‘What I’m really here to do…’—Tarantino

“As proud as I am of my movies, I think writing has become more, and more, and more, and more important to me. That first real flash of excitement is always when I’m writing something that should go this way, and all of the sudden inspiration happens and it goes somewhere else. And I’m party to it. And I didn’t expect it to happen, it just happened. And I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s real talent, That’s what happens. That’s what real writers do.’ In the case of Jackie Brown and I have to be careful how I say this, because I absolutely love Jackie Brown [adapted from Elmore Lenard’s Rum Punch]— it’s one of my best movies. And I have deep affection for it. But having said that, I don’t think I was put on this earth to adapt other people’s novels. I think I was here to face to the blank page, and pull stuff out of me. Find whatever story or genre I want deal with and just do my own little version of it. But I was there to start from nothing. And then at the end have a finished movie. Starting with that pen and that blank piece of paper. That is my journey, that is my heart of darkness, that’s what I’m really here to do.”
Two-time Oscar-winning screenwriter Quentin Tarantino
The Director’s Chair interview with Robert Rodriguez

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‘The way I write…’—Tarantino

“The way I write is really like putting one foot in front of the other. I really let the characters do most of the work, they start talking and they just lead the way. I had heard that whole speech about the Sicilians a long time ago, from a black guy living in my house. One day I was talking with a friend who was Sicilian and I just started telling that speech. And I thought, ‘Wow, that is a great scene, I gotta remember that.’ In True Romance the one thing I knew Cliff had to do was insult the guy enough that he’d kill him, because if he got tortured he’d end up telling him where Clarence was, and he didn’t want to do that. I knew how the scene had to end, but I don’t write dialogue in a strategic way. I didn’t really go about crafting the scene, I just put them in the room together. I knew Cliff was going to end up doing the Sicilian thing, but I didn’t know what Coccotti was going to say. They just started talking and I jotted it down. I almost feel like a fraud for taking credit for writing dialogue, because it’s the characters that are doing it. To me it’s very connected to actors’ improv with me playing all the characters. One of the reasons I like to write with pen and paper is it helps that process, for me anyway.”
Two-time Oscar-winning screenwriter Quentin Tarantino
Creative Screenwriting interview with Erik Bauer

Writer/Director Quentin Tarantino sat down with writer/director Robert Rodriguez on The Director’s Chair and talked about the creative process. Tarantino grew-up with a fascination for movies in the way some kids have playing sports. It was an obsession. After dropping out of high school, he stumbled upon writing while taking an acting class when he was 19 or 20 years old. (Keep in mind that this was the early ’80s before everyone had cable Tv, VHS machines, or the Internet. And when Tarantino’s income was sub-$10,000 per year, so he wasn’t buying plays and scripts. He used his lack of resources—and lack of going to film school— to his advantage.)

“I always had a good memory, so I would see a scene from a movie and I would just remember it. And I’d go home and write it from memory. And anything else I couldn’t remember or anything good I came up with in the meantime, I’d add it into the scene—because it was just my scene. And little, by little, by little I started adding more, and more, and more to the scenes. And that was me learning how to write dialogue—or just realizing I could write dialogue. And I never took it seriously until a member of the class, a guy named Ronnie Coleman, [said], ‘Quentin, you’re really good. You’re as good as Paddy Chayefsky.’ ‘What do you mean I’m as good as Paddy Chayefsky?’ ‘Well, we did that scene in class from Marty and you just wrote it down—you gave me this handwritten scene from Marty. And it included this entire monologue about a fountain. Well, I actually have the original Paddy Chayefsky script and there’s no monologue about a fountain. That was completely added by you. You added an entire monologue to it. And it was just as good as the Paddy Chayefsky stuff.’ And somebody saying something like that to you actually got me to taking in seriously. That maybe I did have a talent for that.”
Quentin Tarantino

It’s important to also realize that means he was writing for at least a decade before he sold his first script—True Romance.

