Robert Rodriguez: Interviews

A Digital Desperado

75 A Digital Desperado Brian McKernan and Bob Zahn/2002 From TVB Europe, August 2002, 28–29. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Director Robert Rodriguez burst upon the filmmaking scene in 1992 with his self-financed feature El Mariachi, which he made in three weeks with a borrowed camera and $7,000. When the then-twenty-four-year-old, Texas-born filmmaker took the movie to Hollywood, Columbia Pictures bought it and signed him to direct a sequel, Desperado, for $3.1 million. Rodriguez recounted the experience in his 1995 book, Rebel without a Crew, and went on to score additional triumphs with such fast-action films as From Dusk Till Dawn (1996), The Faculty (1998), and his familyfriendly Spy Kids (2001). A true “renaissance” filmmaker, Rodriguez not only writes and directs his movies, he also usually serves as production designer, director of photography, and editor. In January 2000 his friend George Lucas showed him early digital HD footage of Star Wars Episode II, which inspired Rodriguez to do a side-by-side test of 35mm film and Sony’s HDWF900 HDCAM CineAlta 24P camera system. “When I screened the film-out I was shocked to see how bad film looks compared to the HD,” Rodriguez recalls. “The studio [Miramax] couldn’t understand why anyone would shoot film after seeing those tests. I told them that digital 24p HD is new . . . I don’t think anyone realizes they’re at this level yet. As soon as you bring an HD camera to your set, it’s over; you’ll never go back.” Since that epiphany Rodriguez has shot two 24p movies, Once Upon a Time in Mexico (the third in his El Mariachi series, which will be released later this year) and Spy Kids 2: The Island of Lost Dreams, which arrived in U.S. theatres on 7 August. 76 rober t rodriguez: inter views Q: What are the advantages of shooting with digital HD? Rodriguez: I had started, actually, in video and moved into film and was always disappointed by the limitations of film. HD is very freeing and is more like going back to the basics of filmmaking, where it’s fun again. It’s just so much easier to shoot in HD. I was able to light and even DP myself because I was able to see what I was getting on my monitors and be much edgier with the lighting because I knew that I wasn’t going to get into trouble; there was no guesswork or waiting for dailies. We moved a lot faster and it was a lot more satisfying. It felt like the difference between cutting on film and cutting on an Avid; it was that big a change in the creative process. Q: You mentioned that there are limitations on film; can you elaborate? Rodriguez: There’s a lot of technical hang-ups to film. I do a lot of my own production design, but when I get the film back I’m always disappointed because it never looks like it did when we were there making the movie. HD turned that around. HD was the first time I saw that what I was getting was what I had seen on the set. With film it’s always downhill from the moment you walk on the set until you finally see your movie released. Everything we do now ends up as work on the screen. Every color we paint isn’t all turning gray like it does with film, the color isn’t sucked out of it, we don’t have this extreme amount of contrast that film does now these days because of the way they process it. I also have a lot of effects. Any time you do an optical in film you lose another generation. It’s also much easier to pull a matte digitally than with film. When we filmed the first Spy Kids we wanted to get the cleanest image, so we shot slower film stock, which meant a lot more lights on the green screen, which is a lot more money. And I still wasn’t satisfied with how it looked. I’d visit the effects guys and they were having so much trouble pulling mattes, taking the grain away, pulling the matte, putting the grain back in. I mean, it was just ridiculous. Film is so archaic , it’s just not worth it anymore. Q: How did shooting digital HD influence your work with...