How does he manage to retain creative control? “Easy,” he told NEWSWEEK over drinks in the Hotel des Bains at the Venice Film Festival earlier this month. “Don’t ask for a lot of money.” Low budgets are certainly a Rodriguez trademark. He made his first feature, “El Mariachi,” for $7,000 in 1992. Its 1995 sequel, “Desperado,” starring Antonio Banderas and the then unknown Salma Hayek, cost Sony $6 million–still paltry by studio standards. And the third and final installment of the series, “Once Upon a Time in Mexico,” came in at $26.5 million–$15 million of which went to its stars: Banderas, Hayek, Depp and Willem Dafoe. It nearly broke even when it hit U.S. theaters last week, and will no doubt keep ringing up the receipts when it opens in Europe this week. “I could have asked for three times the budget with this cast,” Rodriguez says. “But if I had, there would have been studio people on the set in Mexico, making sure we were covering their investment, and that’s very restricting. I know how to make cheap movies–and I have to do all the jobs to keep it cheap–but in turn I can make the movie I want. Even if it bombs at the theater, they get their money back. And you have the chance to make something a bit different.”
“Once Upon a Time” surely falls under that category. A paean to Sergio Leone’s 1970s spaghetti Western “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” the film tells the story of a shifty CIA operative, played by Depp, who arrives in a small, dusty Mexican town to foil a political coup with the help of the gun-slinging guitarist El Mariachi (Banderas). Like the other “Mariachi” installments, the film is exceedingly violent; in one scene Depp’s character’s eyes are drilled out. Yet “Once Upon a Time” managed to avoid the dreaded NC-17 rating in the United States, which would have kept away most of the lucrative teenage audience. “Tone is everything,” says Rodriguez. “And the tone of the ‘El Mariachi’ series is so comic-book that I’ve never had any problem with the censors.”
It’s no accident that Rodriguez’s movies look like comic books: he started his artistic career as a cartoonist. The third of 10 children, he grew up in Austin, Texas, the son of a door-to-door salesman and a nurse. He was full of creative energy, and as a teenager he wielded a video camera nonstop. At 18 Rodriguez enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin but was rejected by the film program because his grades were too low. So he created and drew an award-winning comic strip called “Los Hooligans” for the student newspaper, The Daily Texan. He also met Avellan, a fellow student, whom he married in 1990.
Eventually Rodriguez dropped out of college and started making movies for the Mexican video market. In 1992, out of money but full of ideas, he volunteered for a monthlong cholesterol-drug experiment that paid $3,000. During the trial, which required him to be sequestered, he wrote “El Mariachi,” about a nameless, clean-living guitarist who is driven to violence by revenge. Afterward, Rodriguez took the cash and headed down to Acuna, Mexico, to shoot the film in Spanish with a 16mm camera that he hadn’t yet learned how to use. “It was the best film school,” he recalls. “When you write, direct, edit and shoot, you learn everything all at once.”
While in Los Angeles looking for a Mexican video distributor, Rodriguez showed a trailer for “El Mariachi” to an ICM agent. Before he knew it, he had a two-year deal with Columbia Pictures and the audience award at the Sundance Film Festival. The film became an instant art-house hit. “I never thought I would make it in the business,” Rodriguez says. “I was from Texas. I had no contacts. I was never going to go to film school or move to L.A. and go knock on doors.” When “El Mariachi” got picked up, he says, “suddenly, everything seemed possible.”
In the next eight years Rodriguez turned out a dozen movies, including “Desperado,” a vampire flick called “From Dusk to Dawn” (starring George Clooney in his first major film role) and the “Spy Kids” series, a wildly popular trio of James Bond spoofs about a suburban family engaged in international espionage. When Sony asked Rodriguez if he had an idea for a third “Mariachi” film, he says, “I told them I wanted to do an epic. And they said, ‘Sure’.”
No wonder. Rodriguez has become one of the most bankable franchise directors in the film business. Unlike most franchises, however, which are based on novels or comic –books, Rodriguez’s are invented by him. Tall and rangy with a dizzying energy that matches his movies’ rat-tat-tat pace, Rodriguez toils in the wee hours of the night in his state-of-the-art studio, Los Cryptos, next door to the castle, where his three sons–Rocket, 7, Racer, 6 and Rebel, 4–sleep in their medieval bedchambers. (Upon witnessing Rodriguez’s frenetic, vampire-like work habits, Depp says, “I thought, he must never sleep!”) He turns to comic books for inspiration–not for the stories but for the artwork.
Once he starts filming, Rodriguez gets down and dirty. He shot “Once Upon a Time in Mexico” in seven weeks and finished filming Depp’s part–the lead–in a mere eight days. “I shoot fast. I shoot very fast,” Rodriguez says at near-warp speed. “When an actor comes on the set, I only shoot his character. Johnny had never shot a movie in eight days before. When we were done, he asked, ‘Is there anything else I can do?’ " ((In fact there was. Rodriguez let Depp stay on for an extra day to play one scene as a Mexican priest.) When the film wrapped in less than two months, studio execs couldn’t believe it. “I said, ‘I told you we were going to shoot in seven weeks,’ and they said, ‘Yeah, but we thought you were out of your mind!’ "
Rodriguez’s obsession with keeping budgets small and control tight stems from a desire to keep his romance with cinema alive. “Whenever I’d ask bigger directors what their favorite movie was, they’d always say their first, because they didn’t have enough time or money and everyone had to pull together and do multiple jobs,” he says. “I thought, every movie should be like a first movie.” But that passion for keeping it simple doesn’t prevent him from evolving cinematically; for “Once Upon a Time” he used the new Sony digital high-definition-technology camera that George Lucas inaugurated on “Star Wars: Episode II–Attack of the Clones.”
Rodriguez is also not afraid to abandon the franchise and try new things. Right now he’s making a computer-generated animation movie, and after that, a thriller. Then he may retire to his castle and direct the action from there. “I have a bunch of movies I want to do, but I don’t have time to make them all,” he says. “So I thought, I can write, edit and score and let someone else direct. That way I can stay home with the kids and get more movies done while I still have the energy.” It’s impossible to imagine him without it. ^