P.S. And because I like quirky little connections, one of the teachers Tarantino studied with was James Best. Back in the late 80s James and his wife Dorothy opened The James Best Theater in Longwood, Florida (an Orlando suburb) in hopes of getting on the ground floor of training actors for what was marketed as “Hollywood East.” James said in an 1988 Orlando Sentinel article, ”This will be the new Hollywood. We want to train Floridians so they can get jobs.” Things didn’t turn out that way, but I did move from L.A. back to my hometown of Orlando in ’88 and my wife actually had the lead roll in Goldilocks and the Three Bears performed at The James Best Theater. Gotta love those odd connections. (If there’s a Hollywood East today, it’s in Atlanta where over 40 movies and TV shows were being shot in Georgia last month.)

Related posts:
Analytical vs. Intuitive Writing “To tell you the truth, I try not to get analytical in the writing process.”—Tarantino
How to Write a Screenplay in One Day Basically Tarantino used a variation of this method in writing his acting scenes.
Tarantino & Truth
The Django—Silver Linings Connection
Screenwriting Quote #134 (Chayefsky)
Tarantino on Leonard

Scott W. Smith

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Robert Rodriguez & Green Screen Magic

“When you’re saying you want to be a filmmaker, you’re saying you want to communicate.”
Robert Rodriguez
Project Green Screen, Episode 1

Last Friday I went to a brief 9/11 memorial and ended up treating the day blog wise as a Holiday or weekend when I don’t normally post. But I did think back to where I was when I first heard news of the planes hitting the Twin Towers in New York,  Pennsylvania and D.C. I was in the middle of a production in a small studio with about 30 people present. (To date it’s the only day of production I’ve ever been on that was stopped and people sent home.)

So on Friday September 11, 2015, I was in a very similar small studio setting up for a green screen shoot. While having this cyc worked on earlier in the month I got to meet scenic artist/painter/foreman Jan Wittman who’s worked on the Florida productions Dolphin Tale (Clearwater), Magic City (Miami Beach), The Glades (Everglades). In the Tim Ferriss podcast with Rodriguez, Rodriguez stresses keeping a diary of people you meet because sometimes you end up working with them 5 or 10 years down the road.

And since I’ve dedicated this month to be posts related to filmmaker Robert Rodriguez, it made sense today to look at how he has used green screen productions in some of his films. Sin City (2005) jumped to my mind because I believe it was all shot on a green screen.

“The best way I could describe the sound stage would be like working on a Playhouse 90 set […]There was a real dock, there was a real staircase, the cars were all real, the props were all real; other than that it all had to be imagined. It was all just a big green stage.”
Bruce Willis on working on Sin City

Here’s a short video that gives a behind the scenes look at how Rodriguez and his production team pulled off some of the green screen magic. (BTW—a quick Google search will show some pretty solid examples of you low-budget filmmakers using green screens backdrops and DSLR cameras. I bet at least one feature has been done in someones garage or basement using their own formula of green screen magic.)

Scott W. Smith
Bruce Willis woking on Sin City

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‘It’s Good Not to Follow the Herd’

“Sometimes the only way across the river is by slipping on that first rock—that’s the way there.”
Producer/writer/director Robert Rodriguez (on failing and moving on)

Several years ago (in a pre-GPS time) I was on a video shoot in Cape Town, South Africa and was told by a local advice that I’ve often found helpful. He said that if I got lost while driving to “Follow the oil slick.” (That line of oil left by cars on a well-traveled road.)  And that advice has actually helped me in the States when I’ve gotten disoriented while driving in unfamiliar places. While that advice can help you avoid dead ends, it can also lead you to traffic jams (different kinds of dead ends) because you’re heading where everyone else is going. Here’s filmmaker  Robert Rodriguez to offer an alternative to having a career path of following the oil slick.

