And that’s totally okay. Use what works first, and you can fix the rest later. If you need to disguise a vow out of embarrassment (“How would I confess that to a friend?!”), find a struggling friend and make a mutual “non-suicide vow.” Make it seem like you’re only trying to protect him or her. Still too much? Make it a “mutual non-self-hurt” vow with a friend who beats himself or herself up.
Make it about them as much as you. If you don’t care about yourself, make it about other people.
PRACTICAL GREMLIN DEFENSE
* * *
Now, let’s talk day-to-day tactics.
The fact of the matter is this: if you’re driven, an entrepreneur, a type-A personality, or a hundred other things, mood swings are part of your genetic hardwiring. It’s a blessing and a curse.
Below are a number of habits and routines that help me. They might seem simplistic, but they keep me from careening too far off the tracks. They are my defense against the abyss. They might help you find your own. Test them, keep your favorites, and use them as a starting point:
5 Morning Rituals that Help Me Win the Day (page 143)
“Productivity” Tricks for the Neurotic, Manic-Depressive, and Crazy (Like Me) (page 197)
Is This What I So Feared? (page 474)
The Jar of Awesome (page 570)
Gymnastics Strength Training (page 14)
AcroYoga (page 52)
The Slow-Carb Diet (page 81)
And when in doubt or starting to slip, try these:
Go to the gym and move for at least 30 minutes. For me, this is 80% of the battle. When possible, I prefer an actual “How can I help you, sir?” gym to walking or a home-based workout, as the last thing I need is alone time with my head. Somehow force yourself to be around other humans.
Each morning, express heartfelt gratitude to one person you care about, or who’s helped or supported you. Text, message, write, or call. Can’t think of anyone? Don’t forget past teachers, classmates, coworkers from early in your career, old bosses, etc.
If you can’t seem to make yourself happy, do little things to make other people happy. This is a very effective magic trick. Focus on others instead of yourself. Buy coffee for the person behind you in line (I do this a lot), compliment a stranger, volunteer at a soup kitchen, help a classroom on DonorsChoose.org, buy a round of drinks for the line cooks and servers at your favorite restaurant, etc. The little things have a big emotional payback, and guess what? Chances are, at least one person you make smile is on the front lines with you, quietly battling something nearly identical.
TO WRAP UP—ON THE GREEN AND THE GRAY
* * *
My “perfect storm” was nothing permanent.
But, of course, it’s far from the last storm I’ll face. There will be many more. The key is building fires where you can warm yourself as you wait for the tempest to pass. These fires—the routines, habits, relationships, and coping mechanisms you build—help you to look at the rain and see fertilizer instead of a flood. If you want the lushest green of life (and you do), the gray is part of the natural cycle.
You are not flawed.
You are human.
You have gifts to share with the world.
And when the darkness comes, when you are fighting the demons, just remember: I’m right there fighting with you. You are not alone. There’s a large tribe around you, and thousands of them are reading this book.
The gems I’ve found were forged in the struggle. Never ever give up.
Much love to you and yours,
Tim
Spirit animal: Great white shark
* * *
Robert Rodriguez
Robert Rodriguez (TW: @Rodriguez, elreynetwork.com) is a director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer, editor, and musician. He is also the founder and chairman of El Rey Network, a new genre-busting cable network. There, he hosts one of my favorite interview-format shows, The Director’s Chair.
While a student at the University of Texas at Austin, Rodriguez wrote the script for his first feature film while he was a paid subject in a clinical experiment at a drug research facility. That paycheck covered the cost of shooting. The film, El Mariachi, went on to win the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival, and became the lowest-budget movie ever released by a major studio. Rodriguez went on to write, produce, and direct many successful films, including Desperado, From Dusk Till Dawn, the Spy Kids franchise, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, Frank Miller’s Sin City, Machete, and others.
Preface
This is the motherlode. The stars and caffeine aligned to make this interview extremely rich, and Robert hit a home run. My personal highlight doc for this episode was a book by itself. So, please indulge me, as this one is longer than usual. It’s worth it.
What’s Your Own “Rodriguez List”?
The term “Rodriguez list” has come to mean writing down all of your assets and building a film around the list. It originates from Robert’s approach to making El Mariachi, which he shot as a “test film” for himself. This “What assets might we have?” question is also asked by billionaire Reid Hoffman (page 228). Here’s Robert’s story:
“I just took stock of what I had. My friend Carlos, he’s got a ranch in Mexico. Okay, that’ll be where the bad guy is. His cousin owns a bar. The bar is where there’s going to be the first, initial shootout. It’s where all the bad guys hang out. His other cousin owns a bus line. Okay, there will be an action scene with the bus at some point, just a big action scene in the middle of the movie with a bus. He’s got a pitbull. Okay, he’s in the movie. His other friend had a turtle he found. Okay, the turtle’s in the movie because people will think we had an animal wrangler, and that will suddenly raise production value.
“I wrote everything around what we had, so you never had to go search, and you never had to spend anything on the movie. The movie cost, really, nothing. [The only cost] was really just that I wanted to shoot it on film instead of video, so that it would look more expensive, and try to tell people I made it for $70K and try to sell it for $70K. [Robert spent $7K on El Mariachi.]
