Director attempts western with OUATIM - Kansas.com
Once Upon a Time in Mexico is being billed as the final installment in Robert Rodriguez's trilogy, after El Mariachi and Desperado, about the gun-toting mariachi with no name. But the writer-director wants to let you in on a little secret.
"This is really part four," he says with a smile. 'We ended up skipping part three altogether. It's a very strange movie, like waking up after drinking too much tequila and going `Where am I?' "
At the end of 1994's Desperado, Antonio Banderas (as the mysterious mariachi) and Salma Hayek (as his beloved Carolina) rode off into the sunset together, leaving a trail of corpses -- most of them bad guys -- in their wake. But Mexico, which opens Friday, picks up several years later, relegating the duo's relationship to flashbacks.
Like its title implies, Mexico is an epic, and, as Rodriguez explains, "a movie about Antonio and Salma wouldn't be epic."
MAKING `DOLLARS'
Rodriguez credits Quentin Tarantino, who made a cameo appearance in Desperado, with giving him the idea for Mexico.
"On the set of Desperado, Quentin had it all in his head already. He was saying `This is your Dollars trilogy! No one has done this since Sergio Leone. El Mariachi is A Fistful of Dollars. Desperado will be For a Few Dollars More. And now you gotta do The Good, The Bad and the Ugly. It's gotta be epic. And you gotta call it Once Upon a Time in Mexico.'
'And I said `That's very interesting, Quentin, but let's shoot this scene and get this movie done first.' I really didn't think that was ever going to happen."
Rodriguez, who says he feels closer in spirit to his Spy Kids movies than the genre films (From Dusk Til Dawn, The Faculty) he is best known for, says the main reason he agreed to make Desperado -- a $7 million sequel to his $7,000 debut El Mariachi -- was to show studio executives he was capable of making a big-looking movie for a budget that, by Hollywood standards, was definitely small-time.
Upon its release, Desperado grossed a modest $25 million -- a nice return on Sony Pictures' original investment, but still disappointing by action-movie standards. "Desperado was a little ahead of its time," Rodriguez says. "It was Salma's first English-language movie and Antonio's first Hollywood starring role. It was action, but very ethnic, and a lot of people didn't think it would have universal appeal."
But Desperado eventually found its audience on cable TV and home video -- it was the first title Sony released on the DVD format -- which led the studio to ask Rodriguez if he'd be interested in making another one.
SHOOT FIRST, EDIT LATER
Rodriguez, who had fallen in love with the ease and portability of the high-definition
digital cameras he had just used to make 2001's Spy Kids, was excited by
the creative freedom the equipment would allow him to bring to a large-scale
action picture. But he was already contractually bound to have Spy Kids II ready
for a summer 2002 release date, and if he put Mexico on the back burner, an
impending actors' strike (which never materialized) threatened to push the film
into
Hollywood limbo.
'I told Sony `I can go shoot this movie right now, because Antonio is free, Salma is free, everyone is available, but I won't be able to edit it until I shoot, edit and release Spy Kids II.' It would have to sit in a can for a year, waiting to be edited. And they said yes."
Armed with a budget of "less than $30 million," Rodriguez rushed into preproduction, heading down to Mexico to scout locations while still writing the script. Inspired by The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, Rodriguez decided to make the Mariachi one of three main characters.
"The guy with the guitar case was so iconic, I had to come up with some
really cool, archetypal characters. I just started drawing and came up with
a guy with no
eyes and a guy with no face, and then I constructed a story around those three
guys, something with multiple storylines that would live up to the title,"
he explains.
What he came up with was a complicated tangle of double and triple crosses involving renegade CIA agents, a political coup, a presidential assassination attempt and lots and lots of John Woo-style gunplay.
FREEDOM FOR `MEXICO'
Because he makes profitable movies at a price, the studios give Rodriguez whatever creative freedom he wants, allowing him to carry out all aspects of post-production at his 63-acre ranch home near Austin, Texas, where he lives with his wife Elizabeth Avellan (who doubles as his producer) and their three sons. That creative freedom also serves as a lure for actors, who know the project won't end up being wrested from the director's hands in order to satisfy the marketing whims of studio executives.
"Actors often get frustrated when they read a script that they like and when they get to the set, the director is not charged up anymore, the producer is all over them, the script has been changed and the movie doesn't come out like they thought it would," Rodriguez says.
With a cast that included Johnny Depp, Willem Dafoe, Mickey Rourke, Ruben Blades and Enrique Iglesias (making his Hollywood debut), shooting began on Mexico in Rodriguez's traditional rapid-fire style. Rodriguez says serving as his own cinematographer and production designer actually makes for less work.
"You can be thinking about the lighting and production design while you're writing, so when you get to the set, you just have to concentrate on what's really important, which is the actor's performance."
QUICK SHOT
As he had done in the past, Rodriguez also scheduled the shoot so each actor could come in and shoot their respective roles on consecutive days, often in sequence, and then get out. Depp, for example, only spent eight days on the Mexico set, even though he's onscreen for more than half the movie. "Johnny had never shot a movie that quick," Rodriguez says. 'On his last day, he was like `Is there anything else I can do?' But every day he was there, he was working from beginning to end. If this movie had been shot on a regular schedule, he still would have worked for eight days. They would have just been spread out over eight weeks."
Once Upon a Time in Mexico is the fourth movie Rodriguez has completed in the last three years, but the director says he has no plans to slow down. He's already planning his next two films, one a computer-animated feature, the other a psychological thriller that he describes as "Hitchcock on acid."
"I really make work easy for myself, because I don't have the pressure of a studio hanging over me, so it doesn't feel like work. If I went to L.A. and did The Hulk or something, that would be work. But when you work for yourself from your home, it's like running a Latin restaurant where the entire family pitches in," he says. "You can eat there, you can work there, you make people happy and you sleep in the back. So you never want to leave. It doesn't get any better than that."