“It’s good not to follow the herd. Go the other way. If everyone is going that way, go this other way. Yeah, you’re going to stumble, but you’re also going to stumble upon an idea nobody came up with… It’s lined with gold over there because nobody goes that way—it hasn’t been picked clean yet. And you’re going to stumble upon something. You’re going to stumble a few times, but you’re going to consistently stumble upon an idea no one’s come up with by going that way. I’ve always been that way. If everyone is going that way—like they know what they’re doing with purpose—I don’t know what I’d doing. I’m just going to go this other way. At least it’s a new frontier.

“I always found success that way. I found success by just going the opposite way. If there’s too much competition over there—if everyone is trying to get through that one little door—you’re in the wrong place. I hate saying that. At film festivals people say, ‘How do we break in?’ Well, the problem is you’re at a film festival. Nothing wrong with film festivals, but everyone else here is trying to get through that same door, and they’re not all going to fit. You gotta think bigger than that. There’s less competition up there.

“I always wanted to get into TV but instead of going and competing with everyone else trying to get on 7PM on NBC on a Friday night—own a network. You know how many other people are trying to own a network? Nobody! You’re competing with no one. When [El Rey Network] was up for grabs there were 100 other applicants. Now, that sounds like a lot, but out of the whole country—a hundred? Really? How many actually had a solid business plan and vision for something that could be implemented? Probably five. So you’re competing with the top five instead of the top 20,000 trying to get on NBC Friday or Saturday night. “
Filmmaker Robert Rodriguez
Interview with Tim Ferriss

P.S. Speaking of driving…here are two tips that promote efficiency and safety. UPS truck drivers avoid making left turns and the USPS encourages its drivers to avoiding backing up.

Related posts:
‘Take a Risk’—Coppola
J.K. Rowlings on the Benefits of Failure
‘Don’t try and compete with Hollywood’—Ed Burns

Scott W. Smith

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Family, Food & Film Outside of L.A.

“Without a network, creative work does not endure…without Paris, there is no Hemingway.”
Jeff Goins
The Unfair Truth About How Creative People Really Succeed

Filmmaker Robert Rodriguez has his filmmaking network of people down in Austin, but he also has a literal network—El Rey Network. And when you own a network you can line up interviews with your director friends, which is exactly what The Director’s Chair with Robert Rodriguez is all about.

“It was a thrill to be able to feel that I was a director from a studio at 24 or 25, but when I came out to Hollywood and was making Finian’s Rainbow…everything I wanted to do wasn’t somehow permitted. I wanted to make the film on location—it was about sharecroppers in Kentucky and I go, ‘Can I go to Kentucky and have dancers dancing around with tobacco?’, ‘Oh no, no, we gotta do it on the sets from Camelot.’ I used to sit there with George Lucas, who was about 19, and we would just grump about we couldn’t do this and we can’t do that. And we started to fantasize, let’s go make a film driving across the country. And we’ll make a truck that has all the necessary equipment and we won’t even know exactly what we’re going to shoot. If we hear there’s mine disaster we’ll all go to the mine disaster and incorporate that into the movie. We made The Rain People that way. And then we were so mobile that we said, well gee, we have a whole studio in a truck, we don’t have to go back to L.A., we can go to San Francisco and be close enough to L.A. to have the access to the actors and the prop houses, and the resources, and not be in the center of it. I essentially combined the culture of a theater club with the reality of filmmaking as we learned at USC and UCLA and that was Zoetrope.”
Oscar-Winning writer/producer/director Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather, Patton)
Interview with Robert Rodriguez
The Director’s Chair, Episode 5

The Coppola family, food & film model is much of what Rodriguez has created in Austin, Texas—which has an entrenched film community that’s avoided being in the center of the film business. This is what Rodriguez told Coppola in the above interview:

“Family and food and film kind of all seem to go together for you, and it inspired me to do that. I started my own studio [Troublemaker Studios]. I work with my family, and I’ve had other filmmakers come to my sets and see that I’m working with my kids—they’ve gone off and worked with their kids and have done fantastic work. You’ve kind of started this little revolution.”

