Robert Rodriguez: commitment

Transcript context

…Yeah. That means, what do you do? Commit to a body of work. Just do that. Because you don’t know. You don’t know what’s going to be a Pulp Fiction, and what’s going to be a Jackie Brown. What’s going to be… You don’t know. And you’d like to think they know, but they don’t know either. They feel it. Like I asked Jim Cameron. I said, “Do you see your movie really clearly? Can you see it with hyper focus? Because it seems like that.” And he goes, “It’s really far, and it’s out of focus. And as you work on it, and you work on it starts coming.” I said, “Well, okay, good. So that’s normal.” I thought maybe he had laser vision, or something. But no, even him, he doesn’t really know, but he feels that he can make decisions and he understands what a creative drive is, and how to just keep being relentless about it. But it’s not like they have all the… Proximity is huge. Proximity will change your life. Did for me. Just being around those guys. They didn’t teach me, “Hey, I’m going to teach you how to make a movie.” Just being next to them, being in their world, just ups your game. And you’re able to do things you weren’t able to do before. You get ideas you didn’t get to do before I did. I’ll show you one of my painting things. You’re not going to believe this freaking thing. I had a painter friend in Germany, Sebastian Kruger, he gives a workshop once a year. I said, “I’m going to go there, and I bet I’ll learn more about directing by watching this guy paint, than I will by watching another director. ” Because that’s just, now, I know how creativity works. You’re going to learn lessons outside of the box by doing that. And I tried to practice before going out there. I was doing a Danny Trejo, I’ll show you the before and after. You’re not going to freaking believe what you see, but it really tells the story of how important proximity is. So I do this painting, it’s like, “Ah, it fucking looks garbage.” I’ll show you, it looks like garbage. I can’t do paintings that are just like… See, you never should say, “I can’t,” because you just cut your leg off. But I couldn’t at the time paint, just paintbrush into paint and then right on the canvas like that, without using some kind of medium. Which this guy Sebastian Kruger would do. So first I did a digital painting of Danny Trejo, just to get the framing and all that Nice. How was that created?…

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