Robert Rodriguez (Robert Anthony Rodriguez) è un attore statunitense, regista, produttore, produttore esecutivo, scrittore, sceneggiatore, fotografo, montatore, musicista, suono, è nato il 20 giugno 1968 a San Antonio, Texas (USA). Robert Rodriguez ha oggi 55 anni ed è del segno zodiacale Gemelli.
The Marriage Is Over, but the Show Goes On
RICHARD LINKLATER may have put this capital city on the film industry’s radar with “Slacker” in 1991. But for almost as long as Austin has been known as the Texas Hollywood, its most prominent and prolific player has been Troublemaker Studios, a filmmaking funhouse created by the director Robert Rodriguez and the producer Elizabeth Avellan.
For more than 15 years the partners — in both business and marriage — churned out entertainments like “Sin City,” the “Spy Kids” trilogy and “Desperado.” And they gladdened the hearts of studio executives by delivering their popular movies under budget, keeping postproduction in-house at Troublemaker’s downtown location and in their sound and editing studios on the 100-acre Avellan/Rodriguez compound outside Austin, next door to the castlelike home (complete with balconies and hidden staircases) where they raise their five children.
But last year, during the filming of the “Grindhouse” double bill that paired Mr. Rodriguez’s “Planet Terror” with Quentin Tarantino’s “Death Proof,” came the rumors, and then the official announcement that Mr. Rodriguez and the pregnant Ms. Avellan had decided to end their marriage. The news that the two had separated and, months later, Mr. Rodriguez’s public appearances with Rose McGowan, the leading lady of “Planet Terror,” came as a shock to the close-knit Austin filmmaking community.
In a place where crew members had grown so accustomed to regularly working with Troublemaker that some had picked up and moved here from Los Angeles — Ms. Avellan lovingly refers to them as her children — the dissolution of the marriage raised the obvious question: What would become of the moviemaking miniempire they had built together?
Mr. Rodriguez and Ms. Avellan say they plan to keep Troublemaker as is, and to continue working on some joint projects, like a planned family film called “Shortz.” But for Ms. Avellan, 47, personal hardship is leading to a professional evolution. Most of her career she has willingly ceded the limelight and the major creative decisions to Mr. Rodriguez, a charismatic character who famously got his start by partly financing his $7,000 debut, “El Mariachi,” by spending a month in an Austin hospital testing a cholesterol-lowering drug. Now Ms. Avellan plans to transform her own ideas into movies and television shows and take Troublemaker in new directions. For the first time, she is producing a major studio picture with a director besides Mr. Rodriguez.
“Queen of the South,” a sprawling crime thriller set in Mexico and Spain, will be directed by Jonathan Jakubowicz, a 29-year-old filmmaker and Avellan protégé, and produced by Ms. Avellan and Sandra Condito for Warner Independent Pictures. Based on Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s novel of the same name, “Queen” is the story of Teresa, a murdered Mexican drug cartel pilot’s girlfriend. Fearing for her life, she escapes to the Mediterranean and begins her own trafficking operation.
In the past, she said, while she was interested in projects like “Queen,” with its $25 million budget and exotic locations, “I didn’t want Robert to feel like I wasn’t giving 150 percent, like any producer would do. So I’d not talk about this or that.”
“Now I feel free to mention some of the things that I’m doing,” she added.
Considering the strength of the previous incarnation of their partnership, this looser arrangement carries risks for both filmmakers as they make their first films without each other’s help. (Mr. Rodriguez is working on a remake of “Barbarella.”)
Both Mr. Rodriguez and Ms. Avellan describe their relationship as complementary; their success, they say, came from matching her logistical side with his creative one. “In a lot of ways, we were made for each other,” Ms. Avellan said.
Born in Caracas, Venezuela, before moving to Houston as a child and later attending Rice University, Ms. Avellan knew she was destined to be a producer, she said. The moment came while watching Holly Hunter playing a hyperefficient news producer in the 1987 film “Broadcast News.” “To have that much pressure and keep all those balls in the air and have the random knowledge,” she said, “I thought, ‘That’s me!’ ”
Eight years after “Broadcast News,” Ms. Avellan was a co-producer of “Desperado,” Mr. Rodriguez’s first major studio film. From then on, she has received top production billing on all his films. In a telephone interview, Mr. Rodriguez pointed out that he had helped produce Troublemaker’s projects as well. “But the stuff she’s doing now on her own, she’s doing the full-fledged producer job, which I’m sure is more exciting to her than just working on whatever project I hand along,” he said.
