Hello. My name is Justin the Clue. I'm here today with Will Sloan.

And you're listening to the Import Cinema Club. And today, you know, we're going to do it without a crew.

Just me, by myself, along with Will. We're going to do this podcast slash make a movie.

Because we're talking about the original one-man band

Robert Rodriguez.

That's right.

This podcast will be accomplished with a budget of merely $7,000.

Plus $200,000 in post-production, but we don't talk about that part.

So Robert Rodriguez, I'm sure many people listening to the podcast, everybody listening to

the podcast will know who Robert Rodriguez is.

He was one of those early 90s Sundance guys. He was best friends with Quentin Tarantino.

He burst onto the scene with his film El Mariachi, which cost a mere $7,000, supposedly, although like you said, it had hundreds of thousands of post-production put into it. And he had a story behind the making of the film, the fact that he went into medical testing to raise the money to pay for the picture, that he didn't think it had that big of a future. He just wanted to do it as a test. But boom, it wins an audience award at Sundance, and it's the stratosphere from there. He is a studio filmmaker. His next picture

is desperado. And eventually, like now, I don't even know if he has fans anymore, does he?

Well, that's the reason why I really wanted to do this episode, because this man has many hits

to his name, including Spy Kids, most notably. He has this two-pronged career, it seems, where he

makes violent, I'm not even sure I want to call them exploitation movies, but violent

postmodern comedy thrillers on the one hand. And then very silly and juvenile children's films,

on the other hand, like Kevin Smith, he's a Sundance

guy who was able to cultivate his own ecosystem. I mean, Kevin Smith did it by nourishing his

fan base online, whereas Robert Rodriguez did it by building his own studio, building his own

American zoetrope in Austin, Texas, where he makes

these movies basically without leaving home, making them with his family, doing much of them

...