Recommends Red 11.

Transcript context

…I was just like, I don’t even know what basic job even out there, turning the page, oh yeah, don’t want that job. I don’t want that job. I don’t want that job. It’s just going through and it gets to filmmaker and there’s a little icon beside this job, this icon is a guy like this. Literally you look it up and it says, “This is the best job ever. You get to just be creative with your friends, sit back, watch the money roll in, across the desk.” And it said, “But 99% of film students don’t get this job, so give up that dream.” So I was like, I guess I got the best job. But then I started working with my kids when we did, I had a TV show called Rebel Without a Crew based on that, where I found filmmakers who had only made a short film that hadn’t made a feature. I picked this diverse group of filmmakers, gave them $7,000, and we documented them making a feature two weeks like I did. You can bring one person. I had Carlos Gallardo, the producer and star of Mariachi, “Bring one person, can be your cameraman or you can be your sound guy, whatever. But it’s only that for the shoot and you’d have to do the whole thing.” And I saw those guys by the time they’re like, “I don’t know how we’re going to make this movie.” By the first week of shooting, they’re already talking about their next feature. They became so confident because their idea of what impossible is drops really quick when you take it. Yeah, anyone interested in unlocking their creativities, they’re not even just filmmaking, I highly recommend that show and I highly recommend kind of the follow-on show, which is where you make Red 11. So that’s the one I did. So then it came time for me to do one. So I made a movie called Red 11 based on my experiences in the medical hospital, but I’ll turn it into a sci-fi thriller just to use that so that I can use somebody getting stabbed in the eye. So I’m still going to have more elements to show how you can do camera tricks and stuff with no money. And the old days make it for less than $7,000, which I think were like $5,000 mainly because I had a lot of actors I wanted to pay, but the movie itself can make it for nothing. But I brought my son aboard as my number one who hadn’t been working with me in a while. He wrote Sharkboy and Lavagirl when he was seven, but then he hadn’t really been working on my crew, so he didn’t know how to operate the sound equipment, the separate sound system and all that. I didn’t show him until the day of filming because I knew we’re documenting it would make a better tutorial. So by getting them working on the movies together, they came to me super excited. By the end of the day I thought for sure, oh, they’re going to hate this even though it’s only two weeks. They’ve got other interests. They don’t want to be filmmakers. I thought they were going to be like, “All right, I’m out of here,” after one day. But instead he came to me and his brother who acted in it and he went, “Dad, the actor didn’t show up after the first day. The location didn’t match the script at all. We asked you how we were going to solve the problems and you’re like, ‘I don’t know, figure it out.'” We thought Dad’s stumped for once, is he stumped finally? But then by the end of the day, his eyes were all wide. We figured it out. They went, oh, they don’t realize this is the creative process. Every day is like that. And in life too, every day you don’t know if your machine’s going to not work or you’re going to get a flat tire or you get fired that day. So life is very unpredictable, just like a movie set. So I realized I’m going to make them all work on my movies now because it’s teaching them about life. I’m teaching them very little about the film make, it’s about life lessons, about how you take on something impossible, turn chicken shit to chicken salad and make it work. And that’s the strive, that’s life, that’s the process of life. So many people say, “Well, I’m not ready to make my projects.” You’re not ready for life either. You’re like this all day, you’re dodging shit that’s going on. How come art has to be perfect? It’s like it should be the same, life and art should be the same.…

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