A Career Hooligan Looks Back, But Mostly Forward
Robert Rodriguez on a lifetime of innovation and the movie, 'El Mariachi,' that started it all
By Marc Savlov, Fri., Aug. 24, 2012
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"It's a very different process, but he trusted me and when he left he said, 'I don't want to work with anybody but you. I'm so spoiled now.' So the word is out [about Troublemaker]. People are like, 'Something's going on down there.' Imagine, you can come be in a movie, it's only going to take you a day, we can't pay you very much but you're not going to feel ripped off, and it's going to be the best creative experience of your life. So people are talking. [Robert] De Niro came down because he heard about [me] from George Clooney. He was on his way from New York to go do Little Fockers and stopped here four days. We shot him in four leisurely days and he's in the whole movie. And that makes it easier to get other guys, like Mel Gibson."
Indeed, one of the hallmarks of both Rodriguez's adult action fare and his family-oriented films is the caliber of talent he's been able to corral over the years. After El Mariachi was picked up for distribution by Columbia Pictures 20 years back – Rodriguez later forged a fruitful distro relationship with the Weinstein brothers' Dimension Films, beginning with 1996's From Dusk Till Dawn – the director made a pointed effort to include as many Latin actors in his films as possible. Antonio Banderas, then-unknown (in el Norte, anyway) Salma Hayek, Cheech Marin, and permanent Troublemaker badass Danny Trejo all kicked off a series of what would become recurring appearances in Los Hooligans/Troublemaker films that continue to this day.
The idea of using Latin actors and crew has been a guiding principle behind Rodriguez's artistic vision since well before El Mariachi: One of his earliest home video productions, which he shows me, was "Ismael Jones and the Eyes of the Devil." Watching it now is like watching the birth of the Rodriguez style: rapid cuts, dizzying zooms, nonstop action. It owes as much to the Shaw Brothers' crazed chopsocky style of the Seventies as it does to the director's famously DIY work ethic.
Throughout his career, the lack of Latino actors in mainstream Hollywood films had been a sore spot for Rodriguez. If he could do it in his films, why weren't others following in his wake? It's a tough question that, until recently, had no easy answers. Until, that is, March of this year, when Rodriguez announced the pending creation of his own television network, called El Rey, which would serve as a venue for Latin programming in English, the first of its kind in the U.S.
He explains: "It's going to be a Latin network that competes with Univision and Telemundo. And we can do this because Comcast just merged with Universal, and to become that big they have to designate 10 channels to independent operators, four of which have to be minorities. So, via a government loophole, you can own a network. If you put in a pitch and they like it, they'll give it to you. Shit, I'm a believer in affirmative action if that's what it takes!
"El Rey is the missing piece. When I went to Hollywood there were no Latin actors. Even when I went to make Spy Kids, the Weinsteins were like, 'Why are you making the kids Latin? We don't understand. The film is in English, it's American.' And it's because when you write what you know – I'm Latin, and all my characters are going to be Latin, even though they're speaking English and playing rock and roll with action and adventure. [Spy Kids] was based on my family. My Uncle Gregorio was a special agent in the FBI – that's who Antonio's based on. The kids are based on my sister and brother. It's my family. But still, they couldn't figure out why I was making it Latin. Finally I said, you don't have to be British to enjoy James Bond, and they went, 'Okay.'
"The problem is there's not enough Latin filmmakers to push that agenda to make it more diverse. Otherwise, you know, it becomes a token character, and that's not going to feel authentic. So El Rey allows us to do something a little more authentic that's still going to be for everybody. It's going to be totally in English, so anybody can watch it, just like anybody could watch Machete or From Dusk Till Dawn or whatever. It provides a forum for Latin characters written by Latin filmmakers."
It is, to be sure, the biggest game changer that Robert Rodriguez has ever been a part of. Check it out: La revolucíon will be televised!
Elizabeth Avellán, producer and co-founder/owner of Troublemaker Studios: "Our dream had always been to make movies here in Austin. We knew it could be done because Rick [Linklater] had done Slacker and Dazed and Confused, and movies-of-the-week were happening all the time, too. We knew there was some sort of a crew here, that was being trained by working on these films. Ned Blessing had been done here, Barbarosa, and people like William Wittliff were working out of Austin. There was obviously a local film scene happening and what they were doing was training the crew that, ultimately, we ended up using for The Faculty, which was the first film we did here in Austin."
There's a precedent for what Rodriguez and Avellán have created here in Austin, but you have to go back a long way. All the way to 1919, when D.W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks – in a bid to control their artistic license and manage the means of production on their films – broke rank with the studios in the earliest years of Hollywood and formed United Artists.
The parallels between Troublemaker's self-contained, self-sustaining digital world and the fledgling indie United Artists Corporation are striking, but the historical echoes of what Rodriguez is doing go back even further, to the birth of filmmaking as we know it, when pioneering inventors and artists like the Lumière Brothers, Georges Méliès, and Thomas Edison literally made it up as they went along.
And now, Rodriguez is doing the same thing: from reenergizing 3-D (with 2003's Spy Kids 3-D) to trailblazing totally digital filmmaking (via Once Upon a Time in Mexico, shot in 2001 but not released until 2003), all while building his own filmmaking empire – some might say dynasty, considering the amount of familial involvement – separate and distinct from Hollywood. Love him or like him (seriously, who could hate this guy?), you can't fault Rodriguez's rampant creativity or wild ambition. And it all goes back to that $7,000, funded by lab rat stints in Pharmaco medical studies, which led to the roll of the dice that was El Mariachi.
"Why work for a studio anymore?" Rodriguez asks. "Studios don't even pay for their movies these days, they have to go get independent financing themselves. So why not bypass them completely? Why use them as a broker? Why are they owning your product?
"People think 'independent' means it has to be independent subject matter, but it doesn't, necessarily. You have a lot more freedom because you can go right to the financiers who love working directly with the filmmaker. And if you can build up a trust with them, then they just write you the check and then you go get the distributor. And then you and the financier own it. With the studios, as soon as you make a big production out of it, you're making a big production out of it."
Dear Diary ...
In 1993, The Austin Chronicle asked Robert Rodriguez to keep a diary detailing his experiences at the Sundance Film Festival, where El Mariachi would go on to win the Audience Award. "Sundancing As Fast As I Can," Feb. 12, 1993.
20th Anniversary of 'El Mariachi' Event
The Austin Film Society, AMD, and El Rey Network will present a special El Mariachi anniversary event on Thursday, Aug. 30, 7:30pm, at the Paramount Theatre. The evening's festivities include a 35mm print of El Mariachi, the first public screening of Rodriguez's early short "Ismael and the Eyes of the Devil," a Q&A, and a live performance by Rodriguez and his band, Chingón, who will play songs from the Rodriguez canon as the corresponding clips, from films starting with Desperado up through Machete, play behind the band on an enhanced digital screen. Tickets are on sale now; see www.austinfilm.org for more info.
