Robert Rodriguez's critically acclaimed film debut
Robert Rodriguez's critically acclaimed film debut
PHOTOGRAPHED, EDITED, WRITTEN, & DIRECTED BY: Robert Rodriguez
MUSIC BY:Eric Guthrie, Chris Knudson, Cecilio Rodríguez, Álvaro Rodríguez, Marc Trujillo
RUNNING TIME: 81 minutes
STARING: Carlos Gallardo, Consuelo Gómez, Reinol Martinez, and Peter Marquardt
RUNNING TIME: 81 Minutes
DISTRIBUTED BY: Columbia Pictures
El Mariachi opens with a shoot-out in a jail between a criminal named Azul and men working for a drug lord named Moco. Azul vows to kill Moco and sets off with a guitar case full of guns. A Mariachi, who is never called by name, wonders into the small Mexican town of Acuna only to be mistaken for Azul. The two men wind up accidentallys switching cases. As Moco's men are coming for him the Mariachi falls in love with a woman named Domino. The two end up facing down Moco and his henchmen. Domino does not survive and the Mariachi is shot in the hand, rendering him unable to ever play the guitar again. He leaves town with Azul's guitar case, prepared for next time.
El Mariachi has a story that can serve as a source of inspiration it all of us would be filmmakers out there. Robert Rodriguez was a 23-year-old college student who was dying to break into the business of making movies. He had won some prizes at film festivals for is short film Bedhead. He knew that the best way to improve your filmmaking skills was to go out and make something. The only problem is that making a movie is expensive, or so conventional wisdom says. He knew that he would never get work in Hollywood with out experience. So he hatched a plan to get some experience and sharpen his skills at the same time.
Growing up in the Mexican-American community he had seen what the Spanish direct-to-video market had to offer. And frankly most of it sucked. The camera work amateurish, the sound was bad, and the plots were forgettable at best. He looked at this stuff and decided he could make a better film than that for next to nothing. His plan was to raise just enough money to shoot an action movie, in Spanish, using friends for actors, with whatever he could beg, borrow, or steal. He figured he could than sell that to the Spanish market for much more than he had spent and use the profit to make a sequel with a bigger budget. Than do the same thing for a third Mariachi movie. The way he looked at it he would than have the experience gained over the course of three films, and even a highlight reel get his foot in the door in Hollywood. Of course if the films sucked who cares, no one would ever see them anyway. The Spanish direct-to-video market shrinks each year because the films are so bad. The low profit causes the producers and distributors to spend less, which results in even lower quality. Vicious cycle really.
Even though he was planning on making El Mariachi for $7,000 (next to nothing in movie terms) he still had the problem of raising the money. He didn't want the problems that come along with investors or loans so he decided to get the money himself, there by making sure that he would be accountable to no one. He had some money from various film festivals that Bedhead had won at. He decided that he could raise an additional $3,000 be being a human lab rat. He went to a medical research company called Pharmaco and signed up for a month long study of some kind of cholesterol supplement. The deal was that he would have to live at the research hospital for a month, eat only what they gave him. And get his cholesterol levels tested many times.
Living in the hospital he passed his time writing the Mariachi script, watching movies, and telling other experiment subjects about his plans to make a movie. One of the other lab rats, Peter Marquardt, impressed Robert by simply resembling Christopher Walken. Peter had said that he wanted to be in a movie so Robert cast him as the head bad guy. Peter fit the mold that Robert wanted for Moco. He wanted the character to be an American who had fled the states to a small Mexican town, and could barely even speak the language. Peter defiantly fit the language part. In many of his scenes he is wearing sunglasses to conceal the fact that he is reading his lines off of a cheat sheet.
The most important piece of equipment that any filmmaker needs is a camera. If you want to shoot on film the film plus the camera are going to cost you. Robert and Carlos borrowed a 16mm Arriflex camera from a buddy of theirs. Why spend money that you don't have if you can borrow for free. The camera had two lenses. The one was a 5.7 Kinoptic wide-angle lens, which is wide enough that you do not need to focus it. The wide-angle lens distorts the picture a little, but is only really noticeable if you know to look for it. The not needing to focus part is good because a one man crew can't carry the camera while running during an action sequence and play with the focus at the same time. The other lens was a 12-120 Angeniuex zoom lens. Robert used the zoom to great effect during the filming of dialogue sequences. Every time the actor would say a few lines he would zoom in or out. When he edited the movie he would insert reaction shots of other characters. When viewing the finished product it looked like the camera setup would change for each shot. Which makes it look like he spent all day changing camera setups when in reality he spent 20 minutes on the sequence. For lighting the indoor sequences he uses two 250-watt photofloods (also called practicals) They fit into regular light sockets but give off light that registers as white on film. He bought two practical bulbs at a camera store and two of those little clip on lights that you can get at a hardware store.
