Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with film director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer, editor, and composer Robert Rodriguez (@rodriguez).
While a student at the University of Texas at Austin in 1991, Rodriguez wrote the script to his first feature film El Mariachi, which won the coveted Audience Award at the 1993 Sundance Film Festival and became the lowest budget movie ever released by a major studio. He went on to write, produce, direct, and edit a series of successful films including Desperado, From Dusk Till Dawn, The Faculty, the Spy Kids franchise, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, Frank Miller’s Sin City, and We Can Be Heroes and collaborated with director James Cameron on the film adaptation of Alita: Battle Angel. His films have grossed more than $1.5B at the box office.
In 2000, Rodriguez founded Troublemaker Studios in Austin, Texas. He recently directed the Lady Gaga/Ariana Grande video “Rain on Me” and episodes of The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett and launched Brass Knuckle Films, an investable action film slate. If you’ve ever wanted to pitch Robert Rodriguez a film idea or get profit participation in action films and sequels, he’ll tell you all about it.
Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!
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Tim Ferriss: Dr. Rodriguez, here we are again.
Robert Rodriguez: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: It has been almost 10 years.
Robert Rodriguez: Can you believe it? 10 years.
Tim Ferriss: And I can’t believe it’s been almost 10 years, number one.
Robert Rodriguez: No.
Tim Ferriss: My decision to go bald early was helpful in making me look somewhat similar to the way I looked then.
Robert Rodriguez: And I always had a black shirt.
Tim Ferriss: And some people may not know also, when I first moved to Austin, which is coming up on eight years, also nuts.
Robert Rodriguez: Wow.
Tim Ferriss: I did not have any plates or silverware at my house and I invited you over for dinner not even thinking of this, and you were kind enough to bring over, I still have it, this red plate and a couple of your dungeon forks and knives, so thank you for that.
Robert Rodriguez: Sure, absolutely. Texas house warming gift.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, a lot has happened in the last 10 years and we’ve continued to hang out and talk and you have a whole new bag of tricks. Our first conversation was a barn-burner of an episode. People were super excited by it, there’s a lot of tactical advice. And you have explored a lot, you have found a lot, you have fine-tuned a lot in the last decade.
Robert Rodriguez: You stumble upon new things, you stumble upon them, literally. So yeah, we adopt them and I store them away so I can tell you about them.
Tim Ferriss: Look at this.
Robert Rodriguez: And I’ve stored 10 years worth of stuff.
Tim Ferriss: So we opened the vault and here we are. Let’s just start with a very broad question, what are some of the things that come to mind that have happened since we last spoke?
Robert Rodriguez: Well, what’s wild is just like a month ago, we just put out an audiobook for the first time for Rebel Without a Crew, the book that started it all for indie filmmaking.
Tim Ferriss: And when was that published?
Robert Rodriguez: In the ’90s, in ’95, because I remember Desperado, From Dusk Till Dawn, Four Rooms, and that book all came out within four months and my son, my first born —
Tim Ferriss: That’s a packed year.
Robert Rodriguez: — five things, it was a packed four months I’ll never forget. But it was full of stories and my diary on how I did Mariachi and to this day people come up and say, not only did it help them start becoming a filmmaker, but it helped them start their own business or it just applied to so many things as we know. The idea of just taking on a big challenge, betting on yourself, going where no one else is, that’s very entrepreneurial stuff. And what’s wild though is I hadn’t read it since I wrote it. So when I had to suddenly do an audiobook for it a couple months ago, I was astounded I’d forgotten so much of the details. And I was like, now I see why it was so inspirational, it blows your mind.
Because when you’re younger, six months feels like six years. But now when you hear the dates, because the dates of my journal, how quickly I go from clearly clueless and penniless filmmaker, making a movie, having the idea, having a movie, doing it by myself, trying to sell it to Spanish home video, to instantly being the toast of the town, it’s just unbelievable. You could see why people would read the book and just drop it and go, I’ve got to go make something because the only reason that happened is he took action, he got up and made that movie.
Tim Ferriss: What do you hear most from that book from readers? Because one that pops up a lot from our episode because we talked about it a bit and also stuck with me in the book was, and I’m sure you have a better way to phrase this, but basically making a list of assets, not focusing on what you don’t have —
Robert Rodriguez: Yeah, focus on what you do have, which applies to everything.
Tim Ferriss: Right, so if you’ve got a turtle, and you have a pit bull, and you’ve got a friend who’s a school bus driver, it’s like, all right, we’re going to figure out how to work that into the script.
Robert Rodriguez: And it’s all point of view, right? It’s like you can really concentrate on what you don’t have in life, and that becomes your focus and then that becomes your life, all the things you don’t have and never get. But when you leverage what you do have, it’s all about leveraging what you do have. It’s also a thing I call freedom of limitations. If we had to make a movie right now with this room, that’s it, it’s kind of very freeing. It’s like, “Okay, this is all we have to work with?” You can come up with a million ideas. When you can do anything — remember we were trying to make a short film?
Tim Ferriss: Oh, I know.
Robert Rodriguez: When you’ve got unlimited, it’s harder, is it not?
Tim Ferriss: I have to say that is one of my great embarrassments and we’re going to talk about it.
Robert Rodriguez: We are going to talk about it because it’s exactly what we’re talking about because you can do anything. And a lot of times, when you can do anything, you can’t do anything.
Tim Ferriss: Canvas is too wide. The canvas is too wide.
Robert Rodriguez: Because it’s too wide. So the smaller aperture, the fact that I had very little things was a blessing. And people took that lesson, applied it to business. And the whole time I’m reading this, you can hear I’m laughing and I stopped several many times during the book to update. I go, by the way, what you just heard never happened before this and never happened against it. It’s very rare, this is lightning in a bottle and it’s like a movie you see, incredible setup, payoff, setup, payoff where a huge setup falls in my lap, don’t even know what to do with it. It pays off in a huge way two weeks later, and then three weeks later, then four weeks later.
And then you also see why I was really bummed I couldn’t sell the movie to Spanish home video. I was going to sell it for $20,000 before Christmas and the contracts weren’t through. I went home a failure and said, “Merry Christmas, I didn’t sell the movie.” I was really bummed. And then you see, because it’s so [inaudible], one month later I had an agent suddenly because of the movie. Good thing I didn’t sell it. I was chasing those guys down for the contract — they could have had it for $20,000. Two months later I sell it for 10 times that.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, incredible.
Robert Rodriguez: And I’m the toast of the town and getting my first movie deal. It’s unbelievable. When I was reading it, I was like, now I see why.
Tim Ferriss: I remember.
Robert Rodriguez: Because when you’re living it, you don’t know how special it is until later —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, you don’t notice it because it’s passed by.
Robert Rodriguez: 30 years later, it still is an unbelievable story and I think it’ll still inspire people today.
Tim Ferriss: And in that example too, it makes me think of advice I got from a mentor of mine at one point, and he said, “Sometimes you need life to save you from what you want.”
Robert Rodriguez: Yes. Yes.
Tim Ferriss: In that instance.
Robert Rodriguez: I really wanted that and when something doesn’t work out, we think we made a mistake. That’s one of my favorite stories, the keys to your next success is in your failure because you followed your instinct. You’ve got to dig in deep and look, and I show you that I made a movie called Four Rooms. It bombed, but I took it on instinct not because I thought it would make money. If I’d just be upset about it and be bummed about it like, “Wow, I must have made a wrong choice.” I haven’t learned anything. But if I go sift through it, the ashes of that failure I find — I got the idea for Spy Kids from that because I saw Antonio and his Asian wife look like a cool international spy couple because they dressed in tuxedos and I thought, “What if these two kids have to save their parents?” There’s five of those movies now.
And then also it’s an anthology and it didn’t work, but I thought, instead of four stories, maybe three stories, one director, not multiple directors, I’m going to try it again. Even though anthologies never work, why would I do that? Because I just did it and I saw what I could do better, and that was Sin City. Two of my biggest movies came directly from a movie that you would consider a failure.
So you only know that by journaling, by keeping track of the things that you thought were a mistake. And you realize, oh, with time, that was the right instinct. But sometimes the only way across the river is to slip on the first two rocks, it’s the only way to get there. And if you don’t do it, you don’t get there.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I’m sure we’ll talk about this more. When I talk to people and they say, “Yeah, I journal.” I’m like, “You do, but you should see what Robert does.” And I’m sure we’ll talk more about journaling because it makes me think of one of my friend’s mothers, very sweet older lady, she was on a chairlift skiing and she’s still very active, she lives in Idaho, and she was chatting up the woman next to her on the ski lift. She’s like, “Oh, what do you do?” And the woman’s like, “Oh, I’m a swimmer.” And she goes, “Oh, me too. I’m a swimmer.” It was Dara Torres, the Olympian, right? So it’s kind like there’s journaling and then there’s capital J, marquee lights journaling, which we’ll get to.
But I want to ask you first, because I just experienced this, was it yesterday? I’m time traveling because there’s a whole warp with South by Southwest, but I got to see you on stage with your daughter Rhiannon and I thought to myself, “Holy shit, she’s really good.” I was going to clap anyway, no matter what, obviously, but I thought to myself, “Wow, she’s really good. I wonder how many performances she’s done.” And the answer was?
Robert Rodriguez: I know, I waited until the end because I didn’t want to tell anybody, I wanted to make sure it went right. She never ever performed before on stage or to a crowd. But we’ll get to this thing later because I want everybody to hear this. It’s so inspiring and I’ve stumbled upon it. It’s counterintuitive parenting. The kids step up. But we’ll get to that because it’s a big thing to leave out.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, because it comes back to parenting and also modeling and coaching, right?
Robert Rodriguez: Yeah, and creating a space for them to flourish.
Tim Ferriss: How do you view that creative, not just capability, but put confidence into other people?
Robert Rodriguez: Yeah, I stumbled upon it. I’ll tell you where it started, it started on Spy Kids. My kids were much younger than my two actors, my two actors were eight and 11, Alexa and Daryl. And my kids were younger and when you’re learning how to raise kids, you tend to go a little easier on your kid. Not to the Spy Kids because they’re actors, I’m treating them like performers. There’s no kid stuntmen, they’re having to do their own stunts, they’re having to do the daily, daily challenges, mind-bending challenges for these little kids to be action stars. They’re like mini Tom Cruises that you’re just throwing them in, there’s no training for that.
And at the end of it, I would just see them become so confident and superhuman even today —
Tim Ferriss: The actors?
Robert Rodriguez: The actors. And I would tell myself, “I need to make sure I challenge my own kids like this.” Because I saw them go from just regular kids into super kids over the course of those three films. So I started putting my kids, making movies with us. One of them came up with Sharkboy and Lavagirl, I put them in as actors, as stunt kids, and I kept thinking, “I wonder if they’re going to really resent me later for putting them to work at a young age?” Because it wasn’t their passion. These two kids that were in the movie, they wanted to be actors.
Tim Ferriss: They chose.
Robert Rodriguez: They chose. But I tried it anyway, it was an experiment, because I thought maybe it’ll give them — and boy, it has just opened up a whole world and we’ll get to how big.
Tim Ferriss: So we’re going to come back to that.
Robert Rodriguez: Yeah, it’s big. And I’m going to tell you some famous people that it’s inspired and you’ll go like, oh, it was directly because of something I told them.
