This year, one of the brightest visionaries of our time, who became famous for his hits “Spy Kids”, “Faculty”, “Machete”, “Sin City”, “Desperate” and “From Dusk Till Dawn”, turned 50 years old. Robert Rodriguez was listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the most versatile cinema figure.
Real nugget
Future film master Robert Rodriguez was born in 1968 into a large and friendly Mexican family living in San Antonio, Texas. The parents of the future filmmaker were far from creative, father Cecilio sold kitchen utensils, and mother Rebecca worked as a nurse. At the same time, they treated the hobby of his son very favorably. After graduation, the young man decided to enter the University of Texas and understand the basics of cinematography at the Department of Motion Picture Arts. However, he failed to realize his intentions, as did most gifted youth from the lower layers of society.
But when you consider that at one time Sam Raimi interrupted his studies at the university in order to create the cult "Evil Dead", Peter Jackson, without getting an education, came up with an "Alien Stew", and Quentin Tarantino did not enter a higher education institution at all, which did not stop him blowing up the movie world with Mad Dogs, the case of Robert Rodriguez does not seem to be an exception to the rule.
Not quality, but quantity
The filmography of Robert Rodriguez begins with the short-head debut project, Bad Head. This creative experiment allowed the director to begin work on the creation of a relatively inexpensive, but colorful Spanish-language film “The Musician”. Suddenly, budgetary action brought the author wide popularity and laid the foundation for the Mexican trilogy, which later included the criminal action movie Desperate with the inimitable Antonio Banderas and the stylish spectacle Once Upon a Time in Mexico with the same non-stop shooting and mind-blowing pursuits.
Born in Texas in a family of immigrants from Mexico, the director sometimes took in quantity, showing from time to time his wide American-Mexican soul. To raise funds for his debut feature film, he even took part in a test of cholesterol drugs. In “Musician”, he tried himself in almost all cinematic professions: from screenwriter and director to cameraman, producer, master of special effects and composer.
"From Dusk Till Dawn." Movie for all time
Unlike previous films, “The Musician” and “Four Rooms,” director Robert Rodriguez ignores the previously indefinitely meaningful and pompous, especially noticeable against the background of the plain plainness of the story being told. The stylistic excesses present in the picture, only in the scene of the final battle with the vampires are justified genre. Rodriguez throughout the creation of the tape does not lose irony, he could not even think that with his creation he would give the world one of the most impressive striptease scenes in the history of cinema. The beauty Salma Hayek, already known for Desperate, was invited to the role of the main vampire. "From dusk to dawn" only confirmed the prohibitive sexuality of the Mexican. Incidentally, in the episode where the heroes barely manage to shoot back from the vampires, the striptease scene was completely optional. But Robert Rodriguez would not forgive himself if he ordered to cut this moment.
Nothing sorry for a friend
In the 90s, films by Robert Rodriguez were created under the influence of his friendship with one of the most prominent representatives of postmodernism in films Quentin Tarantino. Filmmakers often worked together to create their own masterpieces. For example, Robert, for a nominal one-dollar fee, wrote the musical accompaniment for Kill Bill. Vol. 2 ”, Quentin, in turn, played a couple of characters in Rodriguez’s paintings (Desperate, From Dusk Till Dawn) for the same fee. Together, the comrades composed and realized the first anthology, The Four Rooms, and co-authored working on the illustrious Sin City.
Between these projects, Robert Rodriguez managed to create a spy-adventure parody comedy-fantastic trilogy “Spy Kids”. The trilogy, filmed by almost the same methods of “family-friendly contract” as the debut masterpieces, is attracted by the element of unbridled childish imagination and the director’s pronounced irony of the director about the genre that managed to discredit itself. Moreover, the director did not particularly hide that he released a series of paintings specially for his growing sons, born in conjunction with the film producer Elizabeth Avellan. Then the couple gave birth to two more offspring and divorced in 2008.
Fall and ups
After the Sin City, Rodriguez voluntarily left the filmmakers' guild due to the scandalous incident. It seemed his name had sunk into oblivion. The director did not abandon attempts to regain its former glory. He directed The Planet of Fear, which was warmly received. An explosive mixture of black comedy and an old-school horror film, practically without a plot, but saturated with unforgettable episodes and vivid characters, was part of a single film “Grindhouse” along with “Proof of Death” by Quentin Tarantino.
With his Machete, Rodriguez proved to the whole world that he is a virtuoso, the number of which in Hollywood can be counted on the fingers of one hand. The hybridization of genres in the picture is indicative, pure and created with luxurious cunning that new-fangled crazy projects seem corny and boring.
Dangerous trends
The three-dimensional “4D Spy Kids” did not show box office breakthroughs, but became a confirmation that Rodriguez knows how to promote family values, and in quite exciting ways.
Critics called the next brainchild of the director “Machete Kills” frank thrash, they were already worried about the creative fate of the director, fearing that at some point he would simply forget how to shoot a “normal movie”, not according to the rules of thrash. And this is very sad, because no one wanted to lose Rodriguez, who had once given the world “Desperate” and “Faculty”.
In 2014, Robert Rodriguez presented to the court of the world cinema community a film with the subtitle “A Woman Who Worth Killing For.” This long-awaited sequel to Sin City turned out visually a cut above the original tape, but the plot was frankly inferior to it. After a skeptical assessment of his work until 2018, the director did not release a single film.
Triumphant return
Now at the post-production stage is a new directorial work by Rodriguez, a multi-million dollar blockbuster “Alita: Battle Angel”. An outstanding contemporary filmmaker, James Cameron, composed and produced the project. It is said that he worked on a painting based on the Japanese comic strip for twenty years. Initially, James brought Rodriguez to work on a screenplay, which was to be shortened from a three-hour working version, consisting of a mass of disparate ideas and thoughts. Rodriguez brought the manuscript into a divine form, incorporating the idea into the traditional hour and a half hours. Cameron liked his option so much that he invited Robert to take the director's chair.
In perspective
The filming process of the project with a colossal budget of $ 200,000,000 lasted from October 2016 to February 2017. Since then, the team of Rodriguez and Cameron has been working on a gigantic volume of special effects, the main one of which is the central character with her unusually large eyes. Of course, it is too early to predict the audience reaction and commercial prospects of the film, including the probability of sequels. But if the project "goes", then the revived Rodriguez will have no problems with the sequels.