Robert Rodriguez: uncertainty

Transcript context

…So I’ll tell you, two things happen on Dusk Till Dawn. First was, okay, you know how those explosions when somebody walks away in slow motion from an explosion, that’s become kind of even that started with Desperado Desperado’s the first, if you look at all the montages, Desperado’s first. That’s right. That’s right. That is the meme because it was an accident. It was just supposed to be, it was just two grenades, not a nuclear bomb. It throws them over the side and I just wanted some body parts or something to fly up some shrapnel. It literally says shrapnel and my effects guy was so running so ragged. We get to there and I go, “Do you have any body parts and stuff we can throw up or something you can shoot up. “I didn’t realize it’s so high to get past that second floor.” And he’s like, “No, I don’t. I can give you a fireball. I can give you a nice fireball with propane, but it burns away really quick.” “Like how fast?” “Like that but it’ll be big and orange.” “Okay, we’ll shoot it in slow motion so it lasts a little longer because it just goes poof.” So I told the actors, I know how big this fireball is going to be, but just walk really fast and just look real determined and then just keep walking. Don’t stop and turn around because you might get your eyebrows singed. So they take off and it goes, and in slow motion, it looks great, right? I remember showing to Jim Cameron before it came out and his hand went up. He’d never seen that before, six months later Dusk Till Dawn came out. So I liked how much it looked so much that in Dusk Till Dawn, I did it again. So those movies came out within six months of each other. That’s why it turned into a thing because people saw it. And so I thought, “How about for the opening of George Clooney and Quentin walking out of the gas station that we have the whole place just blowing up and they just keep talking like it’s not happening. Take it another step further so I’m not just doing the same thing. Okay, that one, it’s like, “Okay, you’re going to walk out and it’s all in one take. So we’re only going to do one take. We’re going to blow the thing up. We’re going to start with just some smaller explosions. Then when they’re further away and it’s safer, then we’ll do the big fireballs.” So we’re going and you’re nervous if one of them trips up a line and the pressure’s on them, it’s not just you that’s nervous, you’re nervous for them. They’re the ones who got to walk out, do that whole speech, get in the car and drive away. What if the car doesn’t star? There’s a lot of things that could happen. ’s nervous, you’re nervous for them. They’re the ones who got to walk out, do that whole speech, get in the car and drive away. What if the car doesn’t star? There’s a lot of things that could happen. Well guess what happens? The thing you would not expect, they go in, they come out, they start talking, shoot it perfect, great, we can move on. And the camera guy goes, I don’t know what happened, but just like you had a little snafu here he goes, we have an auto-focus on the Steadicam. We have a focus thing. It just went like this, I felt it go whack all the way out of focus and whack for a second back. It just reset itself. We don’t know why it did that because it’s radio-controlled and we can’t tell because we’re shooting film. So we’re like, “Oh, shit. Let’s watch the dailies. Sure enough, let’s see if we can, maybe I can scratch the film right there.” No, it goes completely out focus and back in focus within a second. Now we got to res-hoot it. So we had to wait till we’re back in that location. We rigged it for two more takes just in case. So that thing that was supposed to be the one take is three takes. The other thing that happened was the front of the Dusk Till Dawn bar, that same guy that did those explosions, he packed a bunch of explosives behind the actors. When the actors come running out of the bar at the end of the movie and there’s an explosion through the door because all the vampires are blowing up. He didn’t put like 10 times the amount of stuff. It blew out, you see it in the movie. You see this huge fireball going up and if you watch closely, you see it already start to catch the whole place on fire. The whole front of that, which is foam, is catching on fire, and I cut just before you see that it’s on fire, and that was the first shot at that bar because we weren’t going to start shooting the other stuff till night. So first shot is that, and the set’s ruined, burned to a crisp. The neon lights blew up. So we couldn’t even, Cheech goes, “Well, I guess I’m not doing my speech tonight,” but right away, this is what happens. My first AD, Doug Arnikowski comes over to me and I go over to him. Guys came out with the fire hoses. The fire hoses weren’t even any water. The thing was just scorching. The whole production design team was in tears because they had just spent weeks building this thing and it was up in smoke and charred. I said, “Let’s just keep shooting. Let’s just keep shooting because it looks really kind of cool like this.” s because they had just spent weeks building this thing and it was up in smoke and charred. I said, “Let’s just keep shooting. Let’s just keep shooting because it looks really kind of cool like this.” Yeah, they’re going to have to come repair it and we’ll have to come back, but it’s all black and charred. That’s why that whole scene with George Clooney and Cheech and the building’s black, we didn’t go over there and touch that up. That’s real flame that burned and it ended up looking great. So then the next week when we came back to shoot that other shot that didn’t work, we came back and they had repaired it and we shot all the night stuff, which is the majority of the stuff in front of it. So sometimes you got to roll with it and look at the blessing you get because of there’s a mistake. You probably actually got a better take by doing it later with them. And then you had this incredible look for the end of the movie that looked apocalyptic. If it had looked just clean, you would’ve actually seen that it was kind of a foam set. This made it look better. So I kind of let the universe push you where you’re supposed to go.…

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