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20 The Reformation of a Rebel without a Crew Rustin Thompson/1995 From MovieMaker, September/October 1995, 8–11. Reprinted courtesy MovieMaker Magazine, www.moviemaker.com. Russ Thompson (MM): Is Desperado a sequel, or a remake of El Mariachi ? Robert Rodriguez (RR): When I first made El Mariachi, I got a deal with Columbia to make more movies. The first project I suggested was a remake of El Mariachi, with Antonio Banderas and music by Los Lobos, for about five or six million dollars. And that was the course we were going to take, until we decided to put it in film festivals to test it with an audience and see how it played before remaking it. It did so well, they decided to just release it as it was. But they said, “No matter what happens with the movie, we would still like to do another one with the same character, but starring Antonio.” So we ended up doing a follow-up, you know, where it’s the same character, just in a different adventure. MM: So what was the budget? Five or six million? RR: Well, once we got Antonio we got more like seven. Which is great, which is plenty for me. It’s like, I’m there. My real problem is that when you work with a studio, they allocate a lot more money for areas that I wouldn’t spend on. So we ended up having only $3.2 million to actually shoot the movie, not counting above-the-line and post-production costs. It looks really big, though. Kind of what I wanted to prove was that I could take their money and make it look like the rest of the summer movies—which are anywhere from $50 million to $180 million. rustin thompson / 1995 21 MM: You made El Mariachi for $7,000. We all know that part of the story. But give me a quick overview of how the theatrical release came about. You sent the movie to an agent, right? RR: I shot it for a very particular market—the Spanish video market. The Spanish video distributors were here in Los Angeles, so Carlos Gallardo and I drove up to Los Angeles to show it to them. The video action movies they make are really, really lame. Just awful. Some of them are shot with video cameras. So we thought, “Well, we can compete with that.” So we just tried to make the movie as good as we could, hoping that by having more action in it, we could get them to buy it from us for fifteen or twenty grand. That’s why we had to keep the budget so low. When we came to Los Angeles, one distributor was getting ready to buy it for twenty grand. They were getting the contracts together, and while we were waiting I dropped a tape off at agent Robert Newman’s office [at ICM]. It had a short film on it called Bedhead that had won many film festivals—it was like eight minutes long—and a trailer from El Mariachi that was about two minutes long. And I told him, “If you could watch the tape and let me know what you think—I’m trying to make a demo tape for coming to Hollywood later on.” Bedhead had my brothers and sisters in it, but I figured I could get him to look at it if they knew it had won awards. And he checked it out right away and called back and said, “We want to sign you up as a writer/director.” I was like, “Wow, I didn’t realize I was a writer, but I guess I’ve always written my own stuff. That sounds cool—writer/director.” He signed me up early in January ’92 and I started sending out videotapes of Mariachi and Bedhead all over Hollywood , endorsed by ICM. All the studios watched it over the next two weeks. I never could have gotten anyone in Hollywood to watch a Spanish -language low-budget movie like that, but because it came from the agency, they all watched it right away and jumped right on it. I started getting calls immediately from Columbia and Tri-Star and Disney saying they wanted to make some kind of development deal with me—hear what other scripts I had, maybe pay me to write a script, maybe direct it. It was going to be kind of a slow...

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