Book Report: Robert Rodriguez and the D-I-Y Spirit

Working my way through a suggested reading list provided by K Callan in her book, The New York Agent Book, I decided to check out Robert Rodriguez's book, Rebel Without a Crew. I had a vague recollection of seeing his movie, El Mariachi, which he made as a college student in the 90s for the complete cost of $7,000 and which is the subject of this book.

Robert Rodriguez is a D-I-Y filmmaker extraordinaire.

Drawn from his detailed diary during the period it took to conceive of the film and see it through to completion, Rodriguez's credo is: if you want to create a film, dive in and do it.  It won't be good at first (he says everyone has 12 bad scripts in them), but you have to do the work to learn what your style is and how to do different things to make it better.  By the time he gets to college, he had made 20+ films featuring his friends and family and was circulating a short called "Bedhead" on the festival circuit. This love of making stories did not make him a shoo-in to the UT Austin film school, however, which had a GPA requirement that he did not meet; he gained admittance through showing his festival-circulated short and his cartooning abilities.

Tenacity, tempered by practicality, help Rodriguez set the goal of making a full-length feature film in Mexico one summer, using a good friend from high school's home border town as home base, borrowing a camera, and strategic planning of every shot and every cost (in his case, he did a 1-month-long stint at a medical research facility to earn $3,000 of his budget, and used that time locked up to write, story board and watch movies).

Side note: Rodriguez bemoans the credit card industry's preying on students, and does not take out a loan at any point.  At times in this film's unexpected rise to renown, he has no money to speak of, but he is always mindful to keep his spending in check.

Equally crucially throughout, Rodriguez seems to know himself well enough to find ways to keep himself motivated about the work ahead in editing and selling the film.  After shooting for an exhilerating but exhausting three weeks without a crew (you have to feed and pay crew!), his first created a compelling trailer for the film to make himself see the full-length film's potential.  He knew he was going to be logging many hours to edit the images and then the sound, and he could not lose interest this far into the project.

In the end, some very remarkable things happen for Rodriguez.  A thinly-held connection to an agent at ICM leads to meetings which leads to a bidding war on his services as a filmmaker.  He flies back and forth to LA and his home in Austin to festivals in Telluride, Toronto and Sundance, making a lot of money and gaining a huge following.  Throughout it all, he emphasizes that he was making this film as a practice full-length film, meant to go straight to video in the Mexican market.  He seems as surprised as anyone by this unexpected turn of events.

Best of all, the last chapter is a "10 Minute Film School" in which Rodriguez, in 1995, presciently says he would be excited for a time when anyone who wants to make films uses their home cameras to do so.  You just have to want to do it, and to paraphrase, let your work be bad to learn what does and does not work.  This clearly applies to any D-I-Y notion, be it a film, or any other entrepreneurial/creative endeavor.