Tim Ferriss: All right, all right. So we’re going to get to that. Now, right next to Rhiannon and there was a huge, huge screen and there were other things that were being launched/announced. So what else is happening?
Robert Rodriguez: Oh yeah, the reason we had a big party at my studio on the back lot of my studio, which still has the huge, 90,000-square-foot Alita set because I’m resourceful enough to put it in a corner of my studio where I could keep it since 2016. We built it with steel support beams so we could have forever, it’s the largest standing set in the country, if not the world.
Tim Ferriss: No kidding.
Robert Rodriguez: Well, because they mow them down after each movie because the next movie’s coming in. But I put it in a corner of my big section of my studio so we could have it to film for Mexico, for other cities, we’ve used it on every movie since then.
So we had our party back there to announce this new movie company that I’m doing because I realize I have so many resources there. You’ve seen my studio, I’ve got that huge set, I’ve got all the vehicles, every prop we’ve ever made, every costume. And usually that savings gets passed on to studios, but they just piss it away because they’ve got so much overhead. So I thought, let’s make a slate of action films, it’s called Brass Knuckle Films. Just action because action, there’s an international appetite, always.
In fact, if you were to ask Netflix right now what they need, they would say, “Action, action, action. We don’t have enough action.” So let’s make something that everyone needs and wants. Slate of four pictures only that fans who are usually an afterthought. Right now, people are showing their movies at South by Southwest to get the fans, to get their friends to go spend money on their movies for the privilege of seeing the movies. What if they made money on those movies? So you, for the cost of a badge, can invest into my Brass Knuckle Films for a slate of films. That means you’ve got four bites of the apple, one of those is going to make money and sequels and you share in all that because you’re at the ground floor of development.
And that’s the revolution that we’re doing and people come up to me all the time with movie ideas saying, “I’ve got an idea for you.” And they tell me and they’re ready to give it to me. It’s like, no, you get to come be a co-creator because one of the movies in that slate is going to be picked from one of the fan investors. And even at the lowest level, everyone gets to pitch us their action movie idea and the top 20 gets to pitch directly to me, so you can be a co-creator and fan. But there’s other perks, the perks alone would get you — but it’s not crowdsourcing, it’s not Kickstarter, you are actually an investor.
We’re using Republic, which can use — even unaccredited investors can come invest in this and it’s a platform, an investing platform. They’ve done it in sports and other arenas, but this is now for film —
Tim Ferriss: Applied to film.
Robert Rodriguez: — and my movies especially because I’ve got all my resources to keep the budgets low. Like you know how much the original John Wick cost?
Tim Ferriss: No idea.
Robert Rodriguez: $20 million.
Tim Ferriss: Okay.
Robert Rodriguez: $20 million. The last one was a hundred [million] because the audience grew. So we’re making budgets between $10 and $30 million, that’s like a lower to mid-range budget, right?
Tim Ferriss: Right.
Robert Rodriguez: That’s not a lot of money for the chance to make something that could turn into the billion dollar franchise that it is. We just keep making bites at the apple, one of those is going to turn into that.
Tim Ferriss: It’s like venture capital, I mean the —
Robert Rodriguez: And it’s so fun because the other thing people always ask me you wouldn’t believe, “Could you kill me in your movie? I’d love to die in your movie. Can you just have me die in your movie? Chop my head off, run me over, shoot me.” Everyone wants to die, so that’s one of the perks. If you put in enough money, you get to die on screen in a creative way in one of our action movies. So, it’s a lot of fun but it gets the fans excited.
Tim Ferriss: So hypothetically, someone comes in and they say, “Hey, I like that. I like the model a lot, I want to take 90 percent of it.” Are there limits on what investors can do?
Robert Rodriguez: Yeah, this is just for the development because we can get the money for an action film, we can already fund the whole thing.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, sure.
Robert Rodriguez: I mean, the international buyers alone and we could keep the domestic and sell it, all these guys have an appetite for it —
Tim Ferriss: So it’s like book publishing, you sell the foreign rights and use that to kind of fund the development.
Robert Rodriguez: We sell the foreign rights to go ahead and make it if we want. Or if we have such a big idea, we can take it to a studio and get all the freedoms of an independent film, we have a lot of avenues because they just need it. This is the thing, the problem is they don’t know how to make an action movie at a price because they have too much overhead and they’re just too big, they spend so much.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Well, the incentives are screwy too.
Robert Rodriguez: And that’s why John Wick was an independent movie, that’s why The Beekeeper was an independent movie because you can go make those for less, but there’s always an appetite. We’re not making dream projects or art films, this is going to be just things that put food on a table because I want the fans to win because it’s going to be one, a great story, and two, they should enjoy it because they’re the ones — when you’ve made a movie at a studio, you don’t even know what you’ve got. Then you take it to the fans and show it to them in a private screening, they give you notes, and then you go, “Oh, we screwed that up. We’ve got to go fix that, we’ve got to re-shoot that.” They’re brought in at the end and then told to go spend their money on it. It should start with the fans as well as finish with the fans.
So that’s the revolutionary thing we’re doing because it’s just like Rebel Without a Crew, it’s part of my whole democratizing the process, making it, removing the smoke and mirrors, and letting us all enjoy that process together. I’ve seen the phenomenon of creating a new label, a label on yourself, a label on a business, and we’ll get to that because I have that written down and you’ll see the value of Brass Knuckle. But I’ll tell you where I did it before because this is something that’s happened since our last 10 years and it’s a mind blower and it ties into what the first thing you asked about family.
Tim Ferriss: All right, sweet. So before we get there, I am so curious, because you’ve written and I’m sure you’ve read a lot of scripts, if you get 100, 200, 400, 500, who knows —
Robert Rodriguez: Pitches.
Tim Ferriss: Okay, pitches.
Robert Rodriguez: It’s a pitch.
Tim Ferriss: You’re not getting a script?
Robert Rodriguez: No.
Tim Ferriss: What form does the pitch —
Robert Rodriguez: Well, we’ll give a format. It’s short, it should be less than five minutes, so maybe two or three pages at the most. Maybe one to three pages, something to tell your story.
Tim Ferriss: Okay, got it.
Robert Rodriguez: And if you’ve already written, I’ve had a lot of people come and say, “I have an action script for you.” I’ll say, “Well come be an investor and you can pitch it.” I’ll tell you, I’ve sold more pitches from scripts I had already half-written or written because I know more about this story, I really know it. So when I go to pitch it’s very easy for me to tell you the story, you’ve got a much better chance than someone who’s just making a pitch.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Robert Rodriguez: But we’ll give you a format, we’ll teach you, I want to train people how to do it so that they know. So it’s kind of a film school too.
Tim Ferriss: Can you give us just a teaser of some of the ingredients of a good short pitch?
Robert Rodriguez: If we could sit here right now, and I could tell you a story about there’s a guitar player who comes into town. It’s all he wants, music is his life, and that’s all he thinks about. All he wants to do is find a place for somebody to hire him. He goes into a bar in this new town that he walks into, they don’t hire musicians. He leaves. A second later, a guy with a guitar case full of weapons comes in, shoots the place up because he’s after the main head honcho to leave a message. So now the word gets out: find the guy in black with a guitar case full of weapons, mistaken identity thing. By the end, he’ll become the guy with a guitar case full of weapons and he becomes — every movie’s like a ballad, a sad, tragic ballad because he’s going to meet somebody, she’s going to help him, she’s going to die. And he goes to the next town but no longer can play the guitar because he gets his hand shot, so now he has to become that thing.
Tim Ferriss: Okay, cool.
Robert Rodriguez: That’s a pitch.
Tim Ferriss: That’s it.
Robert Rodriguez: But I can tell you that pitch because I already made that movie so I already wrote that script. It was harder when I was first just trying to figure it out, I was just taking little cards. But a pitch could be something like that where I would see the potential in it and go, this one we can still work on it, we’re going to hire a writer. But it’s that seed of an idea that gets people to stop and listen that you want to find. That’s the lightning in the bottle, sometimes, is just the idea, everyone’s got an idea just like everybody wants to get killed in the movie.
So it’s like this is how we’re going to make it fun for the fans because who’s going to consume it? At the end of the day, it’s the fans, not the zombies in suits that are up there who don’t even watch these movies. I go up there, the disconnect blows my mind. You go talk to some, not all executives, but you go to some studios, you can tell they don’t pay to go see a movie. They don’t watch movies, they don’t love movies, it’s a business. And then you go talk to the fans, I was just at South by Southwest, they’re losing their minds. They tell you all about all the movies they’ve seen, about all the things they collect. They should be sharing in that, not the executives — they’re just going to piss it away. So that’s the idea.
Tim Ferriss: You’re very good at hooks. So before we started recording, when we were out on the sidewalk about to come into the building, you were like, “Yeah, there’s this one line, this one line at the end that I figured out.” What was the line?
Robert Rodriguez: Oh, at the end. So when I told them all about this investment opportunity at the end, I said — so this is how you manifest, because I’ve been talking about manifesting because they asked me the question, “Robert, you’re very positive, but do you have any human doubts?” And I said, “No.” And I told them why and they were all clapping afterwards. So at the end I said, okay, one more thing on manifesting, this is how you do it. Next year it’s our goal to come back to South by Southwest with our first Brass Knuckle film. Now ask yourself this, “If you have the opportunity to invest, to be part of it and pitch an idea that might be that idea, wouldn’t you rather be sitting up here with us than down there in the audience? That’s how you manifest.”
And they all cheer, mic drop.
Tim Ferriss: Mic drop.
Robert Rodriguez: Goodbye. Yeah, it’s true, you set a target. I was talking about my old trainer, I had an old trainer. We’d be working out, and you can tell just making it up as he went, “200, 200 sit-ups, 200 push-ups, 200 push-ups.” And then we’d just go, go, go. Just picking a big number and then hitting it, that’s kind of what you need to do because if you aim low, you’ll hit low. But if you aim high, it might go low, it might go there. And like El Mariachi, when you read the book, it went straight up. But if I hadn’t taken the action, it would never have happened. So, so many people wait.
That’s the discussion we had about, remember you were talking about making a short film and I said, “We’ve just got to commit to making it. We’ve just got to go. Ready or not, here we go. Let’s set a date.” We almost did it but then both of schedules got blacked —
Tim Ferriss: I know, it was close.
Robert Rodriguez: But you understood the lesson.
Tim Ferriss: I understood the lesson.
Robert Rodriguez: Because I told somebody this whole thing, and he was there right where you were sitting. I think I told you, somebody was right here and they said, “Wow, everything you’re saying makes sense. I’ve got a project, all the pieces are actually pretty much there. I just guess I’m not ready.” And I said, “That’s going to be on your tombstone: ‘Here lies so-and-so. He was never ready.’” Why is it that art you have to be ready for? In life, you didn’t know you were going to get a flat tire. You didn’t know you were going to go to work and be fired. You didn’t know the fires were going to be raging. Every day you’re like this, trying to move with the — you’re not ready for anything life has thrown at you, but you become ready on the spot.
Why is it that we think art and life should not be the same? Why art has to be, you have to be ready before you can begin. That’s no relation, they should be the same. You’re not going to be ready until you’re almost done with a project because a lot of the answers you need are not going to happen until you’re on the journey and that’s what keeps most people from doing it. And so that’s why I was going to show you that real time, but we are going to do it still.
