Robert Rodriguez Quotations

You create superheroes to take care of problems that can't really be solved another way.

Low budgets force you to be more creative. Sometimes, with too much money, time and equipment, you can over-think. My way, you can use your gut instinct.

I wish I could freeze time or go back in time and watch my kids grow up all over again because it is just going by too fast.

When you go off in the world and make your life, and you come back to your home town, and you find your old high-school friends driving in the same circles, doing the same things, that's what Hollywood's like. It's a little block, little town. It doesn't really grow or change.

Sometimes I feel like I'm in a dream world, because it doesn't always seem too logical how things work out.

People don't live in Austin to work, they work to live there.

I don't think anyone can be more of a predator than a human being.

What I love about new technology is that it really pushes the art. It really pushes it in a way that you can't imagine until you come up with the idea. It's idea-based. You can do anything.

A lot of people who watch DVDs are people who are interested in, if not moviemaking, then creativity in general.

Don't be told something is impossible. There's always a way.

Don't give me any money, don't give me any people, but give freedom, and I'll give you a movie that looks gigantic.

The studios don't finance anymore, they get outside funds.

What could make my life better? Oh, if I could only find that magic bottle that lets you never have to sleep. I have so much stuff I wanna do, but... That six or seven hours you have to be in bed with your eyes closed. What a waste!

A movie goes from several stages, from idea to script. As you continue shooting, you will make some adjustments. You're constantly adjusting. It's like a piece of music. You're constantly trying to make it better.

I always wanted to be a stay-at-home dad making art, making movies.

Your mind just goes to the craziest idea to lure people into the theater, and then you write your script around those elements.

You ask any moviemaker what their favorite movie experience was, and they'll say it was one of the first ones, where everyone had to pitch in and do everything together, and you had to struggle.

People talk about immigration, but they won't talk about the corruption that actually exists between Mexico and the U.S.

Creative people are notoriously the slowest to adopt new technology.

Don't look at all at what other people are doing. Think of what you're doing as completely fresh because if you imitate you're dead.

I do like strong women in my movies. I have five sisters, so I've just grown up with that model.

I realized that everything I do is fantasy, whether it is an adult movie or a kids movie.

I want to push technology boundaries to be more efficient.

It's such a drag to make a movie.

The only thing I ever wanted to do is never have to work a day in my life.

When I was little, he was the one that pushed me and now that I am older, I now push myself a lot. And he has taught me a lot about boxing stuff, too.

Usually, I'm just pleasing myself and I have very similar tastes I think to an audience, what that core audience really likes.

There is a real balance between risk and return in racing. Inside the cockpit, when everything is very quiet, very smooth, you get your fastest time. In investing, if you are easily distracted and let your emotions get the best of you, you end up making decisions that are sub-optimal.

Leonard Bernstein was a true American hero, ... He could do anything. He was a composer, a conductor and a concert pianist.

My father did not want us to have an accent. It was a different era than it is today, where having a second language is a competitive advantage.

I looked up and saw him walking toward me, ... I ducked my head and started looking at the floor. I thought, 'He'll have to tap me on the shoulder if he wants my attention.' Then I heard him call the other guy. I took a deep breath and let it go.

I have all the creative freedom of someone making a home movie, but I get to do it on a larger scale. It's the best.

I have 5 children of my own. They are bilingual, like most second and third generations. But they speak primarily in English and they couldn't find anything on television that represented who they are in this country.

Frank is such a great visual storyteller, that if you study his artwork you see that his Sin City books are already the best movies never seen on the big screen.

We've focused on retailers that we would call 'category killers,'

I was the one in charge of the kids growing up.

I teach them exactly what they taught me in the camp, which is to box and not a lot of brawling. Just hit and move, basic boxing.

The Adventures of Shark Boy & Lava Girl in 3-D

You'll click a button and get to hear the Austin audience reacting to the film for the first time. You'll hear what took them by surprise, made them gasp. It's gonna be really cool.

We're still writing the script to see if there's enough for a third one, or if we're just going to do a second one, ... We're supposed to shoot in January, but we might do it earlier if we keep working at this clip.

We're trying to wake up the little giant that we have here in Gilroy. We want people to know who we are.

We try to take advantage of other investors' emotional or irrational reactions.

Even though I can make my own budgets, I always ask for less money than we need so that you have to be more creative, you have to strip it down.

(Bernstein's) music continues to be loved by all kinds of audiences, ... So get your tickets early. Our concert is going to be packed.

There's nothing like having lost money -- you need to go through adversity to be tested and you need to face it on several occasions to find out who you truly are. At our firm, we'd rather have people make their mistakes somewhere else.

I usually have a couple of projects going on that are different. A 'Sin City' while I'm doing a 'Spy Kids' at the same time. I need different things going on.

I've always felt like I've been wagging the tail of the big technology dog, to see what I could get it to do. Since I started using AMD64 technology, the technology is now wagging me, to see what I can do with it. AMD LIVE! Fulfils the final dream, by delivering the goods as originally imagined by the artist.

You're talking to a small- to medium-cap value manager, and that manager is becoming a dinosaur. What we do in our Capital Fund or the New Income Fund is a function of our discipline.

You're out there in your race suit and your jeans and nobody knows who you are, ... The Kiplinger Report.

They said that they cut Rodriguez, and I had to ask, 'Which one?'

AMD fuels us so we can move at the speed of thought. My philosophy is less people, really talented and focused people and really great equipment. It sounds backwards but we can do more. Using the AMD64 machines, I can feel the difference. There's no lag time.

They have the necessary abundance of food and the non-disturbance they need to breed, to procreate and to thrive in this area,

It was a tale of two periods -- before Sept. 17 and afterwards.

