He came back to settle the score with someone. Anyone. EVERYONE.
He came back to settle the score with someone. Anyone. EVERYONE.
WRITTEN, EDITED, & DIRECTED BY: Robert Rodriguez
MUSIC BY: Los Lobos
ADDITIONAL MUSIC BY: Tito Larriva
STARRING: Antonio Banderas, Salma Hayek, Joaquim de Almeida, Steve Buscemi, Cheech Marin, Quentin Tarantino
RUNNING TME: 106 Minutes
DISTRIBUTED BY: Columbia Pictures
Desperado opens in a seedy Mexican bar with a drifter played by Steve Buscemi talking about an undefeatable mad dog killer with a guitar case full of guns. He tells the bar's patrons that the man is on his way in their direction and is looking for a drug kingpin who rules the town. When the man arrives in town we find out that he is everything that Buscemi described and more. He is looking for a drug kingpin who is part of the same organization as the people who killed the woman he loved and crippled his hand. He shoots his way through the town and meets up with a woman who is in danger from Bucho, the drug kingpin. After killing Bucho Carolina and the Mariachi leave town. The Mariachi throws away his case of guns, but at the last minute they pick it up. "Just in case. It's a long way to the next town.
After the success of El Mariachi, and the TV movie Roadracers Robert started working on a follow-up to Mariachi. Instead of just remaking it, which he considered for a time, he decided to continue the story only this time with Antonio Bandaris in the role of the ill fated guitar player. This time Robert was able to secure a budget of $7million from Columbia pictures. While $7 million sounds like a lot compared to Mariachi it is nothing compared to other big Hollywood action movies, or even most Hollywood movies at all. The teen sex comedy American Pie had a higher budget. Robert saw an opportunity to make a John Woo style shoot-em-up set in Mexico. Another hurtle to overcome was the fact that they only had 39 days in which to shoot the entire film. By contrast John Woo took 120 days to shoot his famous The Killer.
To get as much as possible from with the limited resources that he had available to him Robert did several things that were designed to save money. He wrote the screenplay himself, and shot entirely on location in Mexico, Acuna (the same town that he shot El Mariachi in) to be exact. The bar that Cheech Marin runs is even the same one as appeared in the Mariachi. With an actual budget they were able to redress the bar and give it a more gritty old west style look. Instead of hiring an LA crew and flying them down to Mexico and than hiring locals for smaller parts he worked mostly with locals in key positions. Using locals who were used to having job titles like 2nd 2nd assistant whoever in key positions meant that they did not know the supposed limits on what can be done on a set. Anything that Robert suggested they never said "can't", they would just come up with a new and inventive way.
In order to put as much of the money on the screen as possible Robert paid several of the bigger actors by the day. He had to schedule the shooting of several scenes around the various one week time periods that Cheech, Joaquim de Almeida, and Steve Buscemi were being paid to work. In fact the reason that Cheech's character hides under the bar during most of the bar fight is because Cheech shot all of his stuff and left town before the rest of the bar fight had been shot. Another creative money saver was that fact that nearly every stunt was done by the same 2 stunt men. They kept putting on different disguises shades, mustaches, ect. For a lot of the killing sequences they were able to save time and money by using a compressed air gun that fired a charge of fake blood at the actor. Facial squib hits are expensive and time consuming, something that Robert and his crew could not afford.
Robert also used several of his buddies in this movie. While he was touring film festivals with El Mariachi he met Steve Buscemi and Quentin Tarantino who were touring with Reservoir Dogs. Both men wanted to work with him so he wrote their parts with the two of them in mind. In fact Steve Buscemi's character is even named Buscemi. The character of Tavo (the guy who hangs out in the bar and tells the girls that he and Cheech piss in the beer) was played by Tito Larriva, the lead singer of Tito and Tarantula, a band that provided several of the songs for the movie. Several people who previously appeared in El Mariachi appear in this one as well. Peter Marquardt, Consuelo Gómez, and Jaime de Hoyos all reprise their roles during the flashback sequence with Antonio getting his hand shot just like the original Mariachi. The original Mariachi Carlos Gallardo serves as producer and plays Campa, the guy with the automatic firing guns in the guitar cases.
The Movie was released August 25, 1995 and grossed $25.625 million in the US.