Tim Ferriss: We’re going to do it.
Robert Rodriguez: We’re going to make a short film, you’re not going to know what you’re going to make it on, and it’s going to fall in our lap because we start the process.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Robert Rodriguez: That is a huge, huge, huge lesson.
Tim Ferriss: You’ve got to start it.
Robert Rodriguez: You just have to start.
Tim Ferriss: You’ve got to start. I mean, in a couple of weeks I have this, I don’t even know if I’ve told you about this, I have a card game I’ve been working on secretly for two years.
Robert Rodriguez: A card game?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, a card game.
Robert Rodriguez: Yeah, you’re always gifting me card games, so you wanted to do your own.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I love card games and the reason that it happened ultimately is just booking a flight to go spend time with a master game designer and deciding by the time we leave, we are either going to have a game or we will have stopped. Because we did a couple of, I would say B minus attempts where we didn’t commit in that type of way and we met in different places around the country and we would playtest different options and different concepts. And then this final trip was like, okay, look, we’re both really busy. We’ve given this a few shots. This time we’re just going to pound our heads against the wall —
Robert Rodriguez: You’re aiming up there now.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, and we’re going to have a game or this is it. And that kicked off the whole process. Now it’s going to be in thousands of stores.
Robert Rodriguez: That’s great. When you used to ask me, “How do you get so much done?” It’s like I set the bridge on fire and then I run across. Otherwise it’s not enough stake, if you have a way out like the last ones, you had a way out, y’all didn’t have that goal, you’ll take the escape route.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it’s easier.
Robert Rodriguez: But if you’ve burned the bridge, you’ve got to go. That’s what the best thing about self-created deadlines. When we have a deadline, it’s a blessing. Like today, I even asked you yesterday, I said, “Do you really need it by tomorrow? We could push it to a later week.” “Oh no, let’s do it.” So when you have a deadline, you said, you make it happen.
Tim Ferriss: You make it happen. Yeah, exactly.
Robert Rodriguez: But we tend not to do that with ourselves and it’s a crippling thing.
Tim Ferriss: So thinking of the audiobook that you just produced and the book, we have spoken over the years about you writing another book.
Robert Rodriguez: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: So what happened to that one?
Robert Rodriguez: You told me, right after we had our [inaudible], he says, “Did you finish that book?” Because I had sounded like I was almost ready. The idea was called The Creative Life because I gave a talk once about Pro Max or something about creativity and they introduced me and they said, “Robert Rodriguez, cinematographer, editor, composer, screenwriter.” They went through all my credits and I got up there and I said, “I feel dizzy just hearing all that stuff.” And there’s this book out, I always see it in the bookstores at the airport it’s called The ONE Thing, about doing one thing. And I was thinking, well that doesn’t apply to me, obviously. But then I thought, but they’re actually —
Tim Ferriss: I think it’s Gary Keller.
Robert Rodriguez: There actually is one thing that I do when I think about it, it’s not those jobs, I live a creative life. I apply creativity to everything I do and that’s why anything that touches creativity is open to me. So I can paint, I can draw, I do anything because 90 percent of any one of those jobs is actually the creative part. The technical part about any one of those, whether it’s music, say, 90 percent creative. Some of the best musicians don’t know how to read or write music, that’s the technical part.
So I realized as they did all those jobs, that was the thing. So I said I want to write a book called The Creative Life where every chapter is about raising your kids, painting, drawing, filmmaking. You’re going to see the same lesson over and over because it all applies. So that was the idea and you ask what happened to it, it’s like I’m going through this whole new chapter that’s so massive. I would feel dumb to put out the book now because I know this is going to change all my thinking and when I turned 50, I thought, “I wonder if there’s some other job I could have where I don’t have to be doing as harder work as filmmaking. With the knowledge I have there must be some.” I don’t even know what jobs are out there. This is the first job I ever got was making movies. I was so young.
I literally bought Jobs for Dummies and was looking through it. No joke because they had these little icons just to see what’s even out there.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, what’s in there? I was like, I don’t want that. I don’t want that.
Robert Rodriguez: It got to filmmaker, and that little icon is a guy with his arms up like this, this said, “This is the best job. You get to be creative with your friends, make stuff, and then just sit back and let the money roll in. Said, but it says, “But 99 percent of film students don’t get this job, so forget that dream.” Oh, clearly I’ve got the best job, but I used to think, “Well, I guess I could keep making movies. I guess that’s been good to me. I guess I could just keep making more,” but then I had to work with my kids for that Red 11 project.
Remember where it was one where we had to do another Mariachi, another $7,000 movie, but with digital cameras, and show people how it was done today? We were going to make one and I made all the other filmmakers that were in our group for this TV show I was doing called Rebel Without a Crew. You can only bring one person just like I had Carlos Gallardo, the main actor from El Mariachi, only one person. You’ve got to do everything. He can be your sound man or he can be your cameraman, but you’ve got to do everything. You’ve got to edit it, you’ve got to shoot it, you’ve got to write it, and you’ve got two weeks. I had only two weeks to do Mariachi and I saw the filmmakers just like that thing I was saying about the kids pushing them. I saw them having — they’d only done short films. None of them had done a feature. This is your first feature and we’re going to document it. It’s like a documentary camera’s going to be on you, like reality TV.
I saw them turn superhuman between the first week and the second week. Once they started shooting, they had no idea how they were going to do it. They were like, “Oh my God, this is just so hard.” By the second week I go to ask them how it’s going. They’re already talking about their next three films. Suddenly their idea of what impossible was went from that to that.
And so I did that as well. I wanted to do that, but with my kid, with Racer, I picked one kid, my son Racer, who hadn’t been working with me in film at all for a while. I brought him to be my co-writer, my collider, my sound guy, and I didn’t show him how to use the sound equipment. I waited until we’re about to start filming. Then I was like, “Okay, this is how it works. Go.” Because we’re documented. I wanted to show people that even without any experience, you can go make a movie in two weeks with no money, and we did, and that thing ended up going to festivals, even getting over to Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes. People were flying us and paying us to go speak about our masterclass on how we made that movie and show clips from the making of. We’re making money from this little no-money movie.
The only reason we had to stop doing a tour, we went to Colombia, we went to Sweden, we went to Paris, we went to — we were doing really well. My kids were like, “Dad, you’re right. This really works.” I say, “Yeah, better than I thought.” We only had to stop shooting because we’re shooting We Can Be Heroes, but the reason I’m talking about this label, what blew my mind about is my kids, I thought they were going to —
Tim Ferriss: Label you apply to yourself?
Robert Rodriguez: Yeah. Maybe to yourself and to just a label, like a company, a fake company within your realm like Brass Knuckle. I would call that a label. I still do other things, but that has a very specific target, and I’m getting all kinds of ideas just popping in my head because I started that. It’s just this phenomenon, ideas I never would’ve thought of before because now it’s got a place to go.
Just like with yourself, there’s a label. I’ll tell you about how I came about that with yourself that really transformed. But my kids, I thought they’re going to resent me again. I’m afraid they might resent me for having to do this $7,000 movie for two weeks and see how much hard work it is because they had their own interests. They weren’t wanting to make movies, but I said, “I need him to be in it because he’ll be a good example,” and I made my other son act in it because he made those knives. I was inspired to make one of the characters a knife guy, and I asked them to do the score too with me, write the score, and I thought, “They have their own interests. They’re going to work on this one day and hate it. I’m prepared for that.”
Instead, they came at the end of the day all excited, their eyes all bugging out of their head, and they were like, “Dad, the actor didn’t show up. The script didn’t match the location at all, and when we asked you in the morning, ‘What we’re going to do?’ You said, ‘I don’t know, we’ll figure it out,’ and we thought…”
Tim Ferriss: Flat tire.
Robert Rodriguez: “…finally, the movie that stumped my dad, but then, by the end, we figured it out.” They were all excited. I went, “Oh, they don’t realize that’s the creative process. That’s every day on a movie, but it’s also every day in life.” It’s the same, and I realized on the making of that movie, so little of what I was teaching them was filmmaking. It was all life lessons, how to take on this impossible challenge, two-man crew making a feature, and then seeing it. I didn’t know we were going to go to Cannes. I actually didn’t predict any of that. I just wanted to finish for the project, but you get blessed because of that.
And the label we created is because my son had come to me and said, “I wanted to draw comics, but I wasn’t born in the golden age of comics, but I am born in the golden age of technology,” so I’m thinking, “Maybe, instead of doing storytelling through comics, give up the drawing thing and do it like with VR, so let’s start a VR company. Let’s start a company. I’ll show you how this works. All these VR companies need people to buy their helmets. They need product. If we tell them — if I call them up and say, ‘I have a VR company,’ they’ll give us money to go make them a short film.”
Sure enough. I just said, “Here, your names…” We all have double R names. All the kids, “Let’s start a company called Double R,” it’s the label we made. So, now we make t-shirts, going to make notepads, and they loved them. They were looking at and have a go — because now any project any of you have, if Rhiannon has an album she wants to do, or Rebel wants to put out a knife, then we can do it through Double R. It’s our company. Now, when you have a company, you have a label, it’s now manifested. Now, you have to do stuff to put into it, right? You get all these ideas.
Michelle Rodriguez and Norman Reedus are in this movie called The Limit. Remember that one?
Tim Ferriss: I do. Yeah.
Robert Rodriguez: They made us a logo, Double R logo, big logo. It went in front of our $7,000 movie also, that went around the world that same year, three projects in one year. I went to Netflix to ask if they needed any movies and they said, “We need family, Spy Kids-type thing. Can you come up with something?” I came up with it in the room. People are always ripping off Spy Kids. I should just rip off myself. Little kids have to save their parents, only what if they’re superheroes and their parents are superheroes that get captured like the Avengers get captured, little kids with superpowers, they don’t know how to use them yet, and the little girl who has no powers has to wrangle them together, to work together, to go save the day. Simple pitch, right?
I wrote it out. I wrote it with my kids. We came up with all these fun special powers we’ve never seen in any movie. We took it, we sold it. It’s the biggest movie on Netflix, most watched and rewatched movie in their history. Nothing can touch it because kids watch it over and over and over, and that has a big glorious, the same Double R logo in front of it, and my kids were just like, “Dad, this really works.” I was like, “Better than I thought. I was just doing it as an example. I did not know it was going to put food on the table in that way,” so I’m going to do that again with Brass Knuckle, but with the fans because we’ve done that before because I told them, “Come be a part of it because proximity is everything.” Remember I showed you that painter I went and watched —
Tim Ferriss: Yep.
Robert Rodriguez: — and how my painting changed, even though he didn’t teach me one thing except I saw that he just had a regular brush, regular paint, and that he didn’t know how he was going to attack it each time, made you go like, “Oh, I thought I needed to know something.” I had a mental block, and I went and did it again, and it was like there it was. It was unbelievable. The proximity sometimes teaches you lots.
So I tell people, “If you come be a part of the company, the proximity to us as filmmakers making this stuff, you’re going to get 10 ideas, 20 ideas on your own. You’re going to see your own thing. You’ll be part of this, but it’s almost like a master class without me even trying to teach you.” That’s just what I’ve found by being proximity, by being around James Cameron, by being around George Lucas, by being around Spielberg. They didn’t necessarily give me lessons, but just seeing how they move through the world, even for just a moment in time, transforms you completely.
