Robert Rodriguez was always an independent self starter. He made his first movie,
El Mariachi, for $7000 and kept doing things his own way. He started his own studio facility,
Troublemaker Studios, where he’s shot
Sin City, Machete, Predators and more. Now he has his own company.
Quick Draw Productions is a step above the production facility Rodriguez already has in Austin, TX. As a production Company, Quick Draw will produce sequels to
Machete and
Sin City, as well as remakes of
Heavy Metal and
Fire and Ice. This year Quick Draw partnered with computer giant
AMD to use their technology for Quick Draw Animation.
Today’s movie lovers are reaping the benefits of many of Rodriguez’ innovations. He actually made
Spy Kids 3-D before the current wave of 3-D films, and the green screen movie (like
300) was largely innovated on
Sin City. He was a pioneer in shooting digitally, he gave George Clooney his first leading role in
From Dusk ‘Til Dawn and he introduced stars like Antonio Banderas, Salma Hayek and Danny Trejo to English speaking audiences. During a trip to Rodriguez’ home base of Austin, I got to catch up with the busy Rodriguez. This was even before he announced
Sin City: A Dame to Kill For was starting production, but we had plenty to talk about with his new production company, animation studio and even his own network. We also talked about the state of independence, since Rodriguez is now a major player in the industry.
SG: What is the latest on Quick Draw?
RR: A couple of new announcements. Quick Draw Animation we’ve been working on this the past year. We didn’t mention it at
Comic-Con. We mentioned Quick Draw Productions which is where we come up with the ideas, we have a financing facility but at the same time I was building out Quick Draw Animation and AMD is helping to power that. We teamed up with another media company that has given us the development money to not just have artists there, a core group of artists to create animated features including
Heavy Metal which I showed there, but this is exactly how we’re going to do it is with Quick Draw Animation which we just formed today. El Rey Network is something that we’re also going to be talking to AMD about because we really want to be able to blow that out and really democratize that way of working, get a lot of content providers to be able to provide stuff in a really cool way.
SG: Was this always in the works for
Heavy Metal?
RR: I knew I was going to do
Heavy Metal. I wasn’t sure where it was going to be. When I got this animation company together, I said, “Well, as long as we’re going to do this other family film, why don’t we also do this more adult animated?” and they were really into the idea. They loved
Heavy Metal so that became part of it.
SG: Is the family film
Fire and Ice?
RR: No, it’s another one.
Fire and Ice isn’t all CG. These are just CG kind of like
Pixar type animation movies which is a real 3D animation company which I never had before. I did effects in my movies but I didn’t have my own animation company. So Quick Draw Animation, that’s what that’s going to be.
SG: We haven’t seen the anthology style like
Heavy Metal done with CG yet, have we?
RR: No.
SG: Why do you think it’s taken this long and now is the time?
RR: You really needed somebody who was a real fan of it. I think conventional wisdom says anthologies don’t really work that well, and I always believed in it. I made an anthology once that didn’t work that well. It was called
Four Rooms and after making that I thought, “You know what, I bet if you do it a certain way, there’s a way you could do it.” I tried it again on
Sin City and that worked really well so I’m going to use that format for
Heavy Metal, three stories and a wraparound and there’s a common thread. Like
Sin City is sort of a destination and a place that wraps that up, that’s what the idea of
Heavy Metal will be as well.
SG: Are there some classic
Heavy Metal stories you want to include?
RR: They’re new ones but if you write down what makes a classic
Heavy Metal story, you can get all your pieces together and mix and match and go, “The ultimate
Heavy Metal story would be this.” After seeing so much of the material, you can say what are the sort of themes that keep coming up? That’s pretty exciting is reverse engineering it like that.
SG: You were so instrumental in bringing so many Latin faces to the screen. What can you do with Quick Draw to further that?
RR: Well, Quick Draw as well as El Rey. Quick Draw Productions is a great example. When I first made
El Mariachi I came to make movies and it wasn’t like I was trying to make Latin films. I was just doing something that reflected my own personality and person. So they were going to have Latin actors and there were no Latin actors working in Hollywood. So not only did I have to go and cast guys like Antonio and Salma, I had to make stars out of them so that I wouldn’t have that problem again. That’s why they’re shot so amazingly in those movies, so people would go, “Wow, those guys are stars.” When I put them in another movie there would be no problem of “Oh, you can’t use them.” Hollywood won’t do anything until someone does it first successfully. Then they’ll imitate. So once we did that then there was imitation. For Quick Draw, what’s great about having my own production company now is now not only producing films but we can finance them as well. We just announced last week Richard Kelly had this great script called
Corpus Christi, it had a Latin lead, he wanted Edgar Ramirez in it. So we went, we got Edgar for him, I’m producing it. I’m financing it as well so we can make sure these things get done right from the get go instead of it going through a studio and they go, “Oh, well, change it. Don’t make it Latin, make it somebody else.” I can say, “No, let’s keep the integrity of what you wrote.” Richard isn’t even Latin but he just knew that was the character he wanted and he really loved Edgar Ramirez.
