Robert Rodriguez: Interviews

The Mariachi Aesthetic Goes to Hollywood

39 The Mariachi Aesthetic Goes to Hollywood Charles Ramírez Berg/2000 From Latino Images in Film: Stereotypes, Subversion, and Resistance by Charles Ramírez Berg, 240–61, copyright © 2002. By permission of the University of Texas Press. Interview conducted on August 22, 2000. Robert Rodriguez is one of the more successful of the wave of young directors of the last seven or eight years, and to date arguably the most successful Latino director ever to work in Hollywood. Because they were made so cheaply, all his films have made money. Four Rooms may have been a critical bomb, but Rodriguez’s segment, “The Misbehavers,” was the most successful, and it was the project that allowed him to edit and to have final cut on future films. And he managed to leverage the directing of The Faculty for Miramax into a multifilm deal in which he has virtually complete creative control. The first of these, the children’s adventure Spy Kids, he was busily editing at the time of this interview. The basic questions that I wanted him to address are important ones: What is it like for a Latino director working in Hollywood these days? What is the responsibility of a Latino filmmaker in Hollywood? How can a Latino filmmaker, one who is proud of his heritage, balance being true to his ethnicity and satisfying the needs of a large, profit-driven media industry? Could someone like Rodriguez, who began his career with his low-budget Mariachi filmmaking aesthetic, continue making films with that same guerrilla mentality? Or would he, by agreeing to work within the media mainstream, be forced to conform to Hollywood’s ethnically cleansed paradigm? Said another way, though he may have entered the mainstream hoping to change it, there is always the danger that it will change him. Put bluntly, has Robert Rodriguez sold out to the system? We talked in his editing suite, which is in a converted garage at his 40 rober t rodriguez: inter views home outside of Austin, Texas. When we first sat down at his editing station, he showed me some of the sequences of the film and explained how the editing on this film was made more complex by the four hundred special-effects shots. He had just gotten back from a trip to the special -effects house to coordinate some of the shots. Typically, he edits all night and sleeps from early morning to mid-afternoon . Then he gets up, plays with his three sons, Rocket, Racer, and Rebel, and takes care of odds and ends until it’s time to begin editing again. Besides the editing computer monitors, he keeps a Mac laptop on the desk, and to the left of the monitors there is a large high-definition television. He plays a film, some on DVD, some on video, as a sort of “visual background” while he edits. He popped in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) to show me how it looked on high definition. Together we marveled at how sharp Hitchcock ’s film looked with the latest technology. I remarked on the color design, in, for example, the scene in the restaurant where Madeleine’s (Kim Novak) green dress explodes against the red walls. He talked about the compositions, such as the one of Scottie (James Stewart) and Madeleine under the Golden Gate Bridge when she tries to commit suicide by drowning. His favorite editing films, he said, were Heavy Metal (1981) and Glengarry Glen Ross (1992). “I’ll be editing away, and then when I’m waiting for an effect to be rendered on the screen, which takes a long time, I’ll turn over to see what’s going on in the movie,” he said. “With [Heavy Metal] there’s either some cool music going on, or a nice graphic, or something funny happening [in Glengarry Glen Ross].” Our conversation gradually drifted toward the topics I wanted to cover for the interview but when I turned on the tape recorder, it was he who asked the first question. Robert Rodriguez: When do you write? Charles Ramírez Berg: I try to write first thing in the morning. RR: That’s what I heard. I tried it. I’m just not a morning guy, you know. CRB: I’m not either, but once you have children, then you become a morning guy. RR: I just don’t like getting up in the morning. CRB: I don’t either. [18.220.137.164] Project MUSE...