And perhaps now Hollywood will truly take notice. Ms. Avellan is well known in Austin as a philanthropist and a supporter of student film (last March she was the first recipient of the Texas Film Hall of Fame Ann Richards Award), and she has played an equal role in creating a moneymaking empire (Troublemaker’s 14 movies have made more than $900 million at the box office and hundreds of millions more in DVD and video sales). But that success has not completely translated to recognition in Los Angeles.
On July 26 The Hollywood Reporter released its first “Latino Power 50” list, highlighting Hollywood’s behind-the-scenes male and female Latino talent. Mr. Rodriguez was third on the list; Ms. Avellan wasn’t included, or even mentioned in Mr. Rodriguez’s entry. “This is the only woman who’s made Latin-themed movies, casting Latinos, for the American audience, in English, that have broken 100 million,” Ms. Condito said. “And she’s not on the list! It’s mind-boggling to me. But that’s not only Hollywood’s fault. That’s also her fault, in the best way possible, in the sense that she doesn’t push herself in front of people.”
Salma Hayek, who starred in Mr. Rodriguez’s “Desperado,” “From DuskTill Dawn” and “Once Upon a Time in Mexico,” calls Ms. Avellan a “well-kept secret.” But, she said, “now that she’s starting her career as an independent, breaking away and doing stuff on her own, people will know more about her.”
If it’s a challenge to continue on with business as usual at Troublemaker now that she is no longer married to Mr. Rodriguez, Ms. Avellan isn’t showing it. While some in the Austin film world and inside Troublemaker wonder what will happen next — “There’s an enormous amount of concern,” said Louis Black, editor of The Austin Chronicle and founder of the South by Southwest Music, Film and Interactive Festival, “because these are two people that a lot of people care about” — Ms. Avellan said she never questioned whether or not to stay with Troublemaker. It’s a decision that might seem counterintuitive, given the collapse of the marriage. But considering the stakes as equal partner of a moneymaking company with grand plans — Ms. Avellan said she also hoped to expand the studio’s sound and digital facilities and bring in more commercial production — it’s an experiment she’s willing to try.
“Robert and I have been such good partners for 18 years,” she said. “So many things haven’t changed in general, just in how we handle our personal life with our children. The only thing we’re not is married anymore.”
“He can make his movies here,” she added, “just like I can make my movies here. It’ll be good for Austin: if I bring a movie in, and Robert does a movie too, this place will be much more used. People can say, ‘Oh, it’ll never work.’ And I’m like, ‘You know what? It’ll work.’ I’m excited at the prospect of showing them — of showing the world what I do.”
Da The New York Times, 30 settembre 2007
È come il primo della classe. Quello che voleva essere sempre il più rapido a consegnare il compito. Ma quando gli si da del secchione, quel ragazzone del regista Robert Rodriguez (alto 1,90, sempre col cappello da cowboy in testa o la bandana), che se nei suoi budget sbaglia il preventivo è perché spende di meno, corregge in “indigeno”. Come certi nativi, spiega serio, cerca di ricambiare con un dono il favore che gli fanno: dargli da girare dei film. E siccome l’unica lingua che i produttori capiscono è quella dei soldi, ecco che li fa risparmiare. Nella classifica dei 100 potenti del cinema del mensile Premiere, guadagna posizioni: era il numero 94 nel 2002, oggi è 80esimo. Merito del grande successo della trilogia Spy Kids.
Dieci anni fa per finanziare il suo primo film, El Mariachi, vendette letteralmente il suo corpo alla scienza, sottoponendosi a pagamento alla sperimentazione di nuove medicine. Con 7 mila dollari (circa 15 milioni di lire di allora) girò quello che secondo lui doveva essere il suo film di laurea (aveva fatto solo corti) e il suo biglietto di presentazione, sia pure destinato al solo mercato spagnolo (non c’era una parola in inglese). Invece non solo finì ai festival, ma la Columbia lo comprò e lo distribuì nelle sale, commissionandogli immediatamente Desperado, che doveva essere contemporaneamente sia remake sia sequel. Oggi esce C’era una volta in Messico e quel progetto, che era nato come un cavallo di Troia per scardina
re il mondo del cinema, si è trasformato in una trilogia. Epica come11 padrino. C’è anche lo zampino del genio mediatico del suo grande amico Quentin Tarantino (erano in concorso insieme al Sundance Festival 1992, uno con Le iene, l’altro con Ei Mariachi) e insieme hanno poi gìrato sia Four rooms che Dall’alba al tramonto. Un giorno Quentin, maestro di slogan, paragonò i burrito western di Rodriguez agli spaghetti western di Sergio Leone.
Da Panorama, 27 novembre 2003