P.S. If you want to add faith to family, food & film outside L.A., look at what the writer/director team of Alex and Stephen Kendrick of Kendrick Brothers Productions are doing in (an unlikely place) Albany, Georgia. This past weekend their film War Room ended up #1 at the domestic box office, ending Straight Outta Compton‘s three week run in the top spot. Produced by Sony Pictures for $3 million War Room hasn’t even been out two weeks and has passed $30 million at the box office. I think it’s the first time a specifically Christian faith based film has finished #1 at the box office. Back in 2008 I wrote the post Shrimp, Giants & Tyler Perry and talked about the niche that Perry and the Kendrick Brothers were cooking down in Georgia.

Related posts:
‘Who said art had to cost money?’—Coppola
‘Take a Risk’—Coppola
Coppola & Roger Corman
The Francis Ford Coppola Way
Screenwriting & the Little Fat Girl from Ohio
‘Super-Serving Your Niche’

Scott W. Smith

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Analytical vs. Intuitive Writing

“We rarely know where we’re going: writing is discovery.”
Robert McKee
Story, page 113

“I think Julius Epstein—not about Casablanca—but somebody asked him about structure, and an outline and whatever and he said, ‘You know, I write page one, if I like it I’ll write page two. If I like page two I’ll just continue to the end. But that school of thought seems to be lost a little bit in the current culture of [screenwriting] books and seminars.”
Mike De Luca  The Dialogue Series 

If you’ve ever wondered why there is so much great screenwriting information out in world, but so few great films made one place to examine is the analytical verses intuitive side of screenwriting. It’s a hard to do justice to the topic in a blog post, but I’ll try to keep the discussion going.

Mike De Luca once asked Fight Club screenwriter Jim Uhls,  “When did you first feel when you had what it takes to be a screenwriter? Did you have a specific moment when you felt the confidence of, ‘I can do this.'” Ulhs said;

“It was when the analytical side and the intuitive side merged together, worked together as a creative unit.”

Much (most?) of what producers, directors, studios, readers, agents, junior agents, teachers, script consultants, screenwriting books/seminars/classes/podcasts and marketing teams focus on is the analytical side of screenwriting. Examining the finished screenplay asking a zillion questions. What works and doesn’t work? The intuitive side isn’t quite as concrete—and could even be called mystical.

“To tell you the truth, I try not to get analytical in the writing process. I really try not to do that. I try to just kind of keep the flow from my brain to my hand as far as the pen is concerned and go with the moment and go with my guts…Basically, my writing’s like a journey.”
Writer/director Quentin Tarantino (Django Unchained)
Creative Screenwriting interview with Erik Bauer

I was in a writing workshop with Oscar-winning screenwriter (and playwright) Alfred Uhry (Driving Miss Daisy) and asked him why he wrote a certain line and he said he didn’t know. When Oscar-winning screenwriter (and playwright) Horton Foote was asked why Robert Duvall’s character in Tender Mercies told his daughter he didn’t know the words to a song when he did, Horton said he didn’t know. He just wrote it. And Oscar-winning screenwriter Tarantino said of creating the Mia character (Uma Thurman) in Pulp Fiction, “I have no idea where she came from. I have no idea whatsoever.” That’s intuition.

When Oscar-winning cinematographer Janusz Kaminski (Schindler’s List) was asked this analytical question:  “When you’re looking at an image do you go with the philosophy of adding light to get the image or subtracting to take away to get the image?,” he said, “I have no idea…I don’t know how it happens.”

If you listen or read many working screenwriters, the one thing that jumps out to you is how different their approaches is to writing. Take theme for example; some writers say they start with theme, others say they discover theme while writing, some say they avoid theme altogether, and some confess to not even understanding how theme fits into their writing. Conflicting views abound in just about everything including is it best to write by hand, computer, typewriter, or even transcription (which worked well for Rod Serling).