SG: I didn’t even mean that it was political, just that they could be the stars of the movie.
RR: Yeah, be the stars of the movie and that’s the key to the movies that I’ve done is you don’t go see
Machete or
Desperado or
Spy Kids even or
Dusk ‘Til Dawn because they’re Latin films. You go because they’re just cool films. So that’s always what’s got to be first. First is a great film and if you’re Latin, that means something more. By making it so specific it becomes more universal. Like you don’t have to be British to watch James Bond. But because he’s British that makes him so specific and makes that particularly cool. That’s what my goal always was in making films that spoke to a generation that I grew up in that didn’t see themselves reflected on the screen.
SG: You’re such an individual self starter, how do you work with big companies like AMD?
RR: It’s the kind of company you work for. Right there, how could you go work at a studio if you’re so independent? Well, I find an independent studio, someone independent minded like the
Weinstein Brothers. That’s why Quentin [Tarantino] and I have always worked for them. We don’t go to
Warner Brothers, nothing against those guys, they’re all great but you don’t want to get lost in some system. Then the same thing when it came to technology, I always just follow what George Lucas does. I ask what is George doing? He goes, “I’m shooting digital now.” It’s going to take 10 years for people to catch up, I’ll do that too. Who do you use as an alliance for your technology? “I hook up with AMD.” Well, I’m going to AMD because he’s very much like that too, he doesn’t want to get lost in some corporate structure. So you find those likeminded corporations that are also very renegade like that and know how to give you a lot for very little. That’s the right kind of partner so it’s the kind of partnerships that you want to foster. We’ve been doing this since 2002 so I don’t even think about it anymore.
They’re very proactive about bringing me new technology and new ideas. They’re constantly thinking of cutting edge things that can help me because they know already how I think. If it’s forward thinking they’re going to bring it to me to try out because it’s a great testing ground. They know I can put it through all the paces in my studio because we’re doing so much.
SG: Do they have technologies that just need artists to work out the kinks?
RR: That’s just how it is. You have creative people and you have technical people. Creative people couldn’t come up with these machines. They come up with the idea for them but they have these amazing technicians who can build it. Then they need the creatives to go just test it out and see what it’s capable of. You need to have relationships like that. They’re good for both companies.
SG: You brought up George Lucas. I know you were inspired by how he couldn’t make
Princess of Mars so he did
Star Wars. You created your own
Spy Kids too. What do you think of the real
John Carter coming out and not connecting with people?
RR: Oh, I don't know, I haven’t seen it. So I reserve judgment. I know Andrew Stanton, he’s a really cool guy. That’s a tough one. I almost worked on that for a while too. It was hard to crack because people have imitated it for so many years. Everything from
Avatar to
Star Wars, we’re all inspired by the books. Then when you see the material, when we wrote the script and we were visualizing, it’s like people have seen all this because people ripped it off already so they’re going to think we ripped them off and it was the other way around. So that was the hardest thing to crack but I haven’t seen the movie.
SG: We’re excited that
Machete Kills is coming and the new poster. Is it possible to make Danny Trejo look any more angry?
RR: Probably not. You know what that was? We were taking his photo for that poster, the inspiration behind it will be a famous story but it’s true. You’re the first person to ask. We were shooting that picture, we shot that when we were doing some reshoots on
Predators. We kept that picture because we thought this is a great photo. We can’t use it in the first
Machete but let’s save it in case we do a part two. What we said was, “Give us the face that you would give your kids when they did something wrong.” Now look at the poster again. He just did that on his own. I don't know if that was the real face or he was screwing around but I wouldn’t want to be his kid.
SG: Is it amazing that people just love Danny?
RR: They’ve always loved him. When I met him, I saw him and just handed him a knife and said, “Here, go practice. You’ve got the role.” I didn’t even see if he could act. He didn’t need to. He had such amazing presence and it’s really the presence that makes someone a star. You can’t replicate that. You walk in the room and you either have presence or you don’t. Not that that’s bad if you don’t have presence. You’re just a background player and then some people are the front and center stars. When I went down to shoot
Desperado no one knew who Antonio was because he was from Europe. Everyone in the streets thought Danny was the star. They were just all around him, signing autographs and he didn’t even have any lines. They just saw him and they go, “Well, he’s got to be the star.” People just connected with him on such a visceral primal level, that’s why people like him.
SG: Why didn’t you just do
Machete Kills In Space as the second one?
