CREDIT: COLUMBIA PICTURES
Salaciously Spanish: El Mariachi, the little $7,000 action film that could stars Carlos Gallardo (left) as El Mariachi.

Movies aren't easy to make. Even the trashiest, dumpiest of schlockfests required someone to sit at an editing desk, likely for days on end, assembling something irredeemable. Effortless, no, they are not, which is why watching Robert Rodriguez's films knowing the production process makes them so much better.

This is going to be a rather odd piece since I'm going to talk about DVD bonus features a lot, but you'll just as easily find them on YouTube.

To start, of course, Rodriguez is the man behind the well-loved Spy Kids and Machete franchises, to name a few. But what makes him interesting as a Hollywood filmmaker is his penchant for low-budget filmmaking, even within the context of the bigbucks studio system. El Mariachi was his first foray into mainstream (well, direct-to-video mainstream, anyhow), a lowbudget action movie that cost only $7,000, in 1992. Impossible? Apparently not. Difficult? Yes. Very yes.

Funded with the award money he won with his student short film Bedhead alongside giving his body up for clinical drug trails, Rodriguez raised $9,000 for his low-budget masterpiece, and finished it under budget by about $2,000. It's in Spanish and a little cheesy, but as an action movie, it's definitely watchable and quite original for a mistaken-identity story. Tied in with the low-budget nature is the almost exclusive use of wide-angle lenses, which add to the film's dreamy, ethereal feeling. If you don't mind subtitles or have a grasp of basic Spanish, watch it, then watch it again, with the commentary turned on.

And from there everything went up. In came in the bigger budget (but still conservatively spent) Desperado and Once Upon a Time in Mexico to complete Rodriguez's vision of a trilogy, albeit on a grander scale. Most remember Sin City, Spy Kids, maybe even the Machete films, but the Mariachi trilogy was truly influential. Alongside Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs and Kevin Smith's Clerks, Rodriguez proved that making a great film didn't require a studio backing; all you needed was grit, dedication and a lot of luck to buck the classic Big-and-in-English-only release structure and see wide release. It was a real watershed moment for independent filmmaking.

But let's take a moment to talk about the short film that helped him make it big: Bedhead. Shot while he was a student at the University of Texas, Bedhead is a quirky, almost Tim Burton-esque fantasy about a young girl who gains psychic powers after sustaining a concussion. Also shot with a low-budget mindset, it's worth a watch, and easily found on YouTube. However, if you own the El Mariachi DVD (worth it for the commentary and 10- minute-film-school alone), you'll get to hear Rodriguez's commentary on the methods he used to shoot the silent-with-voice film. It was Bedhead's rounds at several film festivals that won it the money that went towards producing El Mariachi, so it has to be worth a shot, right?

Besides his journal Rebel Without a Crew (check out my Reading Between the Lines column in this issue for more on that), which documented the making of El Mariachi, Rodriguez's open encouragement of low-budget independent filmmaking shows itself with his 10- minute-film-school series. A staple in nearly every DVD release of his films, Rodriguez imparts his wisdom on keeping the visuals visceral, but the costs minimal. The entire Mariachi trilogy has its own 10-minute-filmschool video covering key shots and techniques used in the film, and as both a film student and a film junkie, they're all highly entertaining to watch.

Regardless of what you think of his current work, the influence of Robert Rodriguez has carried onto not just the indie film scene but to mainstream Hollywood with the type of characters and themes that became popularized as a result of his films. And, hey, they're still fun to watch at parties, the opposite of the expectation of stuffy braininess that comes with a film labelled “revolutionary.”