obert Rodriguez--the youthful auteur who shot to fame with the $7,000 independent feature film El Mariachi--has built a career in part on artful blood-and-guts blockbusters like Desperado and From Dusk Till Dawn. So it may surprise people to discover that his true passion is family movies.
But anyone who's followed the Austin, Texas, native knows that his very first movie was Bedhead, a family movie starring his real family. And Rodriguez--a devoted father of three young children--said he wanted to capture the wonder he remembers from being a child himself.
Spy Kids, from an original idea by the director, tells the story of retired spies Ingrid and Gregorio Cortez (Carla Gugino and Antonio Banderas), who are struggling to raise two children--Juni (Daryl Sabara) and Carmen (Alexa Vega)--without revealing their secret past lives. But when recalled to duty, mom and dad are captured by the mysterious Fegan Floop (Alan Cumming). Only Juni and Carmen can come to the rescue.
With Spy Kids, Rodriguez also set out to demonstrate that a movie heavy with visual effects need not break the bank. Though the Dimension release was budgeted at a modest $36 million, it looks like one that cost three times as much. Rodriguez took a few minutes recently to talk with Science Fiction Weekly about his latest movie, which opened March 30.
Spy Kids looks like it was a lot of fun to make.
Rodriguez: Can you imagine how fun this was? ... I enjoy making movies just to have fun. If you saw the other movies--Desperado and Mariachi--you can always tell I'm a cartoonist who got a camera and is having a good time.
You come up with something like this, you can just run free and wild, and the more imagination you put in it, the better. You better recapture that childlike spirit, because you'll need it. Sometimes I even went back to old drawings I did as a kid, to incorporate ideas I don't think I can even come up with anymore. ... I see my own kids, so imaginative and free. You've got a self-censor as you grow older: "Nah, that's not going to work," or, "Ah, that's a little too far-fetched." Little kids really don't have that. I wanted the movie to really feel like--I wanted people to think that--maybe I really didn't make it, but my son did [laughs]. [That] my five-year-old son designed it and drew it, and I really wanted to have the innocent childlike feeling. ...
My first published artwork that won an award was "Thumb Thumbs" [creatures whose arms, legs and head are thumbs] kicking an eyeball around, like a soccer ball. They're dressed in those soccer outfits. And people always loved that drawing, and I kept it. So it's nice ... 20 years later, to see them running around on screen and getting laughs. Come to life.
Will this movie surprise your fans?
Rodriguez: At the end of [El Mariachi], I had Columbia put one of my short films, which was very much like this, with my little brothers and sisters, my first award-winning short film. The last thing I wrote and directed was Four Rooms, an episode that had Antonio and two little kids in it. That's where I got the idea for this. That was in '94. So I've been working on this since then, as my next project. ... The only reason that I even did Mariachi as an action film was because I was doing it for the Spanish video market, and that's what they wanted ... an action film. So I did that for them, and Columbia wanted me to do a remake, which became Desperado. But all the companies were always aware that what I wanted to do [was family films]. ... I showed them my comic strip. I showed them my family comedies. ... I was going to eventually do something like this. I just needed more effects experience. Because there are over 500 effects shots in the movie. I decided I didn't want an effects supervisor. ... I wanted to come up with ways to do all the effects myself.
If you're creative, the best playground you can be in is getting into effects and making them inexpensively. I think filmmakers starting out today think, "Oh, effects movies are always big budget." They don't have to be. And you can really realize a lot of dreams and visuals that you normally would not get to, even on a lower-budget movie. I think that will be the new direction: people being able to incorporate more effects, even into lower-budget movies that help just enlarge the scope a little.
How do you keep the costs down?
Rodriguez: I'll show you just how simple something like just being your own editor, being your photographer ... just really cut time, cut cost.
[The] boat chase, we shot it in two days ... through just pre-planning, editing the movie first. Shooting everything in one place makes it more inexpensive.
I went on my own to Chile just in a helicopter with a helicopter cam, and got some aerial shots to tie in images, just to make it look like we'd traveled all over the world, but we stayed in Austin. I love magic tricks, just like a kid. ... If I had an effects supervisor, and said, "I want to do that boat chase." ... "Oh, you have to build a gimbal, and you need 360-degree [shots]." Everybody likes to spend. I got no ego. I got a cheaper way to do it, that will look better, and you go for that.
How long have you been working on Spy Kids?
Rodriguez: I started writing it back in '94, off and on, and I think I officially started writing at the end of '98, turned it in in '99. And kept working on it up until the release. You're still always changing lines and adding dialogue.
Some of the stuff in Spy Kids is pretty weird, like the villain.
Rodriguez: That self-censor in my own head would always go, "Wow, I don't know. That seems, kind of, really out there. But maybe we should just try it." And now, it doesn't seem really that weird to me. But at the time, I even wondered. ... But when you're making a movie like this, where the spies are children, you think, "Wow, I can have so much fun with the bad guy." And I loved Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, which Ian Fleming wrote, you know, and Willy Wonka, and always wanted to have very imaginative characters. The villain can be ... someone very imaginative and childlike, which the parents lose against completely right away, because it's a whole other world that only the children can relate to, giving them an advantage. Conceptually, that was something I came up with early on, and it just started piecing itself together.