Almost as important as the camera is the ability to record sound. Robert knew that many direct-to-video movies would have sound that sounds like it was done in a cheap recording studio and not like you're hearing reality, which is kinda what making a movie is all about, making stuff seem somewhat real. His camera was not equipped for sync sound even if it would have been he did not have a crystal sync tape recorder anyway. (meaning he was not going to be able to connect the camera to the tape recorder so that the two move at exactly the same speed) Being able to record sound while filming was out of the question anyway because the camera made too much noise. Cameras with the motor encased in a sound proof case are very expensive. He did not want to re-dub everything in a studio because that always sounds fake, there is no other way to capture the background noise of being outside than actually being outside. Instead what he decided to do was use his little cassette tape recorder and a radio shack microphone. After shooting each scene he would get all the actors to gather around the mic and read off all of their lines right there on the location. When editing he laid down the lines and synced them by hand to the actors lip movements. Since the camera tape recorder were not connected, or even recorded at the same time, they were a little off. The easy fix was when the lines get out of sync with the actors mouths just cut away. Cut to a reaction shot of the guy who is being talked to. Now the line doesn't need to match the lip movements.
The shooting took place over the course of 20 days. They enlisted the aid of as many of the town's people as possible. The local police let them shoot in the jail and even let them use some real machine guns. Provided that a police officer would supervise the guns at all times. Another problem with the guns was the fact that regular machine guns shooting blanks will not fire on automatic. You need to have a plug in the barrel, which they did not have. So to create the illusion of automatic firing Robert would take a shot of the gun firing a single round (bullet) repeat the exact moment of the gun firing twice, cut to the person getting shot, and put in a machine gun sound. For the shot of the zip lining across the street and landing on a bus they had a blacksmith make them a pulley they could support Carlos' weight, they ran a cable from one building to a telephone pole across the street. Robert took the camera way down the street from the action and put it on full zoom and shot at 21 frames per second (as opposed to the usual 24 fps). The extreme zoom made Carlos and the bus look closer together than they were. The 21 fps when played back at 24 fps made the action look faster than it really was.
Once shooting was completed it was time for post-production, the process of editing, syncing dialogue, and laying down music. They had shot 25 rolls of film, which were each 400ft long; which sounds like a lot until you consider that every second of screen time uses 24 frames. (that's 1440 frames per minute) He sent all 25 rolls to the lab to be developed. Since actually editing film is a ridiculously time consuming process Robert had the lab transfer all of the raw footage to 3/4" videotape. (which is better than VHS but not as good as digital or beta)
To edit the 3/4" tape he used equipment at his local cable access station, it was harder to get time on the station's new equipment so he used the old stuff. The first thing that he did was copy the 3/4" to VHS and edited a trailer at his home just to get himself pumped up. He also used the VHS to make a rough edit of the movie at home, so that he would have an idea of what he needed to do when he was editing at the station. Once he started editing at the station he had to get all of the dialogue from the cassettes onto the raw footage preferably synced to the actor's lip movements. That process took two weeks. Editing the raw footage into a finished movie took about a month, using his VHS rough cut as a guide.
Carlos' narration was recorded in Robert's car so that it would sound different from all of the regular dialogue. For the music he used several amateur musicians that he knew (his brother, his cousin, a buddy from college.) His big goal was to stay away from the cheap synthesizer sounding music that so many of these el cheapo productions have. In order to lay down music he had to take the 3/4" tape down a second generation but since 3/4" has better resolution than VHS the degradation between the two generations doesn't show on the final VHS copy. The ending credits were done on the public access station's character generator. He decided to call it a Los Hooligans production after a comic strip that he used to publish in college. Once he had a master 3/4" tape all he had to do was transfer it to VHS tape and he had a demo, which he was ready to sell to the Spanish video market.
However, selling to the Spanish video market proved harder than he had expected. Robert and Carlos drove to LA to meet with some people from various companies. The people that they met did not want to give them a decent amount of money because they had no name actors in their movie. Most Spanish direct-to-videos cast a Spanish soap star as there one and only hook. All of the Spanish distributors who they spoke to either rejected the movie or tried to jerk them around. On an off chance Robert showed the movie to a talent agent who was supposed to speak at a Taxes film commission conference that got canceled. The guy was impressed and ended up taking Robert as a client. Instead of the Spanish video market these guys helped him sell the movie to Columbia pictures.
Columbia had originally bought the rights with a plan of having Robert re-make it, possibly with Antonio Bandaris in the lead role. Seeing how excited people got when they showed them his video they thought about releasing it theatrically. They paid some money to get a working film print ready. They blew his 16mm film up to 35mm. Robert worked with a guy who edits airline versions of films to edit the film and re-edit the sound, which had to be done off of Robert's original cassettes. The film premiered at the Telluride film festival. After a great response to went to the Toronto festival and than the Sundance. After the success at the festivals the little $7,000 movie was given a small theatrical release. During the promotion for the movie Robert found himself to be the center of attention. He appeared on Howard Stern, Letterman, Entertainment Tonight, and several others; everyone wanted to meet the guy who made a movie for nothing. The movie ended up grossing $2.04 million, not bad for $7,000.