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Robert Anthony Rodriguez (born June 20, 1968) is a Mexican-American writer and film director who is known for making profitable, crowd-pleasing independent and studio films with fairly low budgets and fast schedules by Hollywood standards. more...

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Rodriguez shoots and produces many of his films in Texas and Mexico.

Biography

Early life

Rodriguez began his interest in film at 7 when his father bought one of the first VCRs, which came with a camera. He took the camera and started to make short films with his brothers and sisters participating as the cast and crew. It helped that there were ten of them (including Robert) and that these early stages provided the crucial groundwork that would lead to Rodriguez's development as a filmmaker.

While attending St. Anthony Catholic High School, Rodriguez was commissioned to videotape the school's football games. According to his sister he was fired soon after for shooting them with a cinematic style; getting shots of parents reactions and the ball traveling through the air instead of shooting the whole play. After graduating Rodriguez went to the University of Texas where he also developed a love of cartooning. His grades were not good enough to get into the school's film program, so he invented a daily comic strip entitled "Los Hooligans" with many of the characters based on his siblings – in particular, one of his sisters, Maricarmen. The comic proved to be quite successful, running for three years in the student newspaper The Daily Texan while Rodriguez continued to make short films.

Rodriguez grew up shooting action and horror short films on video, and editing on two VCRs. Finally, in the fall of 1990, his entry in a local film contest earned him a spot in the university's film program where he made the award-winning 16mm short, "Bedhead." The film chronicles the amusing misadventures of a young girl whose older brother sports an incredibly tangled mess of hair that she cannot tolerate. The rest of the short film is a humorous account of how the young girl tries to fix her brother's follicle monstrosity when she discovers her telekinetic abilities. Even at this early stage, Rodriguez's trademark style began to emerge: quick cuts, intense zooms, and fast camera movements deployed with a sense of humor that offsets the action.

Career

This short film attracted enough attention to encourage him to seriously attempt a career as a filmmaker. He went on to shoot the action flick El Mariachi in Spanish, inspired by John Woo films. El Mariachi, which was shot for around $7,000 with money partially raised by volunteering in medical research studies, won the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival in 1992. The film, originally intended for the Spanish-language low-budget home-video market, was distributed by Columbia Pictures in the United States. Rodriguez described his experiences making the film in his book Rebel Without a Crew. The book and film inspired legions of hopeful filmmakers to pick up cameras and make no-budget movies. The film and the book are widely considered important touchstones of the independent film movement of the 1990s. Many people realized for the first time that with only a little money and a lot of hard work and talent, it was possible to make a successful and popular film.

Read more at Wikipedia.org