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Robert Rodriguez, Film Director
- University Press of Mississippi
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160 Robert Rodriguez, Film Director Stephen Applebaum/2010 From The Scotsman, posted November 19, 2010. Reprinted by permission of Stephen Applebaum. In Arizona earlier this year, a controversial new law was launched that targeted undocumented immigrants; a recent report suggested it may have provoked the voluntary departure of one hundred thousand Hispanic people from the United States. Provocative timing, then, for the release of Robert Rodriguez’s splattery “mexploitation” movie Machete, in which the eponymous Mexican hero (grizzled former jailbird Danny Trejo) and a colorful roster of Latino characters violently fight for their rights against a gallery of right-wing baddies, including Don Johnson as a murderous vigilante and Robert De Niro as an anti-immigration Texas senator. To some outraged U.S. conservatives, the film looked like a declaration of war. Machete was “racist and anti-American” and “a call to revolution ,” according to one. Another linked “riots” in Los Angeles directly to the film’s release three days earlier. This was all hyperbolic nonsense. But to be fair, Rodriguez had primed right-wingers for such a reaction by posting a re-edited, so-called “illegal ” trailer online with a tacked-on introduction showing Trejo in character saying, “This is Machete with a special Cinco de Mayo message to . . . Arizona,” followed by scenes of a violent uprising by immigrant workers. The film does contain provocative elements, such as a rabble-rousing speech by Jessica Alba in which she declaims, “We didn’t cross the border , the border crossed us,” and the point-blank shooting of a pregnant Mexican woman as she tries to cross the border (if she gave birth in the United States, her child would automatically become American). But Machete is by no means a “call to arms,” says Rodriguez. “People may stephen applebaum / 2010 161 think it’s about immigration but it’s not. We shot over a year ago and it’s only good timing that it seems more relevant now.” In fact he first talked to Trejo about the Machete character sixteen years ago, when they worked together on Rodriguez’s El Mariachi sequel, Desperado. “I had an idea for an action hero who was a Mexican federal agent that’s fighting the drug cartels, who loses his family and has to hide out in the United States as an illegal day laborer, and gets chosen by the bad guys to do a fake hit on the senator.” Meeting Trejo, he realized he’d found his star: “Too many actors play tough guys. Danny is a tough guy. I just knew he would be believable.” Thirteen years later, Rodriguez included a fake Machete trailer in Grindhouse , the homage to exploitation cinema he made with Quentin Tarantino . It proved such a hit with fans that he decided to go ahead and expand it into a movie in the same schlocky, over-the-top style. “So many times you go to a movie because you saw a cool trailer and the movie’s nothing like the trailer. You’re like, ‘They made this look like the greatest movie ever. Why didn’t they just make the trailer?’ So that’s what we did.” Trejo, having finally graduated from supporting player to leading man at sixty-six years of age, couldn’t be happier. “I feel blessed,” he told the press at the Venice Film Festival in September. “Robert Rodriguez has made me go from ex-con to icon.” Machete’s real subject, Rodriguez says, is corruption, arguing that the immigration issue is a “smokescreen” to control the border and keep the price of illegally trafficked drugs high. “You’re hearing a lot about immigration , which is solvable. But the corruption is the real problem in the States and that’s something people don’t talk about at all.” Born and raised in San Antonio, Texas, he has seen the reality of the Tex-Mex fault-line at first hand. “People talk about a border as if there’s a solution of putting up a fence or something, but that just shows they don’t get it. There’s no border. It becomes its own country after a while and if you and me want to get anything across the border, we can. Very easily. That’s how bad it is.” Greed makes bizarre bedfellows of a racist good ol’ boy and a Mexican drug baron in Machete, but the reality is no less extraordinary, says Rodriguez . “There are white supremacist groups in Austin (his hometown in...