“Instead, it ended up going to Columbia and getting released. When we won Sundance, the Audience Award, my acceptance speech said, ‘You’re going to get a lot more entries next year. When people find out that this is the one that won, a movie made with no money and no crew, everyone’s going to pick up a camera and start making their own movies.’ It’s been flooded with entries since then. It was a real change in the paradigm.”
The Benefits of Treating Things like a “Test”
“I didn’t think anyone was going to see [El Mariachi]. It was really just a test film. That’s why I did it in Spanish. I did it for the Spanish market. . . . [I figured] I’ll do two or three of these things, cut them all together, take out the best portions and use it on my demo reel, and then use the money that I make to go make a real first English-language, American, independent film. . . .
“I didn’t overthink it at all. I would have treated it completely differently, had I thought I would ever even show it to anybody. Had I thought it would go to a festival and I would submit it, I would have spent ten times as much. I would have gone and borrowed money. Instead, everything was one take, even if it didn’t work, because the film’s so expensive. And it was a noisy camera and a soundless camera. It would make so much noise, you couldn’t record sound [at the same time]. So, I had to record sound the way you’re doing right now. I would shoot a take, put the camera away, get the sound out, put the mic up close. . . . So I got great sound, but it was out of sync. But, you kind of talk in your own rhythm. So if I say, ‘Hi, my name is Robert,’ you put the camera away, and now you do the audio: ‘Hi, my name is Robert,’ you can pretty much get it to sync. . . . If you look at Mariachi, it’s [almost] all in sync. . . . Where it started to get out of sync, I cut away to the dog, or I cut away
to a closeup. It created this really snappy editing style, but it was really just to get it back in sync because I couldn’t stand it. . . .
“There’s a freedom [in] limitations. It’s almost more freeing to know I’ve got to use only these items: turtle, bar, ranch. You’re almost completely free within that.”
TF: Excuses are a dime a dozen. In the case of entrepreneurship, the “I don’t have” list—I don’t have funding, I don’t have connections, etc.—is a popular write-off for inaction. But lack of resources is often one of the critical ingredients for greatness. Jack Ma, founder of China’s Alibaba Group, is worth an estimated $20 to $30 billion, and he explains the secret of his success this way: “There were three reasons why we survived: We had no money, we had no technology, and we had no plan. Every dollar, we used very carefully.”
Turn Weaknesses into Strengths, Bugs into Features
“I remember on From Dusk Till Dawn, the film, the special effects guys put too much fire in the explosion, and the actors come running out of the building. It’s in the movie. You see the building blow up, the bar at the end. . . . It just kept going and engulfed the whole set, and that was the first shot. We still needed to shoot lots of other stuff with it. Everyone else was freaking out, the production designer was crying. That was all their work. My assistant director comes over and he goes, ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’ I go, ‘Yeah, it looks good the way it is. It’s all charred. Let’s just keep shooting, we’ll do the little repair that needs to be done for next week, and we’ll shoot that exterior next week. But let’s just keep shooting.’ You use those gifts, because nothing ever goes according to plan. Sometimes I hear new filmmakers talk down about their film, and ‘Oh, nothing worked and it was a disappointment.’ They don’t realize yet that that’s the job. The job is that nothing is going to work at all. So you go: “How can I turn it into a positive and get something much better than if I had all the time and money in the world?” I love those experiences so much. . . . I talked to Michael Mann about this [during] The Director’s Chair. We talked about Manhunter once, years ago. He didn’t have money, he’d fired the effects crew.
“Some of the really cool staccato editing was to cover up the fact that they didn’t have effects, and I didn’t know that. I always thought it was a stylistic choice. And he says, ‘No, it’s because we didn’t have any money or time. I had to almost cut it myself, and I was throwing ketchup on the guy between edits.’ It was like, ‘Oh, my God, I thought that was a brilliant stylistic choice.’ I said, ‘I’m going to do that for all my movies now.’ I want all of them to not have enough money, not enough time, so that we’re forced to be more creative. Because that’s going to give it some spark that you can’t manufacture. People will tap into it or they’ll go: ‘I don’t know why I like this movie. It’s kind of a weird movie, but there’s something about it that makes me want to watch it again and again because it’s got a life to it.’ Sometimes art should be imperfect in a way.”
Don’t Follow the Herd—Stumble Instead
“It’s good not to follow the herd. Go the other way. If everyone’s going that way, you go this other way. You’re gonna stumble, but you’re also gonna stumble upon an idea no one came up with. . . .
“That way, at least it’s a new frontier. I always found success by just going the opposite way. There was too much competition over there. If everyone’s trying to get through that one little door, you’re in the wrong place. Sometimes at a film festival when people ask, ‘How do we break in?’ I say, ‘The problem is you’re at a film festival. Nothing wrong with film festivals, but everyone else here is trying to get through that same door, and they’re not all going to fit.’ . . .
