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138 Exclusive Interview: Robert Rodriguez Talks Shorts Silas Lesnick/2009 From ComingSoon.net, posted August 18, 2009. Reprinted by permission of ComingSoon.net. It’s rare—if not utterly unprecedented—to have a filmmaker who moves so effortlessly between hard-R action films and the family-friendly fare. Robert Rodriguez, whose name stands simultaneously with Sin City and Spy Kids, returns to the big screen this week with Shorts, a series of intertwining short films that, told out of linear order, tell a bigger story about the children of Black Falls community and what happens when a magical wishing rock enters their lives. CS: This is a return-to-form for one of your earliest works, your short film Bedhead. Was that something you were consciously going for? Robert Rodriguez: Yes! It was my son’s idea to do this kind of movie, but he hasn’t seen Bedhead so he had said, “I have an idea for the next movie. Let’s do something like The Little Rascals,” and I said, “I never thought of that!” That’s all I used to do, growing up, was make Little Rascal-type movies with my brothers and sisters in my backyard and it got me really focused on what I planned to do one day, which was film a real movie in my backyard with my kids and release it like El Mariachi. So that’s kind of how we started with Shorts. I thought that it was just something I would do with my kids in my backyard and film with hi-def cameras. Have some cameos and stuff and make it look big budget and stuff. But the idea just grew from there. Warner Bros. picked it up when we made a fake trailer with my kids. They saw it and said, “Oh! We’ll pay you such and such to make it.” So we thought, “Okay! Now we’ll really silas lesnick / 2009 139 have to get this movie done.” But the idea was just to do something like The Little Rascals with a bunch of kids. They’re all in a neighborhood and we have the same short-subject format. We do each of the little vignettes with their own title-cards and, originally, I though that the only unifying element would be that they’re in the same neighborhood. Just like how Spanky might be a lead character in one short and a supporting character in another one, you can see everybody kind of coming in and out of each other’s story at one point. But each story would be a completely different story. Once he started mentioning things like a rainbow rock and a canyon and crocodiles and snakes, I thought that that could be one story. But then I thought about the rock and how, if it’s a magic wishing rock, that could be the element that ties everything together. Maybe you think it’s all separate stories, but it’s really just told out of order. It all has to come together and you make it like a puzzle. It just evolved over a couple of years of us working on it. CS: You say they’ve never seen Bedhead . . . Rodriguez: Well, they saw it a long time ago. I think if they saw it now, they would see much more of a connection. You show kids something and they see it and say they like it, but a few years in a kid’s life and they change immensely. They don’t even remember probably seeing it at all now. CS: How do you balance showing them things you’ve done that are made for kids versus things that you did for adults? Rodriguez: No, they have no interest in something like Sin City. They all have very fertile imaginations like I did growing up and they know they’ll have nightmares. You see some things and they just haunt you forever. They’re definitely wary that there are things that might f**k them up. CS: Do you yourself keep a balance purposefully between the two? Rodriguez: Well, it’s really more for me. It’s not, “Oh, I’ve gotta give them something to watch.” There’s plenty of movies for them to watch that I don’t have to make myself. It’s more just about keeping it fresh and balancing it out. You end up needing to use your life’s experiences and I use what...

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