Set in the middle of a video game, it is a film bristling with effects. "The studio just gives me the money and I go make the movie. I use so little of their money they don't gripe." Meaning: he stays in control. After El Mariachi and the success of the first Spy Kids film, Rodriguez knocked back requests to direct blockbusters including X-Men, the ultimately aborted Superman sequel and Planet of the Apes. On films of that size, he says, the studios are "all over you because they want to get their money back".

Rodriguez's priority is to have fun. He says he has expunged the word "work" from his life. "I changed it to 'play'. And I play all the time. Every night I play!" Not that his idea of play would be everyone's. On Spy Kids, he decided he would do his own special effects and set about learning how to do it. "I like stacking the deck against us so we have less time and less money and I'm forced to be more creative. That makes it a lot more fun and it makes the movie better."

The first Spy Kids was edited in his garage. For Spy Kids 2, he used the garage again when he was recording the music; he was able to set up a symphony orchestra in there. He does all his films at home in Texas, where he grew up, with his wife of 12 years, Elizabeth Avellan, as his producer. Like Peter Jackson, that other self-taught effects director, he has found it useful to live and work at a safe distance from Hollywood. He even cuts his own trailers.

And this DIY approach isn't limited to filmmaking. "I had to build my own house," he says, "and I thought well, you can build anything, so why make it look like other houses with a neat little roof? So it looks like this monster, a sort of Aztec fort with secret passages! And that's like my movies. I think, well, if I can make anything, why make something that simulates real life? You get enough of that on the news!"

Rodriguez has always loved fantasy. "I would never make a realistic dramatic film," he says, "because it's so artificial anyway. You've got a camera there. You've got actors performing." El Mariachi marked him as an action director, but he says the only reason he made an action film was because that was what he thought he could sell to the Mexican video market. But he could never have made the kind of western where it mattered what model pistol they used and how many bullets the chambers held. "I don't like any kind of restriction like that."

Spy Kids 3-D is full of good stuff. George Clooney appears as the president of the US and morphs into Sylvester Stallone. There are fantastic chase scenes where little Juni Cortez and Grandpa race the rich kids inside the game.

Rodriguez likes working with children, he says, because they will try anything. "They don't know what they can't do, they'll just do it and if they can't, they'll say 'oh, I guess I couldn't'. But you usually can if you're that free." His own three children are always on set with him. "We took them down to Mexico and they loved being there." He was once upbraided for bringing his son to a movie set. He resigned from that film and vowed that when he had his own company, everyone could bring their kids along. "Because I don't want it to feel like work." If you make a film in that spirit, he says, you have a lot more chance of making something entertaining. "If you're not in that mindset when you're making it, it's going to feel held back. You might not even like the movie, but you might just like the feel of it.

"So often people say to me, 'I don't like those violent action movies, but I like your [mariachi] movies for some reason'. And it's got nothing to do with the dialogue or the story, but with the spirit that infuses them." That sunny smile lights Rodriguez's face. "You can tell we're having fun."

Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over is now screening. Once Upon a Time in Mexico opens on February 26.

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