But you don’t read much where writers talk about the analytical verses the intuitive side of screenwriting. Maybe because it is hard to articulate. The analytical side is the side that informs your writing (or re-writing) by asking things like “Are the stakes high enough?” and “How can I visualize the conflict?” The intuitive side is wandering into the unknown. A place that filmmaker Robert Rodriguez says is good to be because it leads you to creative breakthroughs.

“You don’t need to know…Here’s the shortcut—just get out of your own way… You’re just opening up the pipe that creativity flows through.

“As soon as your ego gets in the way and you go, ‘But I don’t know what to do next,’ you’ve already put ‘I’ in front of it and you’ve already blocked it a little bit. ‘I did it once but I don’t know if I can do it again.’ It was never you. The best you can be is to just get out of the way so it comes through. So when an actor or crew member comes to me and goes, ‘I’m not sure I know how to…’ I say that’s beautiful because the other half is going to show up over there. They say knowing is half the battle, I think the most important part is the other half, not knowing. Not knowing what’s going to happen, but you trust that it’ll be there…You have to trust first and then it will happen.

“You only get the idea once you start. It’s this totally reverse thing. You have to act first before inspirational will hit. You don’t wait for inspiration and then act or you’ll never act. Because you’re never going to have the inspiration—not consistently. You can consistently perform and act until it comes out… Get out of the way, let the pen glide where it needs to go and it will be there and you’ll be amazed. And you’ll be going, ‘how did I do that?'” 
Filmmaker Robert Rodriguez
Interview with Tim Ferriss

Baseball great Ted Williams was once asked how he hit the ball so well and he said something like, “I pick a pitch I want to hit and swing.” Isn’t that what ever baseball player does? But somehow, someway Ted Williams did it better one season (1941) than any Major League player in the last 70 plus years.

For sure it’s a mixture of intuition, analytical skills and talent. Where to draw lines between them all is impossible. Jim Uhls didn’t explain how he merged the analytical side and the intuitive side to work as a creative unit, but I think that’s a fine goal.  And my guess is it happens somewhere in the process of actually writing.

“I finally found it one afternoon when I was twenty-two years old. I wrote the title ‘The Lake’ on the first page of a story that finished itself two hours later. Two hours after that I was sitting at my typewriter out on a porch in the sun, with tears running off the tip of my nose, and the hair on my back standing up…I realized I had written a really fine story.”
Ray Bradbury
Zen in the Art of Writing

“I’m self-taught. I learn everything by doing it. I wasn’t born knowing how to write a play. You do it and hopefully you keep evolving.”
Sam Shepard
Interview with Don Showy
Rock-And-Roll Jesus with a Cowboy Mouth 

Bradbury also wrote that The Muse and The Subconscious are two names for one thing. And I think somewhere in that one thing is where intuitive writing lives and thrives.

Scott W. Smith

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Freedom of Limitations

“I don’t mind failing, I just don’t like failing in front of a bunch of other people.”
Robert Rodriguez
(On why he shot El Mariachi in Mexico as a one-man crew)

Blame it on Mexico if you need a reason
Say too much guitar music, tequila, salt and lime
Blame it on Mexico lyrics by Darrell Staedtler

If you’ve read much of this blog, you’ll know I like unlikely places and Acuña, Coahuila definitely qualifies as unlikely place to be a footnote in film history. That city about three hours west of San Antonio, Texas, just across the border into Mexico is where Robert Rodriguez shot El Mariachi (1992). A film that would go on to win the Audience Award at Sundance, launch Rodriguez’s film career, and help kick start a modern do-it-yourself independent film movement.

