(2025-04-03) Ferriss: Rodriguez The Wizard Of Cinema Returns

The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Robert Rodriguez, The Wizard of Cinema Returns — The “Fear-Forward” Way of Life, How to Overcome Self-Doubt, Learning to Love Limitations, and Counter-Intuitive Parenting That Works (#804). 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.

Tim Ferriss: It has been almost 10 years... 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.

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... 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.

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. (More Dakka)

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.

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.

it’s all about leveraging what you do have. It’s also a thing I call freedom of limitations. (Constraints, Effectual Reasoning)

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: 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.”

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.

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

I got to see you on stage with your daughter Rhiannon and I thought to myself, “Holy shit, she’s really good.”

She never ever performed before on stage or to a crowd.

It’s counterintuitive parenting. The kids step up. But we’ll get to that because it’s a big thing to leave out.

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...
And I would tell myself, “I need to make sure I challenge my own kids like this.” (Lean Family)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. (crowdfunding)

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.

we’re making budgets between $10 and $30 million, that’s like a lower to mid-range budget, right?
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. (Little Bet)

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.

we have a lot of avenues because they (the big movie companies) 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.

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

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. (BrandYou?)

I’m sure you’ve read a lot of scripts, if you get 100, 200, 400, 500, who knows — Robert Rodriguez: Pitches... 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. (elevator pitch)

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.

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.

Can you give us just a teaser of some of the ingredients of a good short pitch?

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.

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

That’s what the best thing about self-created deadlines. When we have a deadline, it’s a blessing

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.”

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 kids, painting, drawing, filmmaking. You’re going to see the same lesson over and over because it all applies.

then I had to work with my kids for that Red 11 project. (Family Business)

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 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. (ambition)

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

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

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…

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.”

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.”

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.

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.”

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.
Say you’re a filmmaker. Make a card.

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...

Did I ever tell you 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 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 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?

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.

You eat right because you’re an athlete.

I catch people all the time describing themselves, and I go, “You’ve got to change that description.”

anything that takes you out of the game early by a belief you have.

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.

I have no human doubts because I know the process too. You can’t wait to be ready

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 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.

I got to tell my kids this after we did this project together

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.

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 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.

So do you have doubts? Yeah, but I’m going to write past it.

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.”

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

Tim Ferriss: So Rick Rubin, his very first podcast, as far as I’m aware, was on this podcast

It was in his sauna

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

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.”

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.

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 magick 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.”

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.

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.

That’s why I say always take action. Don’t wait to be inspired. (More Dakka)

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.

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.

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

What does your journaling look like these days? Or what insights have you had?

Wow, I’m going to hope I can inspire everybody to journal.
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.

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

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

I’ve been showing them home movies recently, because I’ve been digitizing all the old tapes.

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.

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.”

End of day, at 12:12 a.m., an alarm goes off. It says, “Journal.”

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.

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 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.

So the biggest life hack is just working with your kids.

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.

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

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.”

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.
Bad news is I can’t help you at all. I don’t know how you did this. Where did you learn music 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.”

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.”

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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?

“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.

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. (Walking)

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.