Ich habe bisher nicht gewußt, daß Robert Rodriguez ein Buch zur Entstehung seiner, wie man so sagt, Low Budget Produktion "El Mariachi" geschrieben hat [Amazon.com "excerpts" aus "Rebel Without a Crew: Or How a 23-Year-Old Filmmaker With $7,000 Became a Hollywood Player"]. The Ten-Minute Film School ist ein Ausschnitt daraus, der sich großer Beliebtheit erfreut. Zitat:

"Okay, so you wanna be a film-maker? [...]Wrong! You ARE a film-maker. The moment you think about that you want to be a film-maker you're that."

Bemerkenswert ist das Interview mit dem "Onion Club". Rodriguez betont immer wieder, wie wichtig es für einen Regisseur ist, die technischen Aspekte des Filmemachens im Griff zu haben, und zwar sowohl aus künstlerischen als auch aus ökonomischen Gründen:

O: You also taught yourself CGI, is that correct?
RR: Yeah, that's what From Dusk Till Dawn and The Faculty were for. I was already writing Spy Kids, and I knew that would be my bigger movie, because it wasn't for the niche audience ["DTD" und "TF" waren für ein "Nischenpublikum" gedacht? F.F.], it was for a broader audience, it had the potential to just be something more special. But I didn't know enough about the effects, and I didn't want to have to call in the technicians. So I did some practice movies to prepare myself to do Spy Kids the way I did Mariachi, where you're able to do everything yourself. Because that's just so important. Then, you're a painter. Then, you can just paint on the canvas; you don't have to have the paint mixer there, and the canvas stretcher there, and the paintbrush holder there.

Über "Spy Kids 2":
We did the whole sound mix of the movie in my garage, we mixed it all there. I edited it in my garage, shot at home, made it much more a home movie

[...]

My first boss taught me, "If you want to be successful, you're already creative. Become technical. Creative people aren't technical; technical people aren't creative. They always need each other, and they're always on opposite sides of the room." That's why nothing gets done. That's why my bed is stacked high with technical manuals. It puts me to sleep just reading them, but you have to trudge through them. You have to learn new things, and you have to start all over, but art challenges technology, and technology challenges art. Always.

Schade, daß die Filme von Rodriguez mich nicht so recht überzeugen können. Das Lesen seiner theoretischen Ausführungen ist mir bis zu einem gewissen Grad definitiv lieber...