Tim Ferriss: So let’s say somebody’s listening to this, and those are big names out of reach for most folks, but they’re —
Robert Rodriguez: But they’re equivalent in their world. They’re equivalents of people that they really admire that if they just had proximity to them, they didn’t even have to get a lesson from them, and it would just change because your just — your parents used to tell you this, “Be careful who your peers are.” That meant one thing when you were younger. It means even more now when you’re older, like surround yourself with people who are heavy hitter. We talk to each other all the time because it just raises our game. I remember you coming over to my house and saying, “Hey, what chopper is that, that you’re…” You’re seeing upgrades that you can have —
Tim Ferriss: Do it all the time.
Robert Rodriguez: — just by proximity. You pick stuff up.
Tim Ferriss: Can you say more about labels and —
Robert Rodriguez: So, label. I’m going to give you my favorite label example, and it’s a thing I realize now when I did the audiobook that I already knew and had forgot. People would come up to me sometimes and tell me some quote from my book, and I’d be like, “That’s from my book? I was smart back then. What happened?” But there was something I said in the book, saying, “Stop aspiring. Stop saying you’re an aspiring filmmaker.” People come up to you, “I’m an aspiring filmmaker” are the words we use are really strong. You’re always going to be aspiring. You’re never going to get there if you call yourself somebody who’s on the journey. Say you’re a filmmaker. Make a card. I said, “Make a business card that says, ‘I did, director, cinematographer, editor.’” Then what do you have to do? Just like the label, you have to conform to your identity. You have to go do that stuff now, and suddenly, you have movies out. You go make movies because that’s what a filmmaker does. What does an aspiring filmmaker do? Aspires —
Tim Ferriss: Aspires.
Robert Rodriguez: Yeah, you aspire. I knew that back then, but I’d forgotten it, and the reason I remember it is — okay, you always remark, “Hey Robert, you’re always in good shape.” Did I ever tell you I hate sports? I hate working out. Did I ever tell you that?
Tim Ferriss: I’m not sure you told me.
Robert Rodriguez: All through high school they would want me to be on the team. Small school. I was so tall. “Please come be on our team.” I was like, “I don’t…”
Tim Ferriss: Which sport, football?
Robert Rodriguez: Any of them, basketball, football, “We need players, and you’re so big. Come be on the…” I was like, “I don’t even know how these games are played. I’ve never followed sports. I’m a filmmaker. I’m an artist. I’m a musician.” There’s a line in The Faculty Elijah Wood said, that’s my line. I used to tell people, “I don’t think you should run unless you’re being chased.” I just did not love exercise at all. But then later, when I was making movies, my back kept going out because I was doing steady cam because I was sitting drawing for long hours. My back every year would go out really bad where I needed a walker and just cortisone shots, cortisone shots on my back.
I remember Ricardo Montalbán in his wheelchair at 84, and I had a walker on Spy Kids 2 with my back, and he goes, “Robert, I’m 84. What’s your excuse? You have to work out.” I was like, “I know, I know, but I don’t know how. I hate sports. I hate working out.” The next year I worked with Stallone on Spy Kids 3 and I said, “How can I get in better shape so my back doesn’t keep going out?” He goes, “Get thee a trainer. Anyone who ever got anywhere physically had a trainer.” Say, “Even you? Don’t you just go train?” “No.” He said, “No, no. I would rather rearrange my sock drawer than go work out.” I was like, “Well, if you even need a trainer, what chance do us mortal men have?”
So, I got a trainer, and I would hide from him. I would pay him not to show up. I hated it. I hated working out. I would feel sick when he’s coming over, and I would half-ass the workouts because I hated it. So this woman, a friend of mine from Mexico, older woman, “My doctor told me I have to stop smoking so I’m not smoking right now.” I said, “You’re going to go back to smoking because your identity is a smoker. You’re saying you’re a smoker. You’re going to go back. You have to change your identity. You have to say, ‘I’m a non-smoker. I’m a non-smoker,’ because then if you just identify yourself as that, you’re going to then conform to your identity, and you’re going to, ‘What does a non-smoker do?’ They hate smoke, makes them sick. Stay away from cigarettes.” “All right, I’ll try that.” I don’t know if it worked because I didn’t follow up, but right away, I thought, “Hey, I should apply that to myself.”
It’s a good thing to go checklist yourself every few years. Where can I apply? Where are some places that I’m not doing that, that I can change a label? So, you know what I did? And you’ve got to go 180. If you go by degrees, you ain’t going to get anywhere, 20 percent, 30 percent, bullshit. 180. I went from being, hate sport, of course, I hate working out. What do I say to myself all the time? “I hate sports. I hate working out. I hate exercise. I love food. I have to change my identity.” What I said, “I’m an athlete. I’m an athlete. I’m an athlete.” By the next day, everything changed. What does an athlete do? Loves to work out. It makes time to work out. There is no time, but you make time when you love something. You eat right because you’re an athlete. As soon as your identity changes your label, you conform to that, so that’s the power of identity in the words we choose to describe ourselves.
I catch people all the time describing themselves, and I go, “You’ve got to change that description.” Already out of the gate, you’re talking about yourself in a way that’s not going to helpful. Yeah, it’s not going to be helpful.
Tim Ferriss: Besides the aspiring, which you mentioned, where people are handicapping themselves by labeling, using that term, within say filmmaking, are there other ways that you see people handicap themselves just in terms of how they view themselves or their situation or what they have or don’t have? Are there any other common patterns that come up?
Robert Rodriguez: Common ones, I don’t know. Just seems that anything that takes you out of the game early by a belief you have.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Robert Rodriguez: Like, “Oh, well, I don’t have access.” Everyone has access. You have a phone, you can make actually a story on a phone, or you can write, or — I just say whenever I hear anyone use some kind of negative connotation to something like, “Well, I want to make something, but I just don’t have the time.” It’s there’s no time. If you’re waiting for time to happen, it’s not going to happen. All the time’s gone. There’s no time, but we can make time. We can make time for anything that we put our mind to, so don’t give me that shit. That’s like taking a hatchet and chopping off your left leg before the race. You literally did this to yourself. You just hobbled yourself for no reason, with these beliefs, and it’s all you. You are your own worst enemy. You’re like the one in the audience in your way. The biggest obstacle in your life is you, always.
I asked you this question outside because I was curious what your answer was, but one of the questions that came up was, “So, Robert, you’re real positive. Do you have any human doubts?”
Tim Ferriss: I want to come back to that. Yeah. Your answer was, “No.”
Robert Rodriguez: Yeah, we’ll come back to it. I just didn’t want to forget. It seemed like I could work it in here.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah. Get after it. Because I’m sure a lot of people are like, “What? No doubts.”
Robert Rodriguez: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. So, walk us through that.
Robert Rodriguez: Yeah, so they said, “Robert, you’re real positive. Do you have any human doubts?” And I said, “Just give me a chance to think,” because I had never heard it that way, human doubts, but I said, “What do you all think?” And then I see people going, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes because that’s the real answer you would probably give, but I like to do counterintuitive for everything, so I went, “No. Why? Because that’s a manifestation, isn’t it?”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Robert Rodriguez: I have no human doubts because I know the process too. You can’t wait to be ready. You have to have the confidence to know that if — they say knowing is half the battle. What’s the other half? Not knowing? I think that’s more important. That’s where the magic is. You don’t know what the other half is.
Tim Ferriss: Not knowing is half the battle.
Robert Rodriguez: You’re going to figure. Yeah. Not knowing is the major part of the battle. I got there to the set. I didn’t know I was going to do any of it, but as soon as I saw how limited the options were, suddenly it became very clear there was only one way to do it, and if you have that confidence going into each day, you shouldn’t have any doubt. You shouldn’t have any fear. A failure, my biggest successes came from my failure, so why would I fear that? What doubts — I couldn’t think of any. Can you think of a doubt I should have? Give me an example of one I doubt, or even you, what doubts would you have?
Tim Ferriss: I think I need to basically take the last four minutes and just listen to it every morning. I just need to replay that every morning. I think it’s a good reminder.
Robert Rodriguez: Okay, but what doubts do you have?
Tim Ferriss: Well, I’ll just tell you, and this is —
Robert Rodriguez: It’s a good question because I didn’t think —
Tim Ferriss: Hopefully my parents aren’t listening to this, but I grew up in a household where there’s a lot of negativity, and there’s a lot of, we don’t have X because we’re never going to have Y because. We can’t ever have Z because —
Robert Rodriguez: Didn’t you already prove that wrong though?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, no, exactly.
Robert Rodriguez: It’s all right. Now, you wrote your own history now instead of that history.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. No, totally, so there’s software to overwrite.
Robert Rodriguez: Those are formative years, so that’s hard.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, totally. I can’t think of any excuses that you should have.
Robert Rodriguez: Well, just you even. What doubts would you think you would have? Just so I could hear because then I go, “Okay, I agree with that.” I just hadn’t thought of any, I was so on the spot. I was wondering what you would answer on the spotlight.
Tim Ferriss: You know what I appreciate about the question is how effective it is at making you stumble because of the human doubts.
Robert Rodriguez: Yeah, yeah. I like, “Let’s drop the human…”
Tim Ferriss: Human doubts —
Robert Rodriguez: Let’s just drop the human.
Tim Ferriss: Animal doubts.
Robert Rodriguez: Let’s just drop humans. Okay —
Tim Ferriss: No, I know. I just loved that —
Robert Rodriguez: But just doubts —
Tim Ferriss: I’m like, “Wow, that’s masterful.”
Robert Rodriguez: If you dropped that —
Tim Ferriss: Judo move.
Robert Rodriguez: — doubts. What doubts do you have? They wanted to humanize you because you sound like Superman when you talk. A lot of times when we give these talks, everyone thinks you’re Superman, but we know each other. We know that we all have weaknesses and this and that, but we don’t want that, and we don’t want to manifest that, so we don’t dwell on it.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, totally. I would say that my inclination would be if I were on stage in your place, I probably would’ve said yes, but then if we dug a little deeper into what that means to me, I think it would differ from probably how a lot of people would use it.
Robert Rodriguez: Right.
Tim Ferriss: So I would have doubts in the sense that I don’t know how something is going to turn out, but that —
Robert Rodriguez: The best part.
Tim Ferriss: — but that doesn’t mean that I don’t get started, and that doesn’t mean that I stop experimenting because my whole thing is look. For instance, I’m launching this game. People are like, “What, a game? It doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t connect to the other things that you’re doing.” I’m like, “Exactly, because I want to see what’s behind door number three, and I’m not going to know unless I do this thing that’s off-menu.” “So what are you going to do with it? What’s next?” I have no idea because anything I could plan now is not going to be as interesting as a lot that is going to surface if I do well with whatever the next step is in front of me. That’s it. That’s all I need to figure out. And a lot of the time, as you said, you’re going to get there and circumstances will have changed. The thing that was supposed to get shipped from the warehouse isn’t there, and you’re like, “Okay.” And actually side story. I’ll keep it super short, and then I want to actually ask you about a name that came to mind when you said The Creative Life —
Robert Rodriguez: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: — because then I thought The Creative Act and I thought Rick Rubin, and I know you’ve met Rick Rubin, so I want to ask about that.
Robert Rodriguez: Yes, yes.
