Robert Rodriguez stands at the front of a west Los Angeles theater answering questions from a group of film teachers who’ve just seen “El Mariachi,” the award-winning movie he made for an unheard-of $7,000.
Dressed in faded blue jeans, the 24-year-old Texan is relaxed, genial, garrulous. He clearly relishes telling how he did exactly what his film school teachers thought could never be done: shoot a feature-length movie for under $10,000 with a one-man crew (himself), non-actors and two 250-watt bulbs for lighting.
With his film in hand, he landed a two-year contract to write and direct movies for Columbia Pictures and a national distribution deal for “El Mariachi.” He’d originally made the film only as a learning experience, hoping to recoup his investment by selling it on the Spanish-language home video market.
Beyond anything he’d ever imagined, the film is appearing nationwide in Spanish-language theaters and with English subtitles in art houses, an unusual arrangement for an American-made movie.
The crowd of film teachers and students dressed in black gathered to hear Rodriguez is so smitten with the young director and his whimsical action-adventure film that they frequently break into spontaneous applause. Similar reaction to the film’s story of the guitar player who travels the dusty roads of Mexico on a motorcycle earned Rodriguez the top audience award at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year.
The question and answer session verges on becoming an audience testimonial for the young man from San Antonio whose gee-whiz success story makes Broadway musicals seem realistic.
“Mr. Rodriguez, it’s such a visual film, so visual,” one man declares.
“Brilliant. Simply brilliant,” says Alice La Deane, president of the teachers’ group, which uses film in secondary school classes.
“I think it’s a terrific film. I loved it and everything, but I wonder if the appeal isn’t simply to Latino audiences?” another man asks.
A hush falls over the audience. Then a rustle of whispers. A chorus of disagreement erupts from the crowd.
Good-natured and still wide-eyed about everything that’s happened, Rodriguez seizes the floor.
“Hey, you did not raise your hand,” he says to the doubter. “I’m the teacher. Isn’t this the Film Teachers Association?”
It is a delicious moment, filled with sweet irony that does not escape Rodriguez.
Instead of paying attention in his classes at the University of Texas-Austin, he often worked on his comic strip, which ran for three years in the campus newspaper.
“I always thought I was a failure,” he tells the teachers. “I was the kid in the back of the room drawing cartoons. This was the kind of kid I was, so you’ll know not to scold them too hard.”
A cloud of sentiment rushes into the room as the teachers nod knowingly.
Rejected from film production classes because of his low grades, Rodriguez went out and made a short movie on his own that beat out all the film students in a local competition. The film school let him in.
Later, his professors warned their baby-faced but talented dreamer that it is absolutely, completely impossible to make a feature-length movie, even a student movie, for under $10,000. Anyone in the film business would have told him the same.
“You have more examples of failure than success, so you have to be cautionary. You don’t like to see young people beaten down. I didn’t want him to fail,” says one of his teachers, Nicholas Cominos. “Even with a crew of four or five he shouldn’t have been able to do it.”
The professor is proud to say he was wrong. “He’s a consummate filmmaker. He’s way ahead of his time,” Cominos says. “He’s not afraid to try things others would shun.”
Rodriguez was far from untutored, having spent years making short movies at home on his parents’ video camera, a source of experience increasingly important for some young filmmakers.
Using the pause and start buttons on two connected VCRs, he edited his short features, gaining the hands-on sense of filmmaking that would later give him the expertise to work within a miniscule budget.
To raise money to make “El Mariachi,” Rodriguez volunteered to stay a month in a research hospital as a subject for a cholestorol-lowering drug experiment. He used the time to write his script.
With no technical help or extra equipment, he used a silent 16 mm camera to shoot the film. In a technique called looping, he later dubbed in the sound from tape recordings made of the actors speaking their lines on the set right after each scene was shot.
For actors, he enlisted locals that his school chum, Carlos Gallardo, who plays the mariachi, helped round up on location in his hometown of Acuna, a Mexican border community near Texas.
In one opening scene shot at the town jail, for example, the security guard stars as herself.
To get his amateurs to act, Rodriguez would read them one or two lines of the script, then shoot the scene. “I didn’t want them rehearsing, because it would sound rehearsed,” he says.
The intimacy of a one-man crew, rather than a gaggle of assistants on the set, helped his amateurs relax. “You get natural performances out of them because they don’t feel like they’re putting on a show,” he says.
The naturalness of the acting in “El Mariachi,” so unexpected in an action thriller, is one of the movie’s striking qualities. The intentional innocence and gentle wit carry the comedy of mistaken identities that begins when a mariachi carrying his guitar walks into town at the same time as an escaped convict carrying a guitar case filled with weapons.
With next to no budget for props, Rodriguez often relied on the largesse of locals, like the police, who lent him their (empty) guns for shoot-em-up scenes.
Most movies are shot in many takes, but to save on film costs, Rodriguez shot each scene only once. “This was an action picture. How many takes do you really need of a guy kicking in a door?”
When a $17,000 deal with a foreign home video company hit some snags, Rodriguez submitted his film to the all-powerful talent agency International Creative Management on a lark. They called him the next day.
“I knew they didn’t take people off the streets,” Rodriguez says. “I thought they were scamming me. I was nobody. I didn’t know what it meant.”
This is what it meant: Columbia won an ICM-initiated bidding war among the major studios to sign him to write and direct movies for the next two years.
For his first project, Rodriguez suggested reshooting “El Mariachi” for a modest budget, by Hollywood standards, of $5 or $6 million. After reviewing the film, studio heads Mark Canton and Peter Guber decided they wanted to release it as is.
“That’s when I protested: It’s only a home movie,” Rodriguez says. “If I’d known anybody was going to see it (anybody who is anybody, that is), I would have spent more money.”
For budgetary reasons, Rodriguez had edited his movie in videotape version, which is not suitable for movie theater distribution. He followed all of his original edits, keeping the fast cutting style that many have described as artistic.
“When the lines didn’t sync up, I’d cut away,” Rodriguez says. “That’s why you see so many shots of the dog.”
With a budget of $6 million, Rodriguez begins shooting “Mariachi II” in May. Then he hopes to write and direct a family comedy based on what it’s like growing up with 10 brothers and sisters in a Catholic family like his.
This is territory he’s already plumbed in earlier short films and in the campus comic strip.
Bolstered by his overnight success and a tidy sum of money (he won’t specify) for him and his wife, Elizabeth Avellan, Rodriguez still plans to work for the credits he needs to graduate from the University of Texas.
“I have a lot of young brothers and sisters. I want to be an example to them,” he says. “Hopefully, some of this stuff will fulfill some of my (degree) requirements-you’d think.”
You would.
