Robert Rodriguez: recommendation

Transcript context

…It does draw you in. It draws you in and it makes you go now think of ideas you never would’ve thought of for mainly because it has a filter. Well, now I don’t have to think of all these ideas. I actually have, like me on that set, there’s only very few things I can actually come up with that are just action driven first, when they have a great character. You’ll get to it a lot faster with a filter. That’s the beauty of a filter is that now you’ve just shrunk your target and now you can hit that target and people are coming up with ideas because now they’ve got proximity and they’ve got a reason to come up with the idea and they’ve got a deadline, which is the best thing you can do is have a deadline because when you have a deadline, you can freaking move mountains. I had a Spy Kids in the theater every year, three years in a row not being pre-planned. Every year there was a Spy Kids. Now the third one was the biggest one, biggest cast, mostly green screen, video game and the first digital 3D movie ever. So getting visual effects companies to make that, we realized, oh, I shot it with two cameras. That means each effect shot has to be done twice from a different angle. So I went to the studio midway through that and said, “There’s not going to be a movie in the theaters in time. You’re going to have to push the date back.” And they said, “Okay, we’ve never heard you panic. We’ll push the date back for you.” They called back 10 minutes later. I was like, oh, thank God. Because it’s really complicated. I didn’t know it was going to be this complicated, but I wanted a challenge. And they said, McDonald’s will sue us for $20 million if you move the date. You have to have a movie in the theater. We started shooting that movie in January of 2003. It was in 3D in theaters by July. That’s the fastest any effects movie has ever been done. That’s insane.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.