Tim Ferriss: But when I had my very first presentation at South by Southwest, 2007, it was the launch of The 4-Hour Workweek, and I had put together the most incredible presentation of my life. I had rehearsed at a friend’s garage to his chihuahuas. That was the only test audience I had, and if they got bored and walked away, I had to change my presentation. That was the only fine-tuning, but I was so proud of this huge deck that I put together, right? PowerPoint. I get to the venue, my computer crashes, and it’s like, “Well, here we are.”
Robert Rodriguez: Now what? Got to roll up the sleeves now?
Tim Ferriss: And it ended up being so much better than if I had used the slides. It ended up being so much better because I’d rehearsed enough that I knew the material. I didn’t need the visual references. That was a self-doubt that I had that I wouldn’t be able to give it without the slides, and then the slides went away, and it was better than I could have —
Robert Rodriguez: So you might have it. You can have a doubt, but you’re not going to live and breathe by that. You’re going to push past it really quickly because you should have fear. You should have some fear going into something. I call it fear forward.
Tim Ferriss: Fear forward.
Robert Rodriguez: Yeah, fear forward. Have the fear, but don’t let it cripple you. Just go forward knowing you’re doing something that’s outside of your comfort zone and you’re going to reap great benefits. You might slip on the first two rocks. It might be Four Rooms, but if you don’t look at it with a negative point of view, you turn it into a Spy Kids —
Tim Ferriss: That’s an RR merch teaching opportunity.
Robert Rodriguez: Yeah, that’s a teaching. I told somebody that years ago, they went, “Fear forward. I like this.” I guess that’s kind of catchy, but I tell you, I got to tell my kids this after we did this project together. I said, “Now you really know how it works.” Because my son, Racer, said he was helping me with a film, right? By the end of the two weeks, they interviewed him about it. He’s waxing philosophical about the creative process like he’s been doing it for a decade. He said, “I never knew how my dad did El Mariachi.” Every day everything was just falling apart, but we’d figure it out. Every day was figuring it out. “But I never knew how he did that movie for no money, but now I do because we just did it.” He didn’t know either. He just started. Most people never start. He figured it out day by day, and now he knew it in his blood because he had just done it.
So I got them together. I said, “This was the greatest project we could have done together.” When you work with your kids because they get to be in the boat with you figuring stuff out, they see you trying to figure it out, and they’re figuring, they’re part of the solution.
We’re going to get into this. I’m going to talk about nepotism. Why anyone who says anything negative on nepotism you just get slapped in the face and kicked in the balls by their kids? It’ll blow your mind.
Tim Ferriss: All right, we’re going to come back —
Robert Rodriguez: We’ll get back to, but this is the main thing about this is that I told them, “If I ever get hit by a bus, you all know what to do now because we just did it.” And it’s all life lessons. You get together. You make your plan, which is like your script. You make it as bulletproof as possible, so then you can go do your film shoot so you can go take action, watch it all fucking fall apart. It’s like your projector thing, and then that’s when you roll up your sleeves and go, “Now let’s take this chicken shit and make chicken salad,” and it always comes out better. It always comes out better than your original plan. Every time. Wash, rinse, repeat, that’s life. You just learned the most valuable lesson of life on this little microcosm of what life is, which is a movie. Because remember, life and art should be the same.
You are writing a story, and you’re writing your own story while you’re doing it. The story of who you are, and who you’re going to become, and what you’re going to achieve as you’re writing a fake story. That’s why they go together. That’s why people identify with stories. You’re literally — we’re writing our own story. So do you have doubts? Yeah, but I’m going to write past it. I’m going to write my story to where I’m not the guy that has doubts, so that’s the power of creativity and labeling, and that’s a label. Am I going to say I’m a guy who has doubts? No, because then, guess what? Now I have doubts, and if there is a doubt, I can identify, I’m sure like you just did, figure out a way past it right away. So, that’s why I would just say blanket. I don’t have any doubts. I don’t want to be the guy that has doubts —
Tim Ferriss: Figure it out.
Robert Rodriguez: — and I’m going to figure out — it’s like you have to make your business card first that says, “A guy with no doubts.” I’ll add that to it. I have no doubts. I remember Kevin Smith, filmmaker.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, sure.
Robert Rodriguez: Clerks, and all that. He sent me a script called Dogma.
He said, “I wrote this script. It’s got special effects. It’s all out of my wheelhouse.” I said, “But you wrote it?” And he goes, “Yeah, but it’s definitely a Robert Rodriguez movie. You direct it.” I go, “Why don’t you want to direct it?” “It’s too big for me.” “Well, now you have to make it.” You fear forward. You’re doing something that pulls you out of your wheelhouse. And he was so thankful that I told him that and that he did it. Gave him the permission to go do it, and it transformed his career because now he wasn’t doing the comfort zone. He was now going reaching way beyond —
Tim Ferriss: Discomfort zone.
Robert Rodriguez: — so fear forward, get out of the comfort zone. That means you’re on the right track. If you don’t have fear on something you’re going to do that day, probably fucking wasting your time. You’re doing something that you’re just spinning your wheels, so you want to put yourself out there. That’s not the same as having doubt, I don’t think. I think it’s just — it’s a good litmus test. Have a little bit of doubt that my daughter’s going to be able to perform tomorrow because it’s the first time in front of a crowd. She may get nervous. I don’t know. She’s never seen a crowd. She might step out and see the crowd and freeze. Who knows? But I don’t want to put that out there because I don’t want to manifest that. I want to manifest — and we’re going to have cameras filming. We’re going to make this a big moment, and she rose to the occasion because that’s what happens.
Tim Ferriss: She rose, too. She looked like a seasoned vet.
Robert Rodriguez: So far.
Tim Ferriss: So Rick Rubin, his very first podcast, as far as I’m aware, was on this podcast, The Tim Ferriss Show —
Robert Rodriguez: All right.
Tim Ferriss: — ages ago. It was in his sauna. He actually didn’t think I was going to say yes because he had a barrel sauna at what was Shangri-La in Malibu, ended up burning down, sadly. This is quite a few years ago now, but he said, “Okay, okay, we’ll do the podcast.” At that time, he basically did next to no media, and he said, “We’ll do the podcast, but it has to be in the sauna, and we’re going to do the sauna, and then cold plunge, and then sauna.” And I was like, “All right.”
Robert Rodriguez: Just sweating it out.
Tim Ferriss: So we did it in the sauna. Now, the one thing we neglected to consider was not the temperature of the recorder because I could put that on the floor and it was fine.
Robert Rodriguez: The mic.
Tim Ferriss: It was the mics, so we had to wrap those in towels as we did the interview. But you got to meet Rick a handful of years ago.
Robert Rodriguez: Yeah, ’22.
Tim Ferriss: What was that like? I don’t want to even speculate. I have my own guesses as to how you guys might measure and interact, but what was that like?
Robert Rodriguez: Oh, it was wonderful. He showed up at my house.
Tim Ferriss: Okay.
Robert Rodriguez: He was in town producing a band, and I heard he wanted to meet me, so I said, “Yeah, he can just come to the house.” So he shows up at my house. So I figured he’s probably heard some of my podcast stuff, very similar to his creativity. We all approach it differently and we all have our own theories. So he shows up and he goes, “I don’t know who you are or what you do or anything about you, but I had a feeling I was supposed to come meet you.” So I said, “You came to the right place. I’m going to show you my house.” You’ve seen my crazy house. “I’m going to talk about my house.” I’m talking about how I drew it first, envisioned it, built it. “By the time I finish telling you about my house, you’ll know who I am.” So I go out and I give him the whole tour and he’s like, “Okay, okay. Yeah, that’s just like my house.” It might’ve been the one in Malibu. “That’s just like my house in…” somewhere. And he goes, “We’re the same guy.”
So we go outside to where my waterfall is and my pool, and we sit, and puts his feet up, and we just start talking. He just wants to hear about me. So I started telling him what we’re talking about, all this creativity, my whole spiel on it. And he’s like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” We’re going on, and going on, and going on, going on. I’m doing most of the talking. And then, as he was leaving, he says, “I want to give you my book. I’m about to put out a book.” His book wasn’t out yet. So he ran into the car, came back out, and it was just like a galley version of the book. And I said, “What is this?” And he goes, “Actually, it’s pretty much everything we were just talking about is in there.” And I was like, “Really? Okay. I’m going to give you my book.” So I gave him my book. So the picture I have, I’ll show you, is him with my book in front of my house.
Tim Ferriss: That’s cool.
Robert Rodriguez: And then he left. And then, when he left, I’m reading. I’m like, “Oh, my God.” I read the book. It’s so similar, but different, to things that I — because we all come at it from a different area, but his solutions are similar, but different, because his from a different world than mine. Same questions, same kind of things.
It’s that hive brain. I don’t know. And you said this before, you said, “Because you’re a creative, I know other creatives like this, you have one foot in the magic realm and it is like when your foot’s in there, you pick up the signal from the others, so you all kind of get ideas from each other before we even met.” It’s why he knew to show up. And I’ve had people just show up, drawn there, knowing they’re supposed to be there, not knowing why. It’s this kind of magical thing that when you get into the creativity world, you really are tapping into the universe, in a way, to get your ideas, because your brain’s not smart enough.
I’m not smart enough to come up with these ideas. They’re out there. And everybody in every discipline has a different line for that. Like Keith Richards says, “I don’t come up with these riffs. They’re all floating around. I was just the first one to pull it down and use it.” They all have their version of that, that it’s not from them. And that’s the best way to think, because then there’s no ego involved. And if you have no ego then it’s just, you’re a conduit for this creative spirit to come through you, well then you can do anything. I can be a good pipe, I just get my ego out of the way and let it come through.
Because when you’re in a flow, you start, “I don’t want to write this book.” And then you start writing, the first few lines come out, then it starts going and you can’t even believe what’s coming out. It’s because creative spirit, in my theory is, it doesn’t have hands. It’s waiting for you to get off your ass, and pick up the pen, and then it can help take over. And so always take action. That’s why I say always take action. Don’t wait to be inspired. Action first, inspiration second, because if you wait to be inspired, like to make your short film, good luck. They ain’t ever coming. But if you just start making the film, ideas you never in a million years would’ve come up with come into your head, because it’s not you. It’s coming through you now.
It’s like finally you’re going to go make that film we’ve been wanting to make. Creative spirit must be very disappointed in people who don’t take action, who sit there. And I tell you where I figured this out. When I was a cartoonist at 19, I had a daily cartoon strip. It’d take me hours to draw it. I would have to draw a little bit, try to figure out a joke, and I’d have a deadline every day. I wouldn’t get paid and I needed the money. I already had two jobs. So one day I thought, “I’ve got to figure out a better — easier way. I wonder if I could just come up with a method where I go home, sit and just try and picture it, just picture it, and then go draw it.”
And I’d sit there for hours and be like, “Deadline’s — oh, shit. I’ve got to go do this.” I’d have to pick up the pen and draw. And as soon as I started drawing, I would draw one drawing, three others. Then I was kind of, “This kind of drawing kind of goes with that.” I put that there and then that would be formulated. That’s the process. It’s not going to come to you if you’re just sitting on your ass waiting for it to make magic. You have to physically pick up the pen or pick up the camera or pick up the guitar and then it’s like, “Thank God, because he doesn’t have hands. Now I can come through. Now let me take over.” And that’s where — that’s the whole magic of creativity.