RR: I ain’t givin’ anything away, but if you think I’m waiting ‘til part three to show space… I’m glad I’m reading my audience correctly.
SG: You’re all about the creativity of working within restrictions. Does having your own facility make it too easy?
RR: No, this is a lot of restrictions. There are still restrictions on budget, on crew, on time. It’s very scrappy but the best thing, and I used to be a cartoonist, the best thing about having a blank canvas is that when you have inspiration, you can just start working. You’re not being stopped. There’s nothing busting your groove. That’s what I love about AMD technology is it’s so high powered, I don’t have to wait ever. I can just move at the speed of thought. So I love that I had a blank piece of paper and I could just start drawing and I would know I would have something that didn’t exist before. You want it that immediate when you have filmmaking as well. I had the idea for
Sin City, I didn’t have to go to the studio and try to convince them. All those steps, it would just kill the idea. So you want to be unlimited there, but then you still have to work within a set of resources. But to be able to go and put your idea to work, that’s the best gift you can give yourself. Imagine if I were a cartoonist and I had to keep constantly going and asking people for paper. You’re not going to get anywhere like that. You’ve got to have your own basic studio to be able to create as an artist. There’s certainly tons of limitations with that. I don’t just have an open checkbook where I can just do anything I want. You have to be very strategic in what you do and really go only for the best ideas because you’ve got one shot at it.
SG: How are you excited to bring Frank Frazetta images to life in
Fire and Ice?
RR: Well, I loved those images since I was a kid. I used to have those paintings up on my wall, the prints from the print books. I used to cut them out and paste them on my wall. So I have the earliest memories of those. I had them when I was 10, 11, 12 years old. I grew up with them. So to get to work with Frank Frazetta on a
Dusk ‘til Dawn poster, seeing him react to Salma, she looks just like that lady he’s been painting all those years. He was like, “Where’d you find her? This is the girl of my dreams. I would’ve been painting her.” I said, “You were painting her. I made her look like your painting. That’s why she has the headdress.” That was totally based on a Frazetta painting, that image of her. So when he passed away, the family knew that I knew him pretty well and they wanted me to help with the artwork and being an overseer of that and work in the IP. One of the first things I wanted to do was make a movie of his stuff.
John Carter for instance, Andrew Stanton had to tell his crew, “Stop bringing me Frazettas.” That’s all everyone had in their head. They think
Princess of Mars they think Frazetta. It had such a mark on them that people have to try not to imitate him. Well, no one’s done him head on. No one has done him head on where everyone has seen those images through their lifespan and it’s just ingrained in the fantasy culture and they’ve never seen anyone do it justice. So I want to make a movie, like
Sin City immersed you in the graphic novel, I want you to feel like you walked into one of his paintings and see his world the way he saw it for real, as if he’s there codirecting with me. I knew him pretty well. I would know very well, just by seeing something, Frank would say, “Screw that. That’s not right. You’ve got to stand like this. You’ve got to suck in that gut and you’ve got to put out your chin and you’re going to need calves that are this big.” I would be very, very particular about that.
SG: You talk about Salma looking like a Frazetta painting. Are those good images to put back into the culture?
RR: That’s what Frank believed. And Frank is co-directing this with me. He would say, “That’s how I want it.” And I would have to agree. Salma would’ve been perfect as Teegra.
SG: Are you interested in performance capture?
RR: I think it still has a way to go but maybe eventually. I really love working with actors. I love the mix, doing the mix of it where you work with an actor and you create everything around them but then you have that reality that you can tap into. I think humans are just capable still of so much more emotion than computers can generate. That’s just what I like to do. I like that immediacy of working with them.
SG: Is
Red Sonja still a possibility?
RR: No, because I didn’t own that. That’s why it took so long. When someone else owns a property, now I just abandon those kind of things because that’s what stalls. The only productions I never got off the ground were something where someone else controlled it because then they’re indecisive. They’re like, “Well, let’s see how
Conan does first.” So
Conan’s probably not going to make (it) so I’m just doing movies like
Fire & Ice and
Heavy Metal, things where I now own the rights so I can just go make them so I don’t have to ask someone’s permission. Again, that’s the thing. You don’t want to be asking permission. Look how that slows you down. That’s why having your own studio’s so important and having your own production place like Quick Draw where you can finance your own movies, or your own animation and you have technology partners. You don’t need anything else. That’s what’s so great. You can just go, go, go.
SG: You did get
Predators done.
RR: Well, that one was only as a test. I had written the script for that. I wouldn’t have done that had I not written the script 15 years before because I don’t own it. So if they wanted to do another one, I’d probably pass because I’d rather produce stuff like Richard Kelly’s movie or my own movies, other people that I can control the content more and it benefits the whole studio. Why go make someone else rich? You really should just cultivate your own talent and your own pool of ideas and your own entity.
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