Here are some of the limitations that Robert Rodriguez had in making his first feature film;

—One non-sync, film camera with two lens
—One take of everything (because two takes would have doubled the budget)
—One ranch in Mexico that a friend owned
—One bar
—One pitbull
—One turtle
—Zero true film lights (just two clip-on hardware store lights with 200 watts bulbs)

“There’s a freedom of limitations. It’s more freeing to know I can only use these items; turtle, bar, ranch. You’re almost completely free within that. You can almost doing, not anything—because that would be too many options. One of my favorite films that I did with Quentin was called Four Rooms where they said, we’re all doing short films and we all have the same criteria; it has to be set in one room, has to be New Year’s Eve, and you have to use the bellhop. The freedom of limitations was enormous. When you watch that short and it goes all over the room—by the end we burn down the room. It was almost more exciting to know you were in a box, and you could be creative within that box. Now that so many things* are available to you want to limit yourself in a way. So I try to limit time, I try to limit money, so we can still keep that essence of creativity and deliver something on the screen that just looks much bigger. So you can retain your creative freedom. Because if you start spending more money, suddenly the financiers—rightfully so—the studios, the executives will be over your shoulder constantly questioning every move you make because they want their money back. But if you keep the budget low it’s a win-win situation.”
Filmmaker Robert Rodriguez
Interview with Tim Ferriss

* Part of the “so many things available to you” these days that Rodriguez didn’t have access to that many people think they need; sliders, drones, 4K cameras, Steadicam/MOVI, non-linear editors (AVID/Permeire/FCPX), After Effects/Motion, color correction software, Red Rock/Zacuto camera accessories, a zillion plug-ins, etc.etc. Before you buy that “must have” piece of equipment remind yourself of this bit of Rodriguez wisdom; “If you want to make a film on a really low budget you can’t spend on anything…If you start that money hose going you just can’t stop it. Think of a creative way to get around your problem.”

P.S. Make a point to come back Tuesday for a post on the analytical vs. intuitive side of filmmaking and screenwriting, as I continue my month of Robert Rodriguez-centered posts.

Scott W. Smith 

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Living a Creative Life

“If film died tomorrow I’d be sculpting, or painting, or something else that involved creativity. So really what I am is someone who lives a creative life. Not just in work, but when I’m not working…The creative process blows me away… And it applies to anything that you do. How you raise your children, how you cook food, how you run a business. Creativity is so much a part of that. When people say, oh, you do so many things you’re a musician, you’re a painter, you edit, you’re a composer, you’re the cinematographer, you do so many different things and I go, no, I only do one thing— I live a creative life.

“When you put creativity in everything, everything becomes available to you. Anything that has a creative aspect is suddenly yours to go and do. And there’s no separation between work and play. I mean I work ‘in my house’ that’s where I write my scripts, come up with my ideas while I’m playing with my kids, while I’m cooking them a meal which is a creative exercise in itself. And then I go upstairs and do some editing—edit a scene , and then I can hear the kind of music and then I’ll walk over to this room and do music for it, and then I’m not sure how I’m going to get into this character’s head, maybe I’ll paint him first and see visually what he looks like, or musically what he sounds like.  And you can work completely non-linear that way because you realize, I can do anything I want because everything can be creative. Even a business call. You go this is kind of out of my league, but let me add my creativity to it and maybe that will solve something that no one else will be able to solve, and sure enough, you can always rely on creatively to win the day in a lot of areas.”
Filmmaker Robert Rodriguez
Interview with Tim Ferriss

Related posts:
The Best Film School
Nothing Ever Goes as Planned
One of the Benefits of Being Outside Hollywood

Scott W. Smith

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Nothing Ever Goes as Planned

“I remember on From Dust to Dawn (1996) the special effects guys put too much fire in the explosion, and the actors came running out of the building—and in the movie you see the building blow up at the end and the fireball just engulfed the whole set. And that was the first shot. We still needed lots of other stuff to shoot with it. Everyone’s freaking out, the production designer is crying because there goes all their work. And my assistant director came over and goes, ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’ And I said, ‘It looks good the way it is. It’s all charred. Let’s just keep shooting, and do the repairs we need for exterior shots next week. But let’s keep shooting.’ Sometimes you use those gifts, because nothing ever goes according to plan. Sometimes when I hear new filmmakers talk, they talk all down about their film—’Oh, nothing worked” and ‘It was a disappointment’—and they don’t realize that’s the job. The job is nothing is ever going to work at all. And you go, ‘How can I turn that in a way to turn it into a positive?’ And you get something much better than if you had all the time and money in the world.”  
Filmmaker Robert Rodriguez
Interview with Tim Ferriss