So you shouldn’t have any doubts if you could do it. As soon as you say, “Wow, I don’t know how I did that. I wonder if I can do it again.” You just shut the pipe, because your ego got in the way. You thought it was you. It’s not you. It’s coming through you. So just be a clear pipe. I know that works, because I taught that to my kids in a class when they were younger and, right away, they each wrote a book. It was unbelievable, because they didn’t have anything to unlearn. They didn’t have any experience yet, where we all have more doubts now because we’re older. We’re like, “Ah.” It’s like that thing where you teach a class full of grade school kids, “Who can write a novel? Who can be the president? Who can do an opera? Who can dance ballet? They all put their hands up, because they don’t know better.
You keep asking them, as the years go on, hands start going down. Even with no life experience, they just all stop believing they are that person, without any evidence that they’re not. I always wanted to be that kid who had his hands up, don’t matter what. Even if it was something I didn’t know how to do, put your hand up, because you’ll figure it out as you go. Don’t have a doubt. Just go do it. Just go do it.
Tim Ferriss: It seems to be working for you so —
Robert Rodriguez: It’s been working — did you ever see that movie Being There with Peter Sellers? He’s so naive. He’s just a gardener, but he gets hit by a car, and he ends up in Washington, and everyone thinks he’s so smart, because he’s just talking about the garden and they all read into him. And by the end he walks across the lake, because he doesn’t know you can’t.
Tim Ferriss: He doesn’t know he can’t do it.
Robert Rodriguez: It’s the most beautiful movie you can see. Peter Sellers, I think got an Oscar for — or nomination release.
Tim Ferriss: Amazing.
Robert Rodriguez: And it’s amazing and you’re just like, “Oh, my God. They all think he’s this prophet, and everyone’s quoting him and doing their own version of what he’s saying, but he’s just saying, ‘When the roots are strong, the garden will flourish.’” And everybody’s like, “Whoa.” But that naive quality, you want to keep that naive quality. That’s what got me to do Mariachi. I didn’t know it couldn’t be done. It was only until later when people said, “How’d you make that movie for $7,000? You know that’s impossible.” I was like, “Really?” Just like, “It didn’t seem that hard, but if you’re telling me, I guess I just followed my nose, and I ended up at the top of Mount Everest somehow. I wasn’t trying to do that.” But to some people, it was impossible. But to me it was just solutions I came up with to make up for what I didn’t have.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. What does your journaling look like these days? Or what insights have you had?
Robert Rodriguez: Wow, I’m going to hope I can inspire everybody to journal.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Robert Rodriguez: Because it’s really weird. I go do a talk and I say, “How many people keep a diary or a journal?” It could be like a group of 400 people, I’ll see two hands, three hands. I’m like, “Oh, my God, if I can leave you with any impression.” My big thing now — I tell people, this is my theory. Living is reliving. Living is reliving, because — you go to a concert and people have their video cameras up and everybody says, “Put it away. Live in the moment.” Counterintuitive. I say the moment fleets, and you’re not going to even remember it tomorrow. Do you even remember who was standing next to you yesterday? From day to day, shit just goes by, because we see life at 96 frames per second, 20k resolution, surround sound.
Like right now I’m looking at you, but I can see there’s a glass here. I can see, in the peripheral, there’s someone over here operating this thing. A year from now, five and then 10, all our three-pound meat computer can process. It might have a file photo of you in a t-shirt and me in a t-shirt, we kind of remember each other that way, but the metadata will be some kind of narrative that we spoke and had a good time. That’s it. That’s all you’re going to have. And when you journal, I’m shocked going — so I was trying to figure out when I had done my guitar, when I had bought certain guitars. I couldn’t remember. I knew some were gifted, but I couldn’t remember.
I just did a word search in my journals, because I have a year-by-year journal. Guitar, guitar, guitar. So I’d read and it shocked me that, “Wow, I thought I bought this one. It was a gift from this person. How can I not remember? This is a big guitar. This is like a $10,000 guitar. How would I not remember that?” And I would read a little bit of the diary around it. I was floored. If you go back 10 years, even 15 years, it’s like you’re reading someone else’s journal. You’re reading someone else’s journal and it’s like, “I guess I just have to take it for what it’s there.”
Tim Ferriss: Well, my mom actually gave me a box of papers that was sitting in one of the rooms in my childhood home. She said, “What do you want to do with this?” And I opened it up, and in that box were printed out emails that I had sent my mom when I was 15, from Japan, to tell her what I was up to. And I did not remember. That was one of the most formative experiences of my life. I have a lot of memories from that period. I did not remember 99 percent of what I put in those emails.
Robert Rodriguez: It’s got like a dehydrated version that you have to put water on to reconstruct, but, even then, it mostly just fades away. You don’t even recognize it. So it’s so important to keep your history, but imagine what’s your favorite jokes and your favorite things about life that you share with your brothers, your family, your — it’s all past stuff. So living is reliving. My kids now love watching the movies of them growing — I shot so much video and kept journals of all their childhood. They all journal now, but they have their whole childhood, because I gave them the journals of their childhood. They’ve got their whole life journaled.
But I’ve been showing them home movies recently, because I’ve been digitizing all the old tapes. And I thought, “They’re not going to dig this. Some of this shit looks like VHS. It’s so cruddy and…” compared to today’s HD stuff. I was showing them footage of them younger and I have tons of it. I thought, later in life, I could re-watch and relive the wonderful childhood, right? Forget it. You don’t remember — I don’t remember even filming this stuff. It’s like new adventures of. We’re watching it not knowing what’s going to happen next. And they’re watching it. I saw my son leaning into the screen to see what was around the corner. I said, “You just leaned into the screen.” They said, “”Wow. I left the living room.” This is virtual reality to me. And I was like, “Wow, that’s interesting.” Then I realized why.
Compared to our memory, that’s virtual reality. Even the crappiest VHS tape, you hear the sounds, you see the place, you start reformulating. And they cannot stop watching it. Every time they come over, we watch a new fun tape, and we find classic new things that become benchmarks of humor and jokes that become iconic. Reliving is living. My mom turned 75 and I said, “We’ve got to do something for your 75th birthday.” And she said, “No, no, no, no. I don’t want anything done.” “Why not?” “Because nothing can top my 65th birthday.” “65th, what happened then?” “You gave me a car and you flew in everybody from out of town.” I was like, “Really? I don’t remember that,” and it was only 10 years before. I must have tape.
I looked it up, found the tape, put it in. Oh, my God, I didn’t remember any of this. So I recut the tape, took it to her, and we had a big party and I showed the tape. She was crying more. Now she knows. And she gets the key of what it means. She’s like, “Oh, my God.” I was like, “I don’t have to do anything anymore. We’ll just play the old tapes.” It was more appreciated the second — living is reliving, because that’s when it becomes iconic. And, in the moment, this is all just flying by, and we don’t know what’s important. It’s only by journaling that you go, “This person’s no longer with us. What he said changed my life, and I didn’t know it. I forgot that he told me this at this time. If I had not journaled that.” So if your life is worth anything, write it down, because then you’ll be surprised how much of it is more valuable than you think. And you’re only going to know that by journaling.
Tim Ferriss: And what’s your process? Is it like end-of-day Word document? What does it look like?
Robert Rodriguez: End of day, at 12:12 a.m., an alarm goes off. It says, “Journal.” Because I figure by 12 at night, I will have finished with most bullshit that I can actually sit and do it. And I’ve actually got my partner writing a journal now. Never kept a journal before, but because of the stuff I just said, they’re starting to see the value in it. And they send me their journal too. That’s always the best. If your partner also journal — like just seeing someone else’s perspective on a big event — you don’t have to journal every day if you don’t want, but, at least, the big events. Valentine’s, Christmas, birthday, special trip, journal. I’m going to take you on a trip, but journal for me, and give me that as a gift. And it’s wonderful.
Tim Ferriss: Is it bullet points? Is it a page?
Robert Rodriguez: Tell you what, I used to sometimes just do bullets, just like — I try to write more now, because I’ve gone back. I try to write more, just more detail about what happened. Just because it’s going to be gone now. I know it goes away. It’s not going to trigger your memory. In the earlier days, if I only had time to write some bullet point type stuff, I would just do that, because I thought —
Tim Ferriss: Nice, and —
Robert Rodriguez: — my memory, it’ll cue me.
Tim Ferriss: No.
Robert Rodriguez: Gone. Gone. It’s someone else’s journal. Just know that. Even seven years ago, before my son started writing music for me, he had told me — I found a diary range she said, “Rebel told me his one-year, five-year, and 10-year plan.” It was great. And I was like, “What did he tell me? I don’t remember.” And I asked him, “Did you have it somewhere?” He goes, “Yeah, I have it on my phone. Oh, shit, it’s not on my phone. It’s in my diary.” “Please find it and send me, because now I want to know. Now I want to know, because your whole life changed after that. I really want to know now, with more interest than when you first told me, because now we know that whatever you said is not the path that it ended up.”
And so journaling is so powerful and so needed, because you think you’re going to remember. It’s just a meat computer, it’s not going to remember it at all. You have to leave yourself — and now I just find myself having to leave myself breadcrumbs all day, as my memory is fading anyway, just to know what I’m doing, much less what I already did. But it does become iconic and you find some really fun stuff. And if we find a video, oh, my God, this is the best thing. We find a video of us playing, having a great time, like 2003. And the weird thing you’ll find if you videotape your kids and journal, you find these weird 20-year full circle moments. Full circle moments. Like we just started working with a studio, their favorite animation studio in Japan. They love Japan. They love Japan. They’re all about Japan. Japanese knife making. They build houses with no nails, my kids.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah, like joinerism.
Robert Rodriguez: I found the videotape the first time I told them about Japan. Me telling them, and I had, I taped them, because I wanted to see their reaction, because it was like, “You’re going to love this place.” And you see their eyes light up, and they watch it now and go, “That was the moment of inception. That was the moment we never forgot and we built upon.” And to see that is amazing. But then you go back to the journal, because there’s stuff in the journal that’s not on video and vice versa.
And I go, “Wow, you know what we were doing, what I was doing while, we were playing all those games? I was wheeling and dealing big deals in L.A. for Once Upon a Time in Mexico and Sin City.” And they see the context of what was happening in between those moments. And you get this clear picture of, oh, my God, you can totally be all in as a dad and all in as a businessman, and that teaches them about life. Like, wow, you can have it all. You really can. It just helps, in so many ways, to document your life.
Tim Ferriss: Do you have any other parenting hacks?
Robert Rodriguez: So the biggest life hack is just working with your kids. Like I said, I’ve stumbled upon it, but then, when I saw Racer being so excited about what he learned about the creative process, and then I realized everything I was teaching them was life lessons, I went from fearing that they were going to resent me to realizing I’m going to make all of them work on a film with me. That’s just going to be — this is what you’ve got to do.
Tim Ferriss: Part of the deal.
Robert Rodriguez: Part of the deal. Not so that you can become a filmmaker, because you’re going to learn more about life. These are life lessons, and it’s the best way to do it. It’s project-based, it’s challenging. So my son, when we did We Can Be Heroes, I thought, “Okay, he’s done a few scores for me,” because he’d been playing piano since he was four. They all played piano. And it was just to connect right to left side of the brain. That’s all we gave them that for. But he was our best piano player. And at the end, when he did his last recital after high school was finished — and he was already doing knives, Japanese knives making. And he won Forged in Fire. Oh, my God. Did I tell you he won Forged in Fire?