It's a way of bridging the gap between the sexes, income strata and even management levels, to a degree.

It is time to give this country back to its rightful owners, the American people. I believe that together we can make our nation great again and restore the American dream for all.

It's more of a psychological event than an economic event.

It's disappointing, ... They said it was strictly a numbers thing. My agent is now talking to other teams to see if I can head somewhere else.

It's cost me and my firm a lot of money. But rapid growth leads to poor decision making.

It taught me what it means to be bullish and bearish.

These people have done it over four or five decades. It means they've had to deal with many challenges.

Once it happened, I had a better practice in the afternoon. I'm growing more and more comfortable as the weeks have progressed. It was probably my most comfortable practice. I knew exactly what I was doing (on) special teams, so I went after it. It felt like a weight was lifted off of my shoulders.

I'm not looking for the stock market to do much of anything till the end of the year. We're getting into the darker stages of the bear market. People will be very shocked at how cheap stocks can become.

I hope to have more control over that in the future.

I like things that are getting trashed, hated.

If you create a good story that has a lot of story value... I think audiences like that. It's why they stick with the same TV show over and over.

If everyone was going to jump on board after the business side of things were taken care of, I would be delighted to do it,

If I'm excited about it, I'm pretty sure an audience is going to enjoy it. If I'm bored with an idea, you can bet they're going to be asleep. So I try to only do things that I'm fairly excited about.

I don't like having two versions (of a DVD). People will buy the first one and not buy the second, and that's the one I want them to see.

This is one of those periods of time where you can have two different styles at an intersection. This year could be a crossroads.

The challenge is what was making it exciting. You don't want to do anything that's too easy or that you know that you can pull off, otherwise it's really not worth doing.

Sometimes a movie series that becomes popular can be a blessing and curse because you get known for that. People don't give you a chance, after that... I'm a big proponent of getting somebody that you always admire and giving them a chance to do something else because they can redefine themselves.

When you use the same actors a lot, you get to know them and you realize that one movie can't explore all the talent that they have. You really have to give them several different kinds of roles, in completely different movies, to push them and to push yourself.

It [lighting the set up] is quite a process. It's like drawing. It's like being an artist. You pencil it in first, and then you ink it. When you're filming, it's like you're penciling it all in. You know where everything is going to go. But, that application of the final ink takes some time.

We [Rodriguez and Frank Miller] wanted to take the movies and turn them into a graphic novel, so that people wouldn't even know what they were looking at. It's still visual storytelling, but it's approached completely different. The two mediums don't have to be separate mediums. They can be one and the same.

Anyone who can only write about themselves or their life experiences, in my mind, isn't a very good writer.

I definitely want to produce more because I have a bunch of projects that I've either written or half written and I want to continue developing them and if cant direct one right away cause I'm doing something else I will love to still see it get made.

Television series always have a lot of characters because you want people to identify with someone on the show, who will be your eyes.

Any time you do action and horror, you've always got to try to find a way to make it fresh for the audience, but also for yourself, and there are so many different ways to freak people out and create tension.

I was from such a large family that when I first met my wife, I told her: 'You can go work outside of the house and I'll stay home and continue making my cartoon strips. Maybe I'll make some commercials nearby, you know I'll do anything locally, but I would love to just stay at home and raise the kids like I did when I was growing up.'

Really, children will support anything that is empowering to them.

When you put on the glasses in a 3-D movie they just kind of sit there and you forget about them.

If you create a good story that has a lot of story value I think audiences like that. It's why they stick with the same TV show over and over.

I love working with great actors.

Hollywood wants to own everything. I don't want to own anything. I don't want people just to make content, I want to empower and teach them to create content they own that they can exploit in any medium.

I like to keep my budgets at a certain price when I work for someone else, and even more so now that I'm working for myself, and use new technologies to deliver films that look like they have high production levels.

If you do a film with a studio, agents step in, they start saying, 'My actor has to get this amount of money', and it becomes about deals.

Everything I've done has always been my own made up world with its own rules and its own made up stories.

Data scientists are statisticians because being a statistician is awesome and anyone who does cool things with data is a statistician.

Exploitation films were famous for taking an issue an exploiting it because they could move much faster than a studio could. If there was any hot topic, they would run out and make a quick movie and make a buck on it, by changing it around and using it, in some way, to give some relevance.

I try to remind people, whether you have a growth manager or a value manager, you're going to go through cycles where you think you have a village idiot.

That six or seven hours you have to be in bed with your eyes closed. What a waste!

When you make an exploitation film, you always want to have a real issue. That's how they were always done.

Yeah, I was always a big fan of noir.

Very few people have a lot of time to dedicate to one hobby. I was fortunate to have started so young, because when you're young you have nothing but time. Hours and hours to burn up on something as silly as a movie.

Make DV movies so you can learn how to make films, but don't try to distribute them until they are fantastic.

It's easier making a smaller film like El Mariachi. There are no budget worries because there is no budget. There is no crew problem because there is no crew. And if you screw up, no one is around to see you screw up -- so it's no longer a screw up.

All those years I had been making movies because I loved movies, and that's what made all the difference. If you're doing it because you love it you can succeed because you'll work harder than anyone else around you, take on challenges no one else would dare take, and come up with methods no one else would discover, especially when their prime drive is fame and fortune. All that will follow later if you really love what you do. Because your work will speak itself.

It's rare for the studios to find a filmmaker who wants to make a family film. To find someone that has an idea, embraces it, has kids and wants to make something exciting - well, they don't see that too often.

I kind of like working fast.

I have so many friends who don't know how to cook.