P.S. Some day I’ll do a post on “happy accidents” that various filmmakers have talked about that occurred while making their films. (Things that didn’t go as planned but worked better than the original plan.) But one of the most famous is when the mechanical shark in Jaws had numerous malfunctions during filming. And when it did work, on extended shots, the shark looked fake. So the film’s editor, Verna Fields, used the shark less than planned in the edit—and quick cuts when we do see the shark— creating more mystery and suspense. Fields won an Oscar for her editing on Jaws.

Scott W. Smith

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The Best Film School

“I say when you want to do anything you need to reduce your ‘I need list’ to very little. Because if you start going, ‘Well, I need a crew first. I need a budget. I need a set…’—the longer that list gets, the further away you’re going to accomplish that. So you need to shrink that down to ‘I need nothing. I’ve got everything here.’ If you can do that you’re off and running.”
Robert Rodriguez
Interview with Kevin Smith

Welcome to Robert Rodriguez month. Every weekday this month I’m going to pass along a Robert Rodriguez related filmmaking concept, tip or quote. And since this is the first week of school in many places, I thought it would be fitting to start off with a post about what Rodriguez called his “practice film” that turned into what he called “the best film school.”

” I just had to make [El Mariachi] for as little as possible. I really didn’t think anyone was going to see it. It was really just a test film. That’s why I did it for the Spanish market. I already had a bunch of short films, but I needed practice telling features. Needed seasoning and thought I’d do all the jobs myself ’cause I couldn’t afford a crew—that’s the way I learn. If I can sell it for twice of what I put in—that’s like the best film school. I’ll do like two or three of these things, cut them all together. Pull out the best portions and use it on my demo reel and then use the money I make to go make a real English language independent film. And that first one got bought by Columbia Pictures and I was shocked.”
Filmmaker Robert Rodriguez
Interview with Tim Ferriss

El Mariachi won the Sundance Film Festival Audience Award in 1993, and instead of having a $50,000, $100,000, or $200,000 student load debt, Rodriguez landed a two-year deal at Columbia. At film festivals he gave talks about how he accomplished making a feature film (that was actually shot on film) for under $10,000.

“I wanted people to know how I did it. I really wanted to deconstruct how it was done—’cause I would have wanted to know that. As a film student coming from a family of ten kids living in Texas [with] people constantly saying, ‘You want to be a filmmaker? Oh, you need to move to L.A.’ But that you could stay where you are and could come up with something that could be sold—I just wanted to get on top of the mountain and tell everybody. That’s why I put out [Rebel Without a Crew: Or How a 23-year-old Filmmaker with $7,000 Became a Hollywood Player]. I wanted to put it out there because I knew they’d be wondering, because nobody had ever done it…People forgot that’s how movies really started. It was always a couple of guys with a wind-up camera and Buster Keaton in front. It wasn’t a business yet. When it became a business suddenly everyone had a job and you needed 200 people—because it was now an industry. But that’s not what the art form was originally. It was just the manipulations of moving images, and you can do that with two people—one person. That was a breakthrough idea.”
Robert Rodriguez
Interview with Tim Ferriss

Related posts:

Your Story’s Story
Who Cares if It’s Garbage?
The Ten Film Commandments of Edward Burns
Professor Jerry Lewis (The Total Filmmaker)
Bob Dylan & Your Filmmaking Career  “You can learn how to make movies and tell stories by making movies and telling stories.”–Edward Burns
‘Living in Oblivion’
The 10-Minute Film School (with Rodriguez)

Scott W. Smith

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