Tim Ferriss: No.
Robert Rodriguez: My son, when he was 18, got on Forged in Fire —
Tim Ferriss: This is a TV show.
Robert Rodriguez: — and won, that TV show, outdoing all these other blacksmiths, because he’d been teaching himself Japanese knife making. And I asked him, “How did you win? You won $10,000? What was your mindset? You were using tools you had never even used before. They were just throwing stuff at you, and problem-solving, creative problem-solving.” And he gives me this samurai answer that I love. He said, “I convinced myself that I’d already won. Somehow I won. And so when I’d come up against the challenge, instead of thinking what I had to do to get past the challenge, I just needed to remember what I did to get there.” I was just like, “Whoa.”
Tim Ferriss: That’s some Musashi Samurai stuff.
Robert Rodriguez: “That’s amazing. Wow.” I was like, “Wow.” But again, you’ll come up with innovations when you’re thrown into the fire. And so, he was doing so good with the music, he composed a couple of scores for me, but they were just all synth based for Red 11, for that short film that was a VR film. We Can Be Heroes, though. That’s my bag. I do orchestral stuff. We’ll do the score for that together. That way I can teach him orchestral scoring, because that’ll be the next stage. He writes the first piece, not even a picture. He saw what picture I was in, and he went and wrote it to me. It was like John Williams. It was huge. It was massive. And I was like, “Okay, yeah, sure. Let me check it out. I’ll try it to picture.” I didn’t want him to see me try it to picture.
I put it to the picture, it matched. I doubled it, tripled it, it fit this whole five-minute sequence. I called him up 10 minutes later, “Come back up here and watch. It hits everything perfectly. If you could do more of this there, more of that there.” He was stunned. I said, “Good news and bad news. The good news is, it’s awesome. Bad news is I can’t help you at all. I don’t know how you did this. Where did you learn music theory? They don’t teach you that in piano, because I never learned theory, and I was always proud of that. That’s the 10 percent I thought you didn’t need to know.” Now I learned differently how he can manipulate music, because he knows theory. He goes, “Oh, I learned it on YouTube.” I was like, “Well, I’ll tell you what. You’re going to have to write the whole score, but I’ll help you. I’ll be your assistant. I’ll edit it. I’ll show you how you can repeat themes.”
And he sat there and he did it. And I could just see he was just under the gauntlet. I said, “Dude, this is the only way to learn. Throw you in the deep end. If you get a lungful of water, we’ll fish you out.” And his eyes were like this big. But years later, he came back to me and said, “I’m so thankful you did that. My whole life changed, because you put — I didn’t know I could do it, but I had no choice.” He knew I could not help him. I wasn’t doing it as some kind of weird teaching exercise. I had no — I said, “Let me see your charts. The thing you have going on in the baseline only, I would do a whole score with that. How’d you come up with all this other — I can’t help you.” And I remember the conductor said — we recorded in Vienna, stopped midway —
Tim Ferriss: I think you sent me a video —
Robert Rodriguez: Of him conducting.
Tim Ferriss: Yes.
Robert Rodriguez: I said, “Go learn on YouTube, real quick, how to conduct, because I want you to conduct one of them, because I want video of you with a James Bond orchestra conducting your own piece, because I never got to do that.” And you’re so proud when your kids can take on a challenge, and you see it just transforms their life. But the Vienna conductor stopped the score and said, “This is a magnificent score. I can’t believe you’re 20.” He was 20 at the time.
But again, you throw your kids in the deep end, and I tell this to all the parents that I can, because it’s counterintuitive, and a lot of parents would say, “I don’t want to push…” but I tell you, if you have the opportunity to work with your kids, do it, because it enriches your life, because you are mentoring them. They’re mentoring you, because they’re figuring out shit like that that you never would’ve thought of. You’re doing a project based thing together that’s impossible, that you’re all going to overcome together. How many parents do you know like try to give their kids advice on their job, and their kid’s just like, “You don’t know. You’re not in my shoes.”
Tim Ferriss: You don’t get it.
Robert Rodriguez: You’re in their shoes. You’re all trying to figure it out together, so you’re actually useful. You’re not just some Geppetto who’s worried about their kid all the time. I always say, “Don’t just parent, partner.” Because after a certain age, as soon as they’re teenagers, they replace you with their peers, because you become useless to them. If you want a relationship that lasts a long time, partner, don’t parent anymore. They don’t need a parent anymore. They need a partner. They need a mentor. They need an Obi-Wan, because that’s what they look for in their life. Mentors. Be their mentor. Because then their confidence grows when they’re mentoring you back, and they’re seeing that — their confidence soars.
And it’s family time. You’re checking all the boxes. I don’t even do anything anymore. I don’t take any job, any assignment, unless it’s going to involve my children, because life is so good that way. You’re checking all the boxes. You’re preparing them for life. You’re learning from them, they’re learning from you, and it’s family time. I was telling this to Stallone. I was having dinner with Stallone and his wife. It was pre-COVID, right after COVID, something. I had just done We Can Be Heroes, this movie, the biggest movie on Netflix. And I was telling him my son did the score, I wrote it with my kids, and all this. And Jennifer, it was like her eyes were just wide, like, “Whoa.” She hit Stallone. She goes, “You don’t work with your daughters. You don’t work with your daughters.” And Stallone was like [inaudible]. I was like, “Well, man, I don’t want to get anybody in trouble here. Maybe I should reel it back a little bit.”
But sure enough, next year, his daughters have podcasts. He would show up every once in a while to help boost some ratings and stuff. Now they have a TV show, The Family Stallone. For all of them together, working together, they’re living their dream, and they’re just so happy. So I tell people, because people can’t unhear it when they hear it. They just need to know someone did it, and that it worked, to know, “I have a way to try that with my kids.” Because I didn’t know my kids would have wanted to work with me. You know what happened was when my teacher, my kid’s teacher told me, “Your son, Racer,” when he was like 15, “he loves knights. We’re studying knights and we’re talking about squires.” And I asked, “Well, who would you want our apprentice under?” And he said, “My dad.” I was like, “Really? He’s never told me that. Did he say that?” He goes, “Yeah. He said, “[inaudible] dad.” I was like, “Wow.”
Tim Ferriss: How did that feel to hear?
Robert Rodriguez: It was wild. It made you — see, kids have egos too. They don’t want to come just tell you that. They might tell someone else, but they’re not going to tell you. So don’t assume. Don’t assume they don’t want to be part of your life or be part of your work.
Since I’ve been working with my kids since they were very young, I didn’t know it would keep going for 20 years, and now it’s just become the thing that we do. And they endlessly inspire me, because they just have that confidence built in. But we’re building a go-kart together, so I tell — I know some parents would dismiss it as a — an opportunity like that, and call it entitlement, but, wow, you’re so wrong. So wrong. Let me set you straight because this would be a curse on your life if you don’t at least know this. I would say, and I’m curious if you agree you’re not or if you have your own position on it, I would say that if you have an opportunity to work with your children, if you’re in that position, because I know that maybe not all jobs adapt to that, but take it. It’s a tremendous gift to everyone involved and beyond, because if you refuse to do so, because you’re afraid other people will call it nepotism, you are missing out on the most important opportunity of your collective lives. Because, look, what happens as parents when we pass away? Don’t we just give everything that we created to our children? Is that not entitlement that they had no part in building?
There was an opportunity to build this with them so that when they inherit it, they could go, “I made this with my dad.” Right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah.
Robert Rodriguez: Right? So it’s like, oh, thanks, Dad, for all this shit that I had no part of, that you went and made without me being involved at all, getting that chance to have that mentorship go both ways, to build something together, to have that family time together, because you were afraid someone would call you out for nepotism. Thanks. I’m having a ball, and it’s inspiring everyone who’s a parent to go partner instead of parent their child, and have a relationship that lasts your whole life..
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. What strikes me about it also, there’s trust fund kids or trustafarians. I have a new term. Well, it’s not exactly the same, but it gets used similarly, nepo babies, right?
Robert Rodriguez: Mm-hmm.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, but the connotation of that word I don’t think applies to you at all, because, at least, and this is not the Merriam-Webster definition, but when I think of nepotism, there is an unearned giving implied.
Robert Rodriguez: Yes. Right.
Tim Ferriss: Right? There’s an unearned giving implied, and then there is teaching, which you do, and then there is another thing I would say, a step above that, which is enabling someone, specifically to have the confidence that they can figure it out, that they can learn.
Robert Rodriguez: Right.
Tim Ferriss: Right? You didn’t tell your son to go to YouTube and learn music theory, but you put him in situations or you hinted at forthcoming situations that would require a lot of tap dancing and figuring things out. And if we were to create some type of Maslow’s hierarchy of working with your kids, there are different things you can impart or give. And I would say the lowest level is giving someone a fish, right?
Robert Rodriguez: Yeah. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Instead of matching them to their fish. But then, above teaching someone to fish, teaching your kids to fish, is saying, “Hey, whether it’s piano, fishing, music theory, or something that you are going to come up with on your own as a solution to a problem, or a challenge, or a dream that I can’t even think of, I’m going to put you into enough circumstances that you have the confidence you can fear forward, you have the confidence that not knowing is half the battle, but you will get there.”
Robert Rodriguez: You can tell them that stuff all you want, but when they’re doing it with you, they learn so much better.
Tim Ferriss: Exactly.
Robert Rodriguez: That’s why I said —
Tim Ferriss: Well, it’s like you sat —
Robert Rodriguez: — even after they’ve —
Tim Ferriss: — on the couch with your hands behind your head trying to come up with the comic strip.
Robert Rodriguez: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: It’s not going to happen.
Robert Rodriguez: Not going to happen, but you can tell them all that, but it’s different when they’ve lived it too. In fact, when we went and did a — that’s why I did the whole, “If I get hit by a bus, you know what to do, because now they know it in their bones.” When I did a talk in Colombia with a $7,000 movie that we did together, me and the boys, we went, they flew us down there to go talk and everyone was — it’s Colombia, these guys live in poverty. They were leaning forward to find out how to make a movie with no money so they could get out of there. And we were talking, and one woman was asking a question about screenwriting, and I was giving my answer and Racer said, because he had written the script with me now, he wanted to stand up and say, “What he’s saying is really true,” because he had lived it already.
This is the stuff he’d heard before, but now it really sank in because he was there. And what’s cool is, if you build your family up like your team like that, you know what I hear so much now that I hadn’t — probably, because I’m older and I’ve been around longer, a lot of people will just assume I’m too busy to do whatever project I’m doing alone. So they say, “Well, yeah, we can’t wait to work with you and your team.” Most people have a team. My team is my kids and it gets us more jobs. A video game company wanted to be in partnership with me. I said, “Well, let me tell you who my team is. All my kids are gamers. I got them into games when they were really little. They know this world inside out. One of them’s even a game designer. That’s my team and they’re in my house. We love this. We want to work with you and we’re going to take it to the next level because we’ve done this other project and this other project, and this was the process we did.”