“So you’ve got to think bigger than that. There’s less competition up there. I always wanted to get into TV, but instead of going and competing with everyone else trying to get in on 7 p.m. on NBC on a Friday night, [I decided to] own a network. You know how many people are trying to own a network? Nobody. When that network I got, El Rey, was up for grabs, there were 100 other applicants. Now, that sounds like a lot. But out of the whole country, 100? Really? How many actually had a solid business plan and a vision of something that could be implemented? Probably 5. So you’re competing with the top 5 instead of the top 20,000 trying to get in on NBC on Friday or Saturday night. So I always say: ‘Try to look bigger. . . .’”
Failure Is Not Durable
One of my favorite episodes of The Director’s Chair is with Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, etc.), and Robert refers later to this quote from Francis: “Failure is not necessarily durable. Remember that the things that they fire you for when you are young are the same things that they give lifetime achievement awards for when you’re old.”
ROBERT: “Even if I didn’t sell Mariachi, I would have learned so much by doing that project. That was the idea—I’m there to learn. I’m not there to win; I’m there to learn, because then I’ll win, eventually. . . .
“You’ve got to be able to look at your failures and know that there’s a key to success in every failure. If you look through the ashes long enough, you’ll find something. I’ll give you one. Quentin [Tarantino] asked me, ‘Do you want to do one of these short films called Four Rooms [where each director can create the film of their choosing, but it has to be limited to a single hotel room, and include New Year’s Eve and a bellhop]?’ and my hand went up right away, instinctively. . . .
“The movie bombed. In the ashes of that failure, I can find at least two keys of success. On the set when I was doing it, I had cast Antonio Banderas as the dad and had this cool little Mexican as his son. They looked really close together. Then I found the best actress I could find, this little half-Asian girl. She was amazing. I needed an Asian mom. I really wanted them to look like a family. It’s New Year’s Eve, because [it] was dictated by the script, so they’re all dressed in tuxedos. I was looking at Antonio and his Asian wife and thinking, ‘Wow, they look like this really cool, international spy couple. What if they were spies, and these two little kids, who can barely tie their shoes, didn’t know they were spies?’ I thought of that on the set of Four Rooms. There are four of those [Spy Kids movies] now and a TV series coming.
“So that’s one. The other one was, after [Four Rooms] failed, I thought, ‘I still love short films.’ Anthologies never work. We shouldn’t have had four stories; it should have been three stories because that’s probably three acts, and it should just be the same director instead of different directors because we didn’t know what each person was doing. I’m going to try it again. Why on earth would I try it again, if I knew they didn’t work? Because you figured something out when you’re doing it the first time, and [the second attempt] was Sin City.”
TIM: “Amazing.”
ROBERT: “So Spy Kids and Sin City came out of [Four Rooms]. If you have a positive attitude, you can look back. That’s why what Francis [Ford Coppola] is saying is correct. Failure isn’t always durable. You can go back and you can look at it and go, ‘Oh, that wasn’t a failure. That was a key moment of my development that I needed to take, and I can trust my instinct. I really can.’”
Setting the Precedent: Be a “Problem” Early
Robert has made all of his own movie posters since Desperado. Here’s how he got there:
“The [creative] agency shows up [to shoot the movie poster]. Antonio was sick that day, and they were like, ‘We’re here only one day so we’ll put his outfit on one of the other crew members and we’ll paste his head on later.’ I’m thinking, ‘That’s not going to look right. Nobody moves like him. Oh, geez, this is going to be awful.’ So we shot our own poster on the set, the famous one of him with the gun. I saw him doing that one day on the set, and I went and took a little snapshot that would be a great poster.
“When we went to show the studio the posters, the ones the other guys did looked like DVD covers. I put mine up there, too, and Lisa Hens
on, the president of Columbia, looked at all of them. She looked at the one that I had and said, ‘We like that one,’ and I said, ‘That one’s mine.’ She looks at me like, ‘Oh shit, had I known it was you, I probably wouldn’t have said that.’ She goes, ‘Really? Oh, we didn’t know.’ I’m glad I just put it up there along with the others and didn’t say anything. Then that set a precedent. From then on, I could go to every studio and say, ‘I do my own posters, too. So you guys can go ahead and try and make one, but we’ll try and make one.’
“The key is to do it early. Do it while you’re still shooting. First impression is everything. I’ll cut a trailer while I’m still shooting and send it to a studio. They’ll try to make their own, over and over, and they can’t get that first thing they saw out of their heads, ‘It’s still not as good as the one we saw.’”
Notes at Midnight
Robert takes copious notes. He sets an alarm for midnight every night to input the day’s notes into a Word document. He dates everything and stores them by year, so he can find whatever he might want later:
“I have a little alarm that goes off at midnight, because around midnight is usually a good time, and I’ll write something down. Because I found that even when I just wrote some items down, I could go back and fill them in later because I would remember. . . . What kept it going is when I would go back and review the journals and realize how many life-changing things happened within a weekend. Things that you thought were spread out over 2 years were actually Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and that Monday. So many occurrences happened in chunks that could blow you away, things that kind of define you. . . .
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