Robert Rodriguez: preference

Transcript context

…Wait a minute, okay, stuff changed. It’s discipline. Where’s the, not to be cliche about it, but where’s the silver lining of this? Where’s the path to actually make something good out of this? And that’s a skill, right? I call It, and it’s one of my favorite stories. I was doing one of these talks and I said, come talk about creativity. I go, I understand because a lot of people read my book, Reels had a crew and told me, “Ooh, it made me be a filmmaker. But a lot of people said it helped me start my own business because they just see how you can go be entrepreneurial like that and go where no one else is going, and I’m giving all this talk about this kind of positive stuff and this one woman goes, you’re real positive. But what do I tell myself when I just wasted a year and a half of my life doing something that didn’t work? I was like, that’s a real negative way to ask that. Can you just rephrase the question a little more positively before I even attempt to answer it? Because already her point of view is exactly what you’re saying. She’s not looking at all. She’s just concentrating on what didn’t follow her plan and not seeing the gift of everything else that’s there. So she goes very reluctant. It was so perfect. I wish we had filmed it. She goes, “I learned a good lesson the hard way,” and I said, “That still sucks. I say, when you follow your instinct, if you follow your own instinct to go start a business or go make this movie, or it wasn’t someone saying, go over there and you’ll make a million dollars. It was your instinct and you fail sometimes. The only way across the river is to slip on the first two rocks. You fail. You have to really sift through.” It’s like the silver lining, but I call it sift through the ashes of your failure and you’ll find the key to your next success is in there. But if you’re not looking for it, you don’t find it. I’m going to tell you one, and I tell them the four room story. I said, I made a movie called Four Rooms. It didn’t make any money. When Quentin asked me, Hey, do you want to make a movie with me and two other filmmakers? It’s an anthology. It’s on New Year’s Eve, it’s in a hotel. You have to use the bill. We’re not going to know what each other’s making and we make it and we put it together. The hand went up right away, just instinctually. That sounds, yeah, I’ll do that. I’ll go make that with you. Now, should I ask the audience, I like to throw it to the audience and her. Should I have not raised my hand that quick? Shouldn’t I have done a little studying first or should I just go blind instinct? Or should you do instinct with some studying? Okay, well, I could have gone and studied and I would’ve found that anthologies never work. Even when it’s Coppola, Scorsese, Woody Allen, they bomb because people can’t quite rip the hand. What is this Twilight Zone? I don’t want to go see that, but that’s not, I still said, “Yeah, I think I should still go by instinct. : So my instinct was to raise my hand. We go make that movie because I love short films. I made bedhead and short films and I thought, oh, here’s aw . If this works, I can make short films in anthologies and I can have the best of both worlds. And by the way, anthologies is when there’s multiple, multiple one story in one movie, one story, yeah, one movie. So if you did the research, you would know that…

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