Done deal. We’re doing it now. Now my kids get to make a game, a real game, like a big-ass game. And you get to do it together, because you’ve already trained them to be — and it used to be a joke when I had so many kids, I had five kids. I would say, “Oh, yes, my future cast and crew.” I would just say it as a joke, hey, it turned out to be true. Manifested. They’re my cast and crew.
Tim Ferriss: So is there anything to the story of the double Rs besides the fact that you have the double Rs? Is there more to it?
Robert Rodriguez: Yeah, double Rs was just — I’m from a family of 10 kids. My mom’s name is Rebecca and my sister’s name is Rebecca. And we’re the only double Rs, my mom, my sister, and me. And I always just loved the alliteration of that. The double Rs, it was really powerful. R, Rebecca Rodriguez, Robert Rodriguez. So once you name the first kid with an R name, well, then the second one and then the third one. And I gave them regular middle names so they didn’t have to be — so there’s Rocket Valentin Rodriguez-Avellan. He can be Valentin Avellan or he can be Rocket Rodriguez, or Racer Rodriguez or Maximiliano Avellan. If they want to go into politics and not be pro wrestlers, they can change their name. But I didn’t know they were going to keep those names past childhood. I thought it was just fun kid names. Everybody has five names. One is Rogue Joaquin Cecilio Rodriguez. Everyone has five names. So he can pick his identity. I wanted him to just use it as a little —
Tim Ferriss: Every time he has to fill out a government form —
Robert Rodriguez: Yeah, it’s like —
Tim Ferriss: — he’s like, “Oh goddammit.”
Robert Rodriguez: “I’m not going to use that.” But they didn’t want to get rid of their first names. They loved their first names. So I thought, “If everyone’s keeping their first name, let’s own it.” Double R is a cool logo. What’s fun was that it just looks cool, “Double R.” It means all of us, and it makes us like a tribe, and it makes us all — and it gave them a lot of pride. I was surprised how much pride they had in it, and they all started coming up with ideas. Rick Rubin comes over and he saw them —
Tim Ferriss: Also R.R.
Robert Rodriguez: — holding a picture up and he goes, “Double R.” He goes, “That was my artist name.” When he was a DJ and producer, Double R. He was Double R. I was like, [gasp].
Tim Ferriss: That’s amazing.
Robert Rodriguez: This is one of my other favorite things that when I’ve told parents, they go, “I want to try that with my kids.” Was something I stumbled upon, where having some kind of family talk with the kids. We usually have these things we call tribe talks where we talk about anything. It’s like we’re a tribe. We help each other out. They get so excited about a tribe talk. Let’s have a tribe talk.
Tim Ferriss: And the tribe talk is —
Robert Rodriguez: Just me and the kids.
Tim Ferriss: — asking one another for help?
Robert Rodriguez: Like just, if I have a new thing I’m going to talk about that’s going to affect their lives later. Let’s have a tribe talk about this. They’re so excited because they learn about something that I want to share with them to prepare them for life, something that I might’ve just learned, that I wish I could take a time machine, tell myself. You can’t. The closest thing to it is telling your children. Because I used to think, “Any advice I give them, I’m afraid might probably just go in one ear and out the other because it’s not real to them yet. They probably have to live through it and find their own mistakes.” No, they would process it and give it back to me. And I would be like, “Where’d you get that philosophy?” “You told me that.” “I didn’t tell it to you like that.” I might’ve said the glass is half empty or half full. They go, “Oh, yeah. Well, we built upon it.” Well, they take what you tell them and build upon it, right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Robert Rodriguez: So this one was, I thought, “I’m going to be very honest with them and tell them all the major decisions I made in life. Walk them through.” Because there’s a funny scene, it came about because of a movie. We did another Spy Kids. There’s a scene where the parents are talking about Operation Fireball with such memories about it. And the little girl asked, “What is that exactly?” “Oh, we beat up the bad guy. We blew up his lair,” and all this stuff. And she’s just like, “You could have done it a better way. You could have gone to him nicely. You could have talked to him, seen his aesthetic,” you know?
And it plays it out, right? So I thought, “I’m going to try that with my kids. I bet if I told them all the decisions I was faced with, that a lot of times are lose-lose, there’s no clear way to go, and that you think 10 years later you’ll see what the real answer should have been — nothing. There’s never clarity sometimes. I’m curious to see what they would’ve done with the knowledge more evolved. So I walk them through. It was fascinating. It was fascinating. At every turn, okay, A or B, which way would you go? I’m not going to tell you what I did. They both suck, and do you know what they say?
Tim Ferriss: What’s that?
Robert Rodriguez: “I don’t want to have to pick.” “No, you have to pick. I had to pick, you have to pick.” They picked. Every time it was the same until one, they go, it’s a big one, they go, “Well, if that’s the circumstances, that’s the knowledge you have?” And you go, “Yeah, that’s all the knowledge you have.” “Well, I would have done what you did too. I would’ve left.” See, I should have done that. I didn’t. I stayed. Let me tell you what happened, because I stayed, “I should have done that. I knew I should have done that, but I went ahead and stayed because that’s the right thing to do. I did the right thing and it blew up in my face. Watch, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom boom.”
Tim Ferriss: The right thing by external —
Robert Rodriguez: Right thing, external thing.
Tim Ferriss: — external standards.
Robert Rodriguez: But anyone else, counterintuitive though, would say, “With the evidence you have, as counterintuitive as it sounds, you go that way. So you picked the right thing.” I should have done that, but because I decided to do the right thing — you just felt so good afterward, and they were so excited knowing now what life really is like. It’s going to throw shit at you that’s no clear answer. Even with all this time, no clarity. They know that it’s a lot tougher, and they’re invested because it’s you and them in a way. So I tell parents, “Try…” I told — I won’t tell you, but several others were like, “I’m going to try that with my kids for sure. I’m going to tell my kids that. I’m curious to see what they say.”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, walk them through the decision.
Robert Rodriguez: Because you want to see if they remix a better version of you. But you might be surprised that it’s just as unfathomable to them to have an answer as you did.
Okay, life hack. My favorite life hack.
Tim Ferriss: Life hack.
Robert Rodriguez: Have you seen, I showed you that little Spark amp, right? That I can play guitar —
Tim Ferriss: You did.
Robert Rodriguez: Okay. Okay.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, in your kitchen.
Robert Rodriguez: So, there’s no time. Even when you try to make time, you can’t make consistent time. Supposed to walk 10,000 steps for your health, especially after 50 or whatever. No time for that. It takes an hour, an hour and a half. I don’t have enough things to listen to or phone calls to make to go do that. But then I love guitar. I can’t be playing guitar for a fricking hour. When you listen to Tom Morello on his Masterclass, you want to get better at guitar, play for an hour a day. If you want to get better than that, more. So I started trying to do an hour a day. I couldn’t do it consistently. So I’d be like, “God, I want to play guitar. I don’t have time, no time to walk.” So I put them together.
The Spark amps, they have some that are really small and now they just came out with the headphone ones, that you just put it on. It’s the amp is built in and you plug in your guitar, wireless. And I used to have just the one in my pocket, their older one. And I put a playlist on of backing tracks, drums, and bass for songs, my favorite songs that I play to. And I walk just around my house, and you forget you’re even there. It’s like the Angus Young workout. He’s always doing that, or Eddie Van Halen running around. The music drives you. The room is gone. You’re in a stadium. You’re walking across the stage. Your house is bigger than most stages, walking across. I put on an hour to an hour and a half playlist, this was 10 or 12 songs. Easy, 15,000 steps, 17,000 steps, easy.
You don’t even know you did it. You don’t even remember walking. You’re so transported. You’re so busy doing this that I’ll be at the end of my playlist, going, “I want to keep playing.” And so you just keep walking. That’s why you saw me in the crowd, walking through the crowd. I’m so used to playing walking.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah, you’re so used to walking.
Robert Rodriguez: I went walking through the crowd, greeting everybody that I knew instead of — I said, “Well, shit, I can play and walk, and not have to look at my…” Because I got that training, but anyway, anyone who’s a guitarist, the best life hack, you get an hour-plus practice every day. I got so much better on guitar because of it, and you’re walking, and you’re not even feeling it. I don’t even remember doing it. Biggest life hack here. I couldn’t wait to tell you. I call it the rock walk.
Tim Ferriss: The rock walk.
Robert Rodriguez: Got to do the rock walk.
Tim Ferriss: I had —
Robert Rodriguez: My friend goes out into the neighborhood with his thing and he just walks around the neighborhood.
Tim Ferriss: When I saw you on stage with your daughter, that’s the most I’ve seen you play guitar.
Robert Rodriguez: Wow.
Tim Ferriss: I’ve only seen your guitars in the house.
Robert Rodriguez: Right.
Tim Ferriss: But that was the most actual playtime I have seen.
Robert Rodriguez: Wow. Yeah, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: You were standing next to your daughter.
Robert Rodriguez: That’s so funny. True, that’s right, because I don’t go just play a song for you, right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah, with the Hello Kitty guitar.
Robert Rodriguez: Yeah. Rocking the Hello Kitty — it’s a good guitar, and it looks great.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Robert, we’ll have to do this more than once a decade.
Robert Rodriguez: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: But thank you so much for all the stories and —
Robert Rodriguez: Sure.
Tim Ferriss: I took a ton of notes. How can people learn more about Brass Knuckle Films? Where should they go? What should they check out?
Robert Rodriguez: Yeah, so there’s a Brass Knuckle Films website where you can learn all about it and get all the updates, show you how you can invest, and you’ll see all the perks and things for the different levels, and get a part of it. It’s a community. I think it’s really going to appeal to anyone who’s a fan of action movies, but also filmmakers, but just people who are interested in trying, people who consume. Don’t just be a consumer. Make the money back. I want you to make the money so that you’re not just consuming and watching a movie. If you like movies, this is the best way. I tried to figure out, ever since I was a kid, how could I get paid to watch movies? Because I watch movies all the time. This is the closest thing.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Robert Rodriguez: Yeah, Brass Knuckle Films.
Tim Ferriss: Brass Knuckle Films. Beautiful. All right, folks, we’re going to link in the show notes to everything tim.blog/podcast. Thank you, Robert.
Robert Rodriguez: Thank you for giving me a forum to tell people.
Tim Ferriss: Of course.
Robert Rodriguez: I know people will hear because everyone listens to your thing because —
Tim Ferriss: 100 percent.
Robert Rodriguez: — just like with my book, as soon as I made Mariachi, I wanted to share it with people, because I knew I would have appreciated hearing that as a filmmaker, who had no money, from a family of 10, that it was possible because everyone made it sound like it was not. So I just wanted to shout it from the mountaintop and I still feel that same way. As I discover things, I want to tell people, because the feedback loop is amazing. You know —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Robert Rodriguez: — when people come back and tell you how they worked it into their life in their own way —
Tim Ferriss: Hell yeah, it’s super gratifying.
Robert Rodriguez: — it inspires you all over again. You’re like, “Well, you just inspired me now to go try it that way.”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Robert Rodriguez: So yeah, I love sharing that.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, incredibly energizing.
Robert Rodriguez: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: It’s a virtuous circle, and for everybody listening and watching, till next time, be just a little bit kinder than is necessary to others and to yourself. Thanks for tuning in.
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It’d be really cool if you added timestamps to your transcripts, so when somebody wants to share a specific moment with a friend, they can ctrl+F on your transcript page, and then click a timestamp link and share from there.