Robert Rodriguez: Interviews

Mr. Mariachi

6 Mr. Mariachi Kenneth Korman/1993 From Video Magazine, December 1993, 72–73, 122, 126. Copyright © Ken Korman/ Video Magazine. Reprinted by permission. From 42nd Street to Rocky, Hollywood loves a good success story. But the incredible tale of twenty-five-year-old Robert Rodriguez, and his homemade movie El Mariachi, has taught Tinseltown a lesson in filmmaking it won’t soon forget. Rodriguez cut his teeth on consumer video gear, teaching himself how to communicate with basic pictures and sound. And when he found himself in a position to borrow a rudimentary film camera, he proceeded to make one of the year’s best action movies in fourteen days and with a total budget of $7,000. A lengthy interview with Rodriguez revealed an affable and modest young man eager to share his experiences with aspiring filmmakers and other kindred spirits. How did this native of San Antonio, Texas, achieve this seemingly impossible feat? And what can we learn from his story? Though his talent sets him apart from the pack, his tale is nothing short of inspirational. Rodriguez proved that with imagination and hard work—not money and well-placed contacts—it’s still possible to beat the odds and succeed on your own terms. Rodriguez’s road to Hollywood began at the dawn of the video era, before he had even entered his teens. “I started before camcorders were introduced,” Rodriguez explains. “Back in ’79 or ’80, my dad got a JVC VCR, and it had a camera that attached with a cable. It didn’t have a viewfinder, so you had to watch your TV to see what you were focusing at—real crude stuff, real manual.” Rodriguez soon started making “little movies” on video starring members of his large family, including his nine brothers and sisters. And he immediately found himself in the first of many situations where he would have to use his wits to overcome kenneth korman / 1993 7 technical limitations. “We had to shoot mainly inside my house because we only had a twelve-foot cable,” he laughs. When Rodriguez was thirteen, his dad bought a second VCR and broadened his son’s creative horizons. “I suddenly realized you could edit between two decks, playing on one and pausing on the other,” he says. Rodriguez learned to add music and simple sound effects on his increasingly ambitious videos, but always kept them under twenty minutes in length. “People always think home movies are going to be boring and slow. My idea was to keep them short and three times as fast as real movies, so people could watch them and want to see them again. They weren’t very good to begin with, but they got better the more I did—it was like teaching myself to play guitar, or to paint. And with video, it was practically free—two hours of pictures and sound for about eight bucks, as opposed to film which would have been much more expensive.” Rodriguez used the old video camera for many years, honing his skills in anticipation of the day when he’d have better filmmaking tools at his disposal. After he started winning local contests, he decided that if he was going to reach the next level, he’d have to take matters into his own hands. The year was 1989, and Rodriguez barely passed twenty. “I did a medical research study—sold my body to science—to get the money to buy a camcorder,” he says. He chose an RCA ProEdit full-size VHS model, and set about making even more short movies using his new-found mobility . By this time, Rodriguez was enrolled as a student at the University of Texas at Austin, but low grades kept him out of the university’s film school. After his movies started beating those made by UT film students in contests like Austin’s annual Third Coast Film Festival, he was finally allowed in. By that time, however, there wasn’t much the school could teach him. Getting into the program mainly represented a chance to use a real film camera for the first time, free of charge. Rodriguez borrowed a 16mm wind-up film camera and “set out to make an award-winning film.” The result was Bedhead, an eight-minute, $800 film that’s so good Columbia TriStar later decided to include it on all cassette and disc editions of El Mariachi. A fantasy about a little girl’s revenge on her conniving...