I saw my little kids watching Teletubbies, and I thought, "What a weird show that is. What if those were secret agents trapped inside those outfits, and some maniac had put them on TV just to mock their efforts, and it became a hit?" And they're always singing some weird singsong thing, so I thought, "What if they're really saying, 'Help me! Get me out of here!' And they're trying to send secret messages and can't, because they've been back-masked?" I thought that could be very fun. And very twisted.
One of the lines that got the biggest laugh from kids is when Alexa Vega says, "Oh, shii ... take mushrooms."
Rodriguez: She's the one who came up with that. I asked her, "What can you say here that would be something [that kids say]?" ... She said, "A friend of mine is always saying shii...take mushrooms." And I said, "Oh, that sounds cool." And later, we went to an Italian restaurant, and we ordered pasta with shiitake mushrooms, and she said, "Oh, there really is something called shiitake mushrooms?" [laughs] She's 12, she didn't even know that. So I don't even know if kids know what shiitake mushrooms are.
The film also has a very ethnic, multicultural, Southwestern feel to it. Did the studio ever pressure you to make it more whitebread?
Rodriguez: The reason I keep very hands-on in these movies and try to keep the budget so low is because you want to have the freedom to make something different. And it was never an issue with them, because they just bet on the vision of the filmmaker. Because it's like, we're doing an inexpensive movie, so no matter what, we'll make a profit. And a lot of these ideas--like the Fooglies and all that--they're so out there, we just got to wait and see what he comes up with.
I have a great relationship with that studio. And it's good, because a lot of these ideas, we don't know if they're going to work until a week before release. Some of these effects are just being finished now. So if we had X'd those ideas early on, you could rob yourself of coming up with something really good. Then again, you better bet on yourself, because a week out, you don't have a chance to change it.
If they had made a stink, I would have said, "Look, Bond is British, and he's got that going. We've got to create something different." And the colors and the flavor of Latin America really haven't been used very much in Hollywood. I think they were into it right away when they saw the dailies and said, "Wow, the costumes are incredible, and the colors and the sets. This is wild stuff." And that's because of the identity that was tagged onto it. By going Latin with it, exploring those colors, you had the freedom to be Gaudi-esque with the structures, very colorful with the sets. You could get away with that. And I think that gave it a strong identity.
Are you already working on a sequel?
Rodriguez: It'll probably be the next [film], only because the kids get big so fast. And I've got a way to make it even less expensive and faster and more imaginative. I love making them less expensive, because for me, it's more of a creative challenge to not have the money hose to wash all the problems away. You've really got to think about how to solve a problem. And I think it makes the movie more creative. Sam Raimi says that (money hose).
I turned [the script] in already. Only because this script started out so huge. It's one of those that you can riff on forever. They had a robot dog, they had all kinds of stuff. And I realized this is the sequel and the first movie put together. It's too much stuff. I had to throw half of it out. And realize that, well, that's the whole sequel right there.
Will the cast return for the sequel?
Rodriguez: Yeah, and some new cast members that are really fun. It's even more fun to do a sequel for something like this, because this is just the genesis of the characters. Now they're spies. They can go boss the president around. They can do anything they want.
A famous actor makes an unbilled cameo appearance at the end. How did you get him?
Rodriguez: I can't say that. ... After Thin Red Line, [he said], "I was at the very end, and they had my name all over it." So, I said, "OK, it'll be a surprise." But the person who shows up at the end, I worked with him on From Dusk Till Dawn, that was his first starring role. ... It was six months before [Spy Kids] was done, ... I just showed it to him half-made, and talked through half of it, telling him, "There's going to be thumb guys running around here," and he understood what it was, and he said he wanted to do it.
Where did you get the idea for Fegan Floop, the bad guy?
Rodriguez: I just thought it would be real fun to have the bad guy be this real creative spirit, not really having a direction. As a creative person, you always have these voices in your head giving you ideas. And if he had someone more evil telling him things, he might think these were his ideas. So that's where he gets split up.
But I wanted to create this TV show. He puts these agents on TV to mock them, and it becomes a hit, and he realizes that's what he wants to do: create and have a TV show. That's why he becomes obsessed with it.
Kelly Preston was originally signed on to play the mom, who is now played by Carla Gugino?
Rodriguez: Yes. I love working with the same people over and over again. You always know what to expect from them, and you can always write with them in mind. I think I originally wrote the part for Kelly. I'd worked with her on Dusk Till Dawn. And just the timing was bad. We ended up pushing six months to wait for Antonio, but it put us right there when she was having the baby. For the longest time, I couldn’t get her out of my head. So I kept putting off casting mom, because I couldn't really think of anyone else. I ended up barely casting Carla two days before we started shooting her part, because I could never find anybody that really clicked for me. And the little boy [Sabara] brought me a tape [of Gugino's CBS Hallmark Hall of Fame special A Season of Miracles], and said, "We like Carla." And I watched the tape, and I thought, 'Ohmigod, that's her." So I called her up. And right over the phone I figured out [she'd work].
When are you starting the sequel?
Rodriguez: I'd like to start right away, before the kids get too big. I have it written already. I'm going to shoot before [the impending actors'] strike [in July], at least their scenes. Because they grow so fast. ... Before the beginning of July. All the sets are still up. I can come up with ways to reuse sets, to redress them completely.
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Also in